WASHINGTON - The intricately spun web of
terms for North Korea to give up its nuclear
program is in danger of unraveling as doubts rise
here and in South Korea on North Korea's ever
living up to its side of the bargain.
The
return of conservatives to the leadership in South
Korea appears to be persuading North Korea's
leader Kim Jong-il to back away from a process of
reconciliation that promised a vast infusion of
aid and investment if only the North would put on
an appearance of adherence to the six-nation
agreement signed in Beijing on February 13 of last
year.
After remaining silent on the
victory of Lee Myung-bak in
December's presidential
election, North Korea has signaled its unhappiness
with Lee by canceling a meeting to discuss repairs
to the vital railroad from the industrial zone of
Kaesong to the Chinese border in time to carry
visitors from South Korea through North Korea for
this summer's Olympic Games in Beijing.
Repair of the dilapidated railroad, now
barely strong enough to carry trains at extremely
slow speeds, was a major element in the elaborate
plan agreed on by Kim Jong-il and South Korea's
outgoing president, Roh Moo-hyun, when they held
their summit in Pyongyang in early October. The
plan also calls for South Korea to set up another
economic zone west of Kaesong on North Korea's
Haeju peninsula and to build new ports on North
Korea's east and west coasts.
Despite
North Korea's severe economic difficulties, Kim
Jong-il appears to want to put economic agreements
with South Korea on hold at a time when US
officials in Washington also are dubious about
whether North Korea is about to come clean on its
nuclear program and willing to dismantle the whole
show.
While the US special envoy,
Christopher Hill, has been attempting to
demonstrate the opposite, the imminent rise of Lee
Myung-bak to the presidency of South Korea and
North Korea's denial of anything to do with
secretly developing nukes with highly enriched
uranium indicate that Hill's quest cannot be
successful.
Not that Hill has been totally
wasting his time. By patiently following through
on all the possibilities, with the blessing of
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, he has
demonstrated the anxiety of the US to reach a
settlement short of any form of coercion on the
nuclear issue.
Hill's quest reached its
zenith, perhaps, when he worked out an elaborate
formula for moving North Korean funds from the
obscure Banco Delta Asia bank in Macau through
which Pyongyang had been channeling counterfeit
US$100 bills. The result was the US Treasury
Department, bowing to intense pressure, removed
the bank from a blacklist that had cut North Korea
off from all dealings with foreign banks,
including those in China, its only real friend and
benefactor.
Hill's diplomacy may have
succeeded in bringing North Korea back to
six-nation talks and signing the nuclear agreement
in which the North promised to acknowledge all its
nuclear activities and then disable and dismantle
them in return for a vast infusion of energy aid.
Nonetheless, a high-level New York lawyer,
Jay Lefkowitz, who holds the part-time position of
envoy on human rights for the US administration,
evinced the feeling of conservatives in the US
when he said North Korea was "not serious about
disarming in a timely manner". Indeed, he told the
conservative American Enterprise Institute it was
"increasingly clear that North Korea will remain
in its present nuclear status when the
administration leaves office in one year".
These words prompted a quick disavowal by
a State Department spokesman, who said that
Lefkowitz was merely expressing "his own opinion"
and his remarks did not "represent the views of
the administration". The remarks of the State
Department official may be read as an exercise in
diplomacy calculated to mollify the administration
of Roh, who has dedicated his five years in office
to building on the Sunshine policy of his
predecessor, Kim Dae-jung. US diplomats as
well as analysts in Seoul, however, are presumed
to have advised the State Department of the
realities of South Korea's shifting top-level
outlook as well as the North's reluctance to yield
to pressure from president-elect Lee, who has been
saying he wants to help in North Korea's economic
revival and is willing to meet North Korea's
leader Kim Jong-il, but with crucial conditions.
The first is that Lee has been saying all along
that North Korea first has to give up its nuclear
program and has to submit to "verification" of
compliance.
Lee has also called for
reciprocity in return for aid - an issue that's
likely to come up very soon after his inauguration
on February 25 when North Korea comes through with
its annual request for several hundred thousand
tons of rice and fertilizer.
Lee then will
have the chance to demand the return of a number
of South Korean prisoners captured during the
Korean War and several hundred South Korean
fishermen picked up in North Korean waters.
Finally, he's promised to raise the issue of
"human rights", barred from all discussion with
the North during the 10 years of attempts at
reconciliation under the Kim Dae-jung and Roh
administrations.
It's significant, then,
that Lefkowitz's mission as envoy for North Korean
human rights, a position mandated under an
all-but-forgotten act on North Korean human rights
enacted by Congress nearly four years ago, is also
to campaign for victims of human-rights abuses in
the North. Although appointed by President George
W Bush, Lefkowitz, as an advocate for North Korean
human rights, has been largely ignored.
If
anyone in the State Department was listening to
him, it was only to say "he's not one of us". As
Hill was engaged in difficult negotiations,
Lefkowitz was told to remain quiet for fear of
derailing the process.
In fact, however,
Lefkowitz does speak for important elements within
the US administration, notably those surrounding
Vice President Richard Cheney, all more or less
forced into silence as Hill pursued the vision of
a nuclear-free Korea. As North Korea stalls, his
remarks may be a wake-up call for anyone who
thinks the North this time will keep its word.
One result of the shifting mood is that
finally the South Korean and US presidents may
share similar views on North Korea after years in
which Bush had to move from a hard line to a more
moderate position for the sake of rapport first
with Kim Dae-jung and then with Roh. Lee is
expected to call on Bush in March, and they're
sure to agree on the need for North Korea to give
up its nukes as a prerequisite for anything other
than humanitarian aid.
Nor is Lee likely
to want to continue the North-South cultural and
political missions in which South Korean activists
routinely journeyed to Pyongyang for love-ins with
their carefully selected opposite numbers. Lee
made plain his unhappiness with these meetings
when he announced plans to dissolve the
Unification Ministry, responsible for authorizing
and arranging such visits as well as North-South
negotiations on a wide range of levels.
In
the midst of revision of policies and priorities
in both Washington and Seoul, no one seemed to
want to go on talking about removal of North Korea
from the State Department's list of countries
sponsoring terrorism and conclusion of a peace
treaty to replace the armistice that ended the
Korean War in 1953. Somehow those topics have
begun to seem outdated, or at least postponed, all
in accord with the advice of Lefkowitz that the US
"consider a new approach to North Korea".
Journalist Donald Kirk has been
covering Korea - and the confrontation of forces
in Northeast Asia - for more than 30 years.
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