SEOUL - North Korea has livened up the current round of six-party talks in
Beijing with a sideshow at the truce village of Panmunjom in which North Korean
guards have been kicking over tables in the one-room, one-story hootch on the
line between the two Koreas, all this in the presence of South Korean tourists.
While envoys from the United States, the two Koreas, Japan, Russia and China
were yakking in Beijing about "verification" of whatever the North is doing to
disable its nuclear facilities, US and North Korean colonels traded rhetorical
blasts at the critical flashpoint 64 kilometers north of the South Korean
capital Seoul
where the Korean War armistice was signed in July 1953.
First the United Nations Military Armistice Commission - the nomenclature
reflects the role of the UN command structure dating from the Korean War -
demanded an end to "intimidating acts" by the North Koreans. The North in turn
demanded the meeting in which the senior North Korean colonel denounced the
"provocative actions" of the southern side.
The North Koreans accompanied that claim with a warning that "even the
slightest provocation against the other side" anywhere near the conference room
"may lead to an armed conflict at any moment".
The question was whether or not the increased tensions at the Panmunjom
crossing had anything to do with Friday's tragic shooting on the eastern side
of the peninsula in which a North Korean soldier shot and killed a 53-year-old
South Korean woman who had walked into an off-limits area during a visit to the
Mount Kumkang tourist zone. The woman was said to be on an early-morning stroll
near a beach when the shooting occurred.
Hyundai Asan, the South Korean company that has plunged more than US$1 billion
into developing the zone and which operates the tours, suspended visits to the
zone for the third time since the zone was opened to tourism nearly a
decade ago.
The incident was reported as South Korea's President Lee Myung-bak was
addressing the National Assembly, talking up the need for resuming inter-Korean
dialogue and promising renewed aid for the North's starving people, despite
North Korea's frequent rhetorical attacks against him for seemingly hardline
policies.
North Korea has spurned Lee's overtures while pressing for a better deal in the
latest six-party talks, complaining that it is not getting much in return for
this month largely disabling its nuclear complex at Yongbyon.
North Korea has said it only received 40% of the energy aid it had been
promised in return for rendering 80% of the Yongbyon facilities unusable. The
deal in what is called "the second stage" of the agonizing process of de-nuking
the North is for North Korea to have lapped up a total of 1 million tons of
heavy fuel oil as its reward for disabling all its nuclear facilities,
including 50,000 tons shipped at the end of the first stage.
North Korea has reportedly agreed that the verification process can begin
within the next month.
By opening up to inspections in that period, North Korea would have a far
better chance of heading off objections by conservatives in the US Congress to
President George W Bush's decision to take the North off the US list of nations
sponsoring terrorism. Bush made the decision on June 26 after North Korea
submitted a declaration of its nuclear inventory, and congress has 45 days,
until August 11, in which to reject it.
Nonetheless, the US nuclear envoy, Christopher Hill, has warned against the
North's assenting right away to verification of what it has done, but said that
he hopes somehow to get through the second stage in the autumn. By so doing,
President George Bush would still have a diplomatic good-news story before his
term expires in January, even if the process hasn't moved to the elusive "third
stage" stipulated in the nuclear agreement of February 2007.
North Korea in the third stage is supposed to go beyond "disablement" and
achieve "dismantlement" so it won't be possible to pick up where it had left
off on yet another nuclear program.
US officials are talking about what they call a "NK model" for getting the
North to agree to verification. The model, as reported in the South Korean
media, calls for verification simultaneously with dismantlement with "a reward
in each stage", said a source quoted by South Korea's Yonhap news agency.
The source was quoted as saying "a unique denuclearization formula should be
adopted for a speedy implementation of the entire process". The wording
suggests acceptance of North Korea's insistence on "action for action" even if
that carries the risk that in the end the North will have received an enormous
infusion of aid while still clinging to much of its program.
The "NK model" differs substantially from the Libyan precedent frequently cited
by hopeful American officials in which Libya gave up its nuclear program,
welcomed inspectors and was showered with trade and aid. US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice has cited Libya as "an important model as nations around the
world press for changes in the behavior by the Iranian and North Korean
regimes".
The latest talks focus on what Hill calls "an actual verification protocol"
that would establish the structure for sending teams into North Korea, studying
what has been done and confirming North Korean claims.
Such diplomatic talk, though, leaves unanswered how much freedom the inspectors
will have and whether they will be able to look at other sites and facilities
outside the Yongbyon complex.
Inspectors under the agreement of last year should have access to the
underground site where North Korea exploded a nuclear warhead on October 9,
2006, as well as the site or sites from which the North in July 2006 launched
several missiles capable of carrying warheads.
Inspectors will also want to see the 40 kilograms of plutonium that North Korea
has said it has produced and will need to look at the nuclear warheads that
intelligence analysts have long assumed the North has produced. While
acknowledging the output of plutonium, North Korea has said nothing about how
many warheads it has in its inventory.
Nor has North Korea said a thing about the centrifuges that it imported from
Pakistan while nuclear physicist Abdul Qadeer Khan was in charge of Pakistan's
program. Khan said recently that a North Korean plane picked up the
centrifuges, with full approval from Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf, for
its program for developing nukes with highly enriched uranium at their core.
Finally, North Korea has shown no inclination to talk about proliferation of
its program to other countries, notably Syria, where Israeli planes last
September were believed to have destroyed a nuclear facility built with North
Korean aid and advice.
Before getting anywhere at all on those topics, North Korea will want to see
not only its removal from the US list of terrorist countries but also clear
evidence of benefits from Bush's gesture of lifting economic sanctions. North
Korea has complained that obstacles remain.
Another sensitive issue is Japan's refusal to join with others at the six-party
talks in providing a share of the energy aid. The Japanese claim North Korea is
still hiding Japanese citizens kidnapped to the North in the 1970s and 1980s -
and has not explained what happened to some who may have died.
Hill has come up with a controversial proposal for the four others, China,
Russia, South Korea and the US, to pick up Japan's share of the oil.
"North Korea is not so much concerned about where it is coming from," he said
in Beijing. "They want to see that there is a plan to get it there and to make
sure that the parties that are part of the energy effort are doing it."
Journalist Donald Kirk has been covering Korea - and the confrontation of
forces in Northeast Asia - for more than 30 years.
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