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2 War of words over Korean peace
treaty By Donald Kirk
clear whether South Korea will
yield to a compromise on the NLL, as the US
military fears, or blur the issue for later
review.
Kim may be willing to put off the
NLL issue while pursuing a peace treaty that will
help to accomplish the much larger goal of getting
US troops to leave. Roh for his part wants to
appear on North Korea's side at the second
inter-Korean summit - the first since his
predecessor, Kim Dae-jung, flew to Pyongyang in June
2000. The summit, if it
produces a ringing statement on peace, may be the
crowning moment for Roh, whose popularity ratings
have plummeted over economic concerns and his
rather crude political style.
The issue of
a peace treaty, in the US view, is secondary to
the much more immediate problem of getting North
Korea to give up its nuclear weapons as the US
negotiator, Christopher Hill, believes will happen
by the end of this year.
Nuclear
negotiations assumed critical importance this week
as another US diplomat led a team of Chinese and
Russians to North Korea to look over the nuclear
complex at Yongbyon in the run-up to the next
round of six-nation talks at which Pyongyang is to
reveal all details of its nuclear program.
The team got back from Yongbyon full of
praise for the access they had to the 5-megawatt
experimental reactor, shut down by North Korea as
the first step in fulfilling the February nuclear
agreement. A US State Department spokesman said
the team had seen "everything they wanted to see",
including reprocessing facilities and two much
bigger reactors at varying stages of construction
- one of them 50MW, the other 200MW.
There
was no word on whether the team had asked to see
facilities elsewhere for developing warheads with
uranium at their core - a program North Korea has
fervently denied after having supposedly
acknowledged it in October 2002. Nor, of course,
did the team have a clue as to whether North Korea
has been cooperating with Syria, as reported by
Israeli intelligence sources and picked up in the
US media, on a nuclear facility.
US
officials, not wanting to distract from the
six-party talks, shrugged off the reports.
Instead, the White House notified the US Congress
that it would spend US$25 million to send North
Korea 50,000 tonnes of heavy fuel provided North
Korea continued to honor the February agreement.
Hill has said he expects North Korea to
list whatever it has been doing to develop nuclear
warheads when negotiators for the six nations,
including the two Koreas, China, the US, Russia
and Japan, meet again in Beijing this month before
Roh goes to Pyongyang.
The US, as Bush
indicated, is holding out the promise of talks on
a treaty as a reward for North Korea's making good
on its commitment; Roh believes the US, China and
the two Koreas should negotiate a treaty right
away.
But why is a peace treaty so
important when the Korean Peninsula has been more
or less at peace for more than half a century?
Analysts see the answer as simple. If Kim Jong-il
can draw the United States into talks on a treaty,
he can campaign as never before for complete
withdrawal of all US forces. The US still has
about 29,500 troops in the South. In the next two
or three years, the US military headquarters and
most of the remaining US troops will move to a
huge new base 60km south of Seoul from which US
military planners believe they can still defend
South Korea with air and naval support.
Would North Korea, the skeptics ask, pull
back its own million-man army from deeply
fortified positions above the DMZ? And what about
the North's 20,000 artillery pieces within range
of the Seoul-Incheon region, home of half of South
Korea's 48 million people? No one expects Kim
Jong-il, whose power rests in his position as
chairman of the North's Defense Commission, to
consider such questions.
Some observers
believe the exchange between Roh and Bush may
rebound against the South Korean president. Bush
reverted to an echo of the hard line that
characterized his position several years ago,
falling back on the familiar demand for
"verification", a term US diplomats have been
sublimating of late. To Roh and his highest
advisers, the whole nuclear issue seems an
irritation on the way to reconciliation,
confederation - and, long-range, unification
unfettered by the US alliance.
Journalist Donald Kirk has been
covering Korea - and the confrontation of forces
in Northeast Asia - for more than 30 years. (Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
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