Page 2 of 2 North Koreans hungry for a
deal By Donald Kirk
have to deal with the timing of the supply of the equivalent of 50,000 tonnes
in emergency fuel shipments - the reward North Korea is to get for shutting
down Yongbyon.
But the whole process is sure to get much more difficult as negotiators haggle
over whether North Korea has "come clean" on listing all its other nuclear
activities. Pyongyang has steadfastly denied anything to do with a separate
program for developing
warheads with highly enriched uranium at their core, as the United States has
been claiming since Hill's predecessor, James Kelly, met with North Korea's
deputy foreign minister, Kang Sok-ju, in Beijing in October 2002.
It's generally acknowledged that North Korea obtained some of the equipment for
the uranium program from Pakistan, where physicist Abdul Qadeer Khan remains
under house arrest for selling his country's nuclear secrets. The equipment may
have been routed via Iran, which fully acknowledges the existence of a nuclear
program but says it's only for peaceful production of energy, not for waging
war.
Just what North Korea has done with the equipment for processing highly
enriched uranium, however, remains largely a mystery. Many observers doubt
whether it has done much at all.
Hill gives every appearance of confidence in North Korea's commitment to
provide a list of all that it has that has anything to do with nuclear
weaponry. North Korea, under the agreement, stands to receive a total of 1
million tonnes in emergency energy aid while abandoning the status of a nuclear
power that it got by exploding a small atomic device in an underground test
last October 9.
"Disablement" of the Yongbyon facility is not the goal, said Hill, as quoted by
South Korea's Yonhap news agency, but "to get to final denuclearization, we
need to get moving on disablement".
Non-governmental people with contacts in North Korea give an impression of
people in population centers almost clamoring for the food shipments that
should be coming, at least from South Korea.
Noh Ok-jae, secretary general of Food Friends in Seoul, said many North Koreans
in cities "are desperately waiting for more foreign food aid". They expect to
begin to get it right after the conclusion of six-party talks.
A measure of North Korea's desperation was the alacrity with which North Korean
negotiators agreed to talk again in Beijing in hopes of carrying out the terms
of the agreement of February 13. A North Korean delegation led by Kim Kye-gwan
talked with Hill and others, staying in New York at the expense of the Korea
Society, funded largely by South Korea's chaebol (business
conglomerates).
As the six-party talks go on, North Korea is expected to advance an array of
demands, including removal from the US State Department's list of countries
engaging in or condoning terrorism. North Korea also wants the UN Security
Council to retract sanctions imposed after the testing of a nuclear device in
October and may well demand withdrawal of all US troops from South Korea as
well as Japan.
Such strategic and tactical moves, however, do not disguise what may be the
main motivation for North Korea to comply with the February 13 agreement - the
fact that its food supply is dwindling and may go down to the levels of the
mid- and late 1990s when 2 million people are believed to have died of famine
and disease.
"They're desperate," said a foreign analyst who helped the North Koreans during
their New York visit last month. "They're not interested in running their
nuclear program. They are using it to get as much as they can from the other
countries at the six-party talks."
Journalist Donald Kirk has been covering Korea - and the confrontation of
forces in Northeast Asia - for more than 30 years.
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