Page 1 of 2 N Korea
talks: Not a meeting of
minds By Donald Kirk
WASHINGTON - The protagonists at the
six-party talks that began in Beijing on Monday on
North Korea's nuclear-weapons program are at such
odds that the miracle is they are willing to face
one another across the same table, much less
actually negotiate anything.
So far apart
are North Korea and the United States on matters
of substance that their chief delegates may find
themselves yakking away on quite different
subjects for the first few sessions as they
engage in well-worn
repetitions of familiar positions.
North
Korea's Kim Kye-gwan, whom the US envoy,
Christopher Hill, got to know quite well in
"sideline" meetings before the last six-party
talks fizzled out more than a year ago, appears to
have gone to Beijing with one immediate goal in
mind.
Far from considering a deal that
would obligate North Korea to give up its nuclear
program, Kim is there to demand that the US
Treasury Department lift its ruling of September
15 last year, just four days before delegates from
all six countries agreed on a "statement of
principles" under which North Korea would give up
its nuclear program.
The statement,
blasting Banco Delta Asia (BDA) in Macau as "a
primary money-laundering concern", dealt a
crippling blow to North Korea's arcane financial
system by explicitly banning all US financial
institutions from any role, direct or indirect, on
behalf of the bank anywhere on Earth.
The
relationship between the timing of this order and
the reluctant US decision that September 19 to go
along with a vaguely worded statement that held
out the promise of vast amounts of aid, if North
Korea would only show signs of jettisoning its
nukes, has always appeared more than coincidental.
Similarly, it would not seem coincidental
if US Treasury officials, having scrutinized all
that BDA has done since then to clean up its act,
were to decide that the bank is no longer a
conduit either for US$100 supernotes manufactured
in North Korea and/or for payments for arms,
drugs, gold, counterfeit cigarettes and other
lucrative items.
So urgent is the topic as
far as North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is
concerned that he made the US Treasury order the
prime reason for refusing to return to the table
for the past 13 months.
And, now that
North Korea is back, Kim Kye-gwan is making the
lifting of the ban the "precondition" for all
else. Kim comes to the table from what North Korea
clearly perceives as a position of strength,
fueled by the underground test of a small nuclear
device on October 9 and the test-firing, more than
three months earlier, of seven missiles, notably a
fearsome long-range Taepodong that plunged into
the sea less than a minute after launch.
The refusal of the US and Japan to
recognize Pyongyang's membership in the nuclear
club hardly diminishes the North Korean view that
its success, however limited, provides a
bargaining chip with which it may win concessions
without ever getting around to shutting down its
nuclear program.
As long as Kim Kye-gwan
sets the lifting of the US Treasury restrictions
on BDA as a "precondition" for anything, the most
important sessions in Beijing won't be the
six-party talks at all. Rather, they will be
scarcely noted meetings, going on simultaneously,
between US Treasury officials and North Koreans as
they go over reams of documents establishing the
relationship between BDA and Pyongyang.
The bank has frozen $24 million in North
Korean accounts, a small portion of the funds that
Pyongyang has accrued through at least two decades
of doing business through BDA.
The
Treasury Department could lift the ban on dealings
with BDA if investigators were to decide that the
bank has reformed and they have no problem with
Pyongyang using its services as long as North
Korean agents refrain from using the bank to
launder funny money.
At the same time, the
Treasury would have to acknowledge that trade in
arms and gold do not violate international law. US
negotiators might object to earnings from the sale
of narcotics, but they would have to concede,
obviously not publicly, that the US has not been
known to crack down so hard on any number of other
regimes whose leaders have profited off the drug
trade.
No one, however, expects the
Treasury Department suddenly to clear BDA and
North Korea in time for the year-end holidays. In
fact, intricate haggling on the financial issue
may well guarantee that the six-party talks will
devolve into exercises in statement-making in
which North Korea tests US resolve - and also, as
always, divides the other five parties against one
another.
In such a contest, the US and
Japan appear to share common cause as Tokyo revs
up rhetoric against North Korea in a right-
