Pyongyang makes the deal of the century
By Donald Kirk
WASHINGTON - North Korea on almost any score card was the victor, by a wide
margin, in the latest round of the great bargaining game over its nuclear
program. All that was needed to intimidate the United States into deciding the
North is no longer spreading terror beyond its borders was some rhetoric - and
moves that may have been play-acting to give an appearance of resuming
production of nuclear warheads.
Now that North Korea is no longer on the State Department's list of state
sponsors of terrorism, the next US administration faces the unpleasant task of
negotiating on critical elements of the North’s nuclear program that are not
covered in the deal. As technicians go ahead with disabling the outdated
nuclear complex at Yongbyon, the process of getting the North to stop
everything else it is doing is where it was six years ago this month when
then-US nuclear envoy James Kelly made his fateful first and only trip to
Pyongyang.
North Korea has denied ever since Kelly's visit the existence of an enriched
uranium program that first vice foreign minister Kang Sok-ju seemed to
acknowledge to Kelly and his entourage. It was that visit that touched off the
nuclear crisis beginning with the failure of the 1994 Geneva agreement under
which North Korea had shut down the Yongbyon complex in return for the promise
of twin light-water nuclear energy reactors.
Under the latest configuration worked out by Kelly’s successor, Christopher
Hill, both the enriched uranium program, under which the North had begun
developing warheads with uranium at their core, and proliferation of North
Korean expertise and components elsewhere in the world all go unmentioned. So
also are whatever promises the US made about the huge payoffs in aid that North
Korea is determined to extract at every stage of the process leading to
complete dismantlement.
"There's not going to be a satisfactory deal," said L Gordon Flake, executive
director of the Mansfield Center in Washington. He criticizes the declaration
of the North's nuclear inventory delivered by North Korea in June for failing,
among other things, to cover the testing or development of warheads or coming
clean on the number of warheads already produced, in addition to ignoring the
uranium and proliferation issues.
"This is by no means a complete or correct declaration," said Flake. "The whole
thing could unravel. The next president will inherit very difficult
negotiations."
Analysts pretty much agree with that assessment of the decision by President
George W Bush to accept North Korea's acquiescence to a verification protocol
that calls for disablement and inspection only of the facilities at Yongbyon,
96 kilometers north of Pyongyang.
"What you have now is something very limited and manageable," said Jack
Pritchard, another former US nuclear envoy who was with Kelly on the mission to
Pyongyang in October 2002. "It's watered down. They still have to negotiate a
list of things."
Pritchard, now president of the Korea Economic Institute, said the decision
"could have been done two months ago" in August after the 45-day period
mandated by law from the date when Bush notified the US Congress of the plan to
take North Korea off the list. "There's nothing they couldn't have had then
that they have now."
Bush left to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice the task of announcing North
Korea's removal from the State Department's list of terrorist nations after she
and Hill jeopardized US relations with Japan in a failed attempt to get the
Japanese on board with the deal.
The gesture that got Bush to back down from his refusal to take the North off
the terror list after the North had shut down the facility's five-megawatt
reactor was to bar inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) from entering the complex. That decision kept them away from not only
the reactor but also facilities for reprocessing spent fuel rods from plutonium
and fabricating warheads.
Perhaps more intimidating, North Korea showed signs, never confirmed, of
getting ready for another nuclear test similar to that of October 9, 2006, that
spurred resumption of the six-nation talks on the nuclear program, culminating
in agreement on February 13, 2007, of a deal for the North to abandon it.
The latest agreement "looks pretty bad after two weeks of North Korean
saber-rattling", said Victor Cha, former Asia director of the White House
National Security Council.
Cha qualified the criticism, however, by saying the agreement "will button down
Yongbyon". North Korea, after accusing Bush of going back on his word by not
pulling the North from the list of nations sponsoring terrorism, welcomed the
agreement and said IAEA inspectors can enter the complex as before to ensure
disablement of its key elements.
"Now everything gets pushed to the next administration," said Cha, director of
Asian Studies at Georgetown University. "Essentially the agreement looks
terrible. It's not one of those things you get excited about."
Despite reservations about removal of North Korea from the US list, analysts
see it as putting off the danger of another nuclear crisis, at least until the
end of the Bush presidency in January.
"The administration was pushing for a much broader agreement," said Scott
Snyder, senior scholar at the Asia Foundation. He notes that the agreement said
nothing about the right of inspectors to go anywhere, including the site of the
nuclear test and facilities suspected of being used for research and
development of enriched uranium.
"This agreement promises access to all declared facilities based on mutual
consent," said Snyder, author of a book on negotiating with North Korea.
"That's just an agreement to disagree. There's a lot of work for the next
administration to ensure denuclearization. What they've done is settle for a
certain type of understanding that gives this administration a sense of
closure."
The immediate downside, however, was Hill's failure to win the support of Japan
for the agreement.
Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso talked politely to Bush in a telephone
conversation at the time of Rice's announcement, but he said later he remained
unhappy about the removal of North Korea from the terrorist list. This was in
view of the North's refusal to discuss all the Japanese believed to have been
abducted from Japanese soil in the late 1970s and early 1980s. North Korea has
acknowledged the abduction of 13 Japanese, eight of whom are said to have died,
but Japanese officials believe many more were kidnapped.
Japanese Finance Minister Shoichi Nakagawa, visiting Washington for a meeting
of Group of Eight finance ministers, was blunt. He called the delisting of
North Korea "extremely regrettable" since the kidnappings were "terrorist
acts".
Those and other remarks forced the White House to do some damage control. A
National Security Council spokesman said North Korea "needs to honor its
commitments to Japan and provide them resolution on this issue". He urged Japan
and North Korea to "continue to work on this issue" - an effort at face-saving
that was not likely to have any influence on North Korea.
The US appeared, however, to have won over South Korea despite doubts that
North Korea will ever give up its entire nuclear program. South Korea politely
welcomed the deal as possibly affording relief from North Korea's verbal
attacks on President Lee Myong-bak and threats of conflict along the disputed
"northern limit line" in the West (Yellow) Sea, the scene of naval battles in
1999 and 2002. North Korea has denounced Lee as "a traitor" and "human scum"
for demanding complete verification and suspending aid shipments.
South Korean envoy Kim Sook said with diplomatic politeness that the US
decision may result in more six-party talks and lead to an end to the North's
nuclear program - something South Korean officials do not see happening in the
foreseeable future.
As IAEA inspectors returned to the facility, South Korean officials were unsure
when or how to resume sending aid to North Korea. South Korea has been sending
several hundred thousand tons a year of fertilizer to the North, but suspended
aid this year while Lee demanded sure evidence that North Korea had given up
its nukes.
North Korea, suffering again through severe shortages, has failed this year to
request any aid in a show of contempt for Lee.
A North Korean tour guide told a visitor on a recent trip to Pyongyang that he
believed Lee would be overthrown as president in a year or so. This casts doubt
that North Korea will ever work with Lee - and whether the US delisting of
North Korea from the terror list will have much impact on the strained
relations between the two Koreas after a decade of rapprochement promoted by
the Sunshine policy initiated in the presidency of Kim Dae-jung.
Journalist Donald Kirk has been covering Korea - and the confrontation of
forces in Northeast Asia - for more than 30 years.
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