North
Korea 'deal' is only a starting
point By Jim
Lobe
WASHINGTON - This week's six-party
agreement on the principles for denuclearizing the
Korean peninsula is being greeted somewhat warily
in the US, with most experts stressing that the
accord marks only the beginning of what is likely
to be a protracted negotiating process that could
take years, rather than months.
The deal
reached by the two Koreas, Japan, Russia, the US
and China nonetheless sets out a comprehensive
framework. If successfully implemented, it would
not only defuse a three-year-old crisis over
Pyongyang's nuclear intentions, but also ensure
that nuclear weapons are effectively banned from
one of the
world's most militarized hot
spots and bolster the badly battered
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
"If North
Korea returns to the treaty, it will bind every
country in the world save India, Pakistan and
Israel," noted the New York Times, which praised
US President George W Bush, who personally signed
off on the deal, for having "rediscovered the
safeguards and rewards of peaceful international
diplomacy and this vital treaty in particular".
Still, the precise details of
verification, inspection and the sequencing of
specific actions and rewards remain to be worked
out in future rounds of talks, the first of which
is now set for early November. The longer these
details take to be worked out, the easier it will
be for hardliners, who had resisted any engagement
with North Korea, to attack the accord.
"This is a good statement of principles,
but it does not and was never intended to solve
all of the problems," according to Alan Romberg, a
Korea specialist and former senior State
Department official at the Henry L Stimson Center
here. "Nobody ever thought that the next steps
would be easy. In fact, everyone knew that these
details will be very, very difficult to work out."
In a reflection of unhappiness by hawks
within the Bush administration, notably those in
Vice President Dick Cheney's office, the accord is
already being denounced by some as a sell-out of
the administration's previous insistence that
Pyongyang should receive no gains until it
completely and verifiably dismantles all of its
nuclear programs and surrenders the two to eight
weapons that Washington believes it has already
produced. That includes a uranium enrichment
program whose existence has been denied by North
Korea.
"Wittingly or otherwise, the US
negotiating team has executed an apparent cave-in
- embracing precepts crucial to North Korean
objectives but inimical to Washington's own,"
wrote Nicholas Eberstadt of the American
Enterprise Institute in Wednesday's Wall Street
Journal
Eberstadt, along with
administration hardliners, has promoted a policy
of "regime change" in North Korea. He was
particularly scornful of Washington's agreement in
the September 19 "joint statement", issued from
Beijing, to discuss as part of the negotiation
process the delivery of a light-water reactor to
Pyongyang, a provision that recalls the 1994
"Agreed Framework" reached between the North and
the administration of former president Bill
Clinton.
This provision was deemed so
politically sensitive that the State Department
and its top negotiator, Assistant Secretary of
State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs
Christopher Hill, sent it all the way up to Bush
for final approval before the agreement was
announced by Beijing, which has chaired the four
rounds of six-party talks.
"The (world)
has now witnessed a new administration in
Washington - purportedly cognizant of all the
earlier US mistakes - make those mistakes all over
again," Eberstadt wrote.
The agreement
provides that North Korea will give up all of its
nuclear weapons and programs, return "at an early
date" to the NPT, from which it abruptly withdrew
three years ago, and submit to inspections and
safeguards of the International Atomic Energy
Agency.
In exchange, South Korea and the
United States will pledge not to deploy nuclear
weapons on the peninsula, and Washington will
affirm that it has no intention of attacking or
invading North Korea. In addition, both Pyongyang
and Washington pledge to respect each other's
sovereignty and work to establish normal
relations.
China, Japan, Russia, South
Korea and the US agreed to provide North Korea
with energy assistance, including electricity from
the South. In addition, all six nations agreed to
discuss "at an appropriate time" the construction
in North Korea of a light-water nuclear reactor
(LWR).
This last point was particularly
contentious, as indicated by the issuance by each
party of a unilateral statement of its
interpretation. In an indication of many of the
challenges to come, the US statement declared it
would oppose the provision of a LWR to Pyongyang
until the North had complied with all of its
obligations, prompting a statement by North
Korea's foreign ministry that it would not return
to the NPT until the US agrees to provide the LWR.
While Pyongyang's statement was seized on
by hawks here as evidence that North Korea was not
acting in good faith, Hill vowed not to get "hung
up on" these kinds of details at this point in the
process.
"The challenge that Chris Hill
and the State Department, as well as the North
Koreans themselves, face is how to sell the
agreement to their domestic audiences," said Karin
Lee, a Korea specialist at the Friends Committee
on National Legislation, a lobby group here.
"These kinds of statements can be seen as directed
as much as for the home audience as for the
opposing side."
Hill's reaction was
particularly welcome to Lee, who stressed that if
the parties focus on their disagreements, as
opposed to building on areas of potential
agreement - such as how verification and
monitoring of North Korea's compliance will be
carried out - the accord could quickly come
undone.
"If the sequencing about the LWR
becomes the key topic in November, then I would
lose hope in the process," she said.
"Hill
and the State Department are interested in
results, not in playing 'gotcha' with the North
Koreans," said Romberg, the Korean specialist, who
welcomed the success in getting an agreement. "The
first thing you have to do is to test (the North
Koreans) in a serious way with a serious
negotiation, and that has been lacking until
recently.
"What Hill wanted to do was to
establish agreement on the end state - a
denuclearized Korean peninsula and new sets of
relationships between the other five parties.
Having done that, you now go back to the terribly
difficult task of how you get there.
"Anybody who criticizes it misses the
point that this is a very important and necessary
- although not sufficient - first step, although
it does not guarantee that you'll have success at
the end of the day."
