North Korean 'progress' stopped
dead By Donald Kirk
SEOUL - Suddenly the happy talk of United
States nuclear negotiator Christopher Hill is
fading into noises of disappointment and failure
surrounding his visit this week to the North
Korean nuclear complex at Yongbyon.
Hill
said before he left Seoul on Monday he expected
the visit, his first to the site, would "draw some
optimism about what's been done" along with "some
pessimism about what has to be done".
In
the hours since Hill returned to Beijing on
Wednesday, however, the talk is mainly
pessimistic. First there was word from
South
Korea's nuclear negotiator, Chun Yung-woo, that
maybe it would not be possible to completely
disable the complex until February, rather than by
the end of this month, as was widely expected.
Technical difficulties, said Chun, made
rapid disablement a problem, more so than
intimated in all those optimistic forecasts after
a US team began the job last month. Removing all
the fuel rods from the five-megawatt reactor at
Yongbyon, Chun acknowledged, would be "nearly
impossible to finish by the end of the year".
Then came the much more startling news,
from the viewpoint of the success of the elaborate
multi-part scheme for getting North Korea finally
to abandon its entire nuclear program, that North
Korea still was holding out against giving all
details of its nuclear program.
The news
came in disjointed fragments. The first clue came
from unnamed "sources" at the South Korean Foreign
Ministry that there might be a delay in North
Korea's coming up with the list that Hill had said
he hoped to obtain "in a few days".
Hill,
talking in Seoul before going to Pyongyang, was
rather coy about that list. He hoped to see it
while in North Korea, but that version would not
quite be official. North Korea would give the real
version, he said, to the Chinese as host of the
six-nation talks "by the end of the month". If
there were any doubts on that timetable, Hill
didn't let on.
By now, however, the doubts
are out there, and the future of the six-party
process is at stake - or at least on the brink of
one of those periodic impasses until all sides
converge again and come out with yet another
agreement on future good intentions.
In
what appeared as a diplomatic two-step, Hill and
South Korea's Foreign Minister Song Min-soon, with
whom Hill has been striving mightily to remain on
the best of terms through the whole nuclear
ordeal, came out with confessions on Thursday that
all was not that well.
The six-party
talks, which were supposed to convene for another
round by next week, were now "at a very critical
juncture ... ahead of being crippled," said Song.
With North Korea about to miss the deadline for
shutting down the Yongbyon complex and submitting
the list of its entire nuclear program, Song said
simply, "We will need to be a little more
flexible."
To no one's surprise, Hill's
mission to Pyongyang had foundered on the issue
that set the nuclear crisis into motion in October
2002, namely North Korea's highly enriched uranium
program.
Hill and others have been giving
the impression that somehow, by diplomatic sleight
of hand, they had worked out a little deal with
North Korea's negotiator, Kim Kye-gwan, by which
he could acknowledge North Korea once had a
program for highly enriched uranium but had given
up.
Or if that wouldn't quite work, how
about an admission by North Korea that, true
enough, they had imported some shiny aluminum
tubes from Pakistan but they could be used for
industrial purposes?
Did the fact that
Abdul Qadeer Khan, the "father" of the Pakistan
atomic bomb, had conveniently included a blueprint
for using these tubes as the centrifuge for
exploding a warhead loaded with highly enriched
uranium have to mean the North Koreans were
serious about a uranium program? Maybe they just
wanted to see what highly enriched uranium was all
about after having shut down the five-megawatt
reactor at Yongbyon under terms of the first
nuclear agreement reached at Geneva in 1994.
It was, of course, the alleged
acknowledgement of the highly enriched uranium
program by North Korea's Vice Foreign Minister
Kang Sok-ju, when Hill's predecessor, James
Kelley, visited Pyongyang in October 2002, that
detonated the current nuclear crisis. The US the
next month stopped shipping the heavy fuel oil
that it had agreed to send under terms of the
Geneva agreement until completion of construction
of twin light water reactors to help fulfill North
Korea's energy needs. North Korea kicked out
inspectors from the International Atomic Energy
Agency and, by February 2003, had resumed
fabricating nuclear warheads with plutonium at
their core.
Ever since those dark days,
negotiators have been scurrying around trying to
get back to talking terms on North Korea's nuclear
program. They appeared to have finally triumphed
when they signed the six-party agreement on
February 13 committing North Korea to give it all
up in exchange for more energy aid than dreamed of
in the 1994 Geneva agreement.
A subsequent
deal, signed in early October, while South Korea's
President Roh Moo-hyun was in Pyongyang talking up
inter-Korean friendship and cooperation with North
Korea's leader, Kim Jong-il, seemed to solidify
the whole thing by detailing dates and phases.
Now the question is whether it's back to
the drawing board yet again. Just as Kelley did in
2002, so Hill in the latest foray to Pyongyang
claims to have produced the evidence that North
Korea was dabbling in highly enriched uranium,
even though the North Koreans have been denying
this.
The proof of North Korea's purchase
of equipment and materiel, said Hill, had come
"from more than one source". Now is the time for
the North Koreans, he said, "to step up and show
some trust in us and in the process".
The
US demand, it seems, remains precisely the same as
it was five years ago. "We want to be completely
sure they don't have any ongoing program," Hill
told reporters in Beijing. As he has been doing
ever since taking over from Kelley, widely
regarded as lacking the authority from Washington
to be able to make innovative suggestions, Hill
pleaded that clarity "about what's happened is
also a means for us to build a future
relationship".
The impasse was all the
more startling in view of the similarity between
the US position now and in October 2002. The
policy of the George W Bush administration on
North Korea has ostensibly moved from hardline, as
epitomized in Bush's "axis of evil" speech in
January 2002, to a soft line, but the bottom line
remains the same.
The US won't settle for
"a declaration in which everyone can immediately
see what's missing", said Hill. "We want to make
sure this declaration is as complete and correct
as possible."
In putting on this show of
firmness, Hill ran the risk of upsetting the
rapport he has worked so hard to build with the
South Koreans. A South Korean official hinted at
disagreement when he said the North Koreans by now
"must have explained the suspicions over its
uranium enrichment program" but "that explanation
does not meet Washington's expectations".
Left unspoken was the South Korean view
that the US should consider taking North Korea's
word for what it was doing and get on with the
program. That's a notion that Hill wasn't about to
buy, at least for now. "Number one issue is we
want to be completely sure they don't have any
ongoing program," he said. "Number two issue, we
want to know what they have been up to in the
past" - the same questions that precipitated the
nuclear crisis in October 2002.
Journalist Donald Kirk has been
covering Korea - and the confrontation of forces
in Northeast Asia - for more than 30
years.
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