SEOUL - Whatever happened to the two agreements reached at six-party talks on
North Korea's nuclear program in 2007, at which North Korea agreed on quite
specific steps for disabling and then dismantling its entire nuclear program?
For the benefit of those who seem to have forgotten, notably the United States
envoy on Korea, Stephen Bosworth, and his North Korean interlocutors, those
hard-wrought deals promised North Korea just about all Dear Leader Kim Jong-il
wanted by way of aid, energy, oil, you name it. If only ...
... If only North Korea would make good on its promises not only to shut down
all his nuclear facilities but also tear them apart, destroy them, so North
Korea would have to start all over again if
it ever had any notion of recovering its ranking as the world's ninth nuclear
power.
The second agreement, in October 2007, had editors, producers and journalists
who should have known better reporting that the North had conclusively agreed
to give up its nukes. It's a sign of the shambles of those deals that they were
forgotten during Bosworth's visit to Pyongyang this week.
When Bosworth got to Seoul on Thursday afternoon, after 48 hours in Pyongyang,
he neglected to breathe a word about them.
Instead, Bosworth harked back to the piece of paper signed on September 19,
2005, at six-party talks in Beijing, at which the parties signed off on a
vaguely stated wish list. The "joint statement", as it was called, was larded
with words like "the goal" of North Korea's giving up its nukes "at an early
date", and the commitment of all to the United Nations charter. It also
committed North Korea to giving up its nuclear program in return for such
enticements as a "peace regime", not to mention massive, unspecified quantities
of aid.
Have the US and North Korea agreed to tear up, to renounce, the agreements of
2007, reached after North Korea had conducted its first underground nuclear
explosion in October 2006? Or are they supposed to embark on another endless
round of negotiations to get back to where they were at the end of 2007?
Bosworth's remarks were all too brief to get around to considering these
questions. In fact, judging from North Korea's response on Friday, they may be
taboo, not to be raised again, while the North leads the US ever more bilateral
talks.
Remarkably, North Korea's ever-anonymous foreign ministry spokesman, as quoted
by Pyongyang's Korean Central News Agency, adopted much the same language as
Bosworth. Both sides, said the North's spokesman, "had a long, exhaustive and
candid discussion on wide-ranging issues" concluding in "common understanding
on the need to resume the six-party talks". Like Bosworth, the spokesman cited
"the importance" of the 2005 joint statement.
In fact, Bosworth's remarks were so similar to those of the North Korean
spokesman as to suggest that they had both agreed on what they would say - and
might as well have signed off on their own bilateral statement. Or so it seemed
as Bosworth talked of "common understanding" and "the essential importance" of
the statement of September 2005 and characterized his conversations with North
Korea's First Vice Minister Kang Sok-ju and next vice minister Kim Gye-hwan as
"candid" - the same adjective used the next day by the North Korean spokesman.
There were, however, clear differences in emphasis. While Bosworth "conveyed
President [Barack] Obama's view" of the need for "complete denuclearization"
and saw delays in returning to six-party talks as "an obstacle to progress",
the North preferred to dwell on the need for a peace treaty in place of the
Korean War armistice and opening of diplomatic relations with Washington.
Bosworth did not deny touching on those aims as "elements" of the 2005 joint
statement, but the sense was that North Korea will press the US for a
commitment to a peace treaty and diplomatic relations before returning to the
table. That problem alone suggests how hard it will be to pick up the pieces of
the process.
The sharpest indication of the frustration in getting North Korea to return to
the table was Bosworth's one-word response when asked if he and the North
Korean negotiators had agreed on more talks or set a date. "No," Bosworth
responded, ending his brief appearance at the foreign ministry in Seoul after
conveying the results of his talks in Pyongyang to South Korea's chief nuclear
negotiator, Wi Sung-lac.
The difficulties of Bosworth's long-awaited first mission to Pyongyang came as
neither a surprise nor a disappointment to South Korean officials. He had
assured them beforehand that he would stick to the topic of six-party talks -
and not digress to a peace treaty or US-North Korean diplomatic relations other
than in the context of the 2005 joint statement.
The fact that Bosworth stopped off here before flying straight to Pyongyang on
Tuesday on a US Air Force plane, and then flew back here on the same plane
after his talks were done, symbolized US concern about South Korean
sensitivities.
The route ordinarily would have been to transit in Beijing, the normal way
station in and out of Pyongyang, but Bosworth instead flew to Beijing after
briefing the South Koreans. He will have also briefed the Japanese and
Russians, the other parties in the six-party talks, before returning to
Washington.
Overall, however, the attempt at bringing North Korea back to negotiations
leaves analysts here deeply divided on whether bilateral dialogue between the
US and the North is worth the effort.
"You may need a second or a third round of talks," Lim Dong-won, architect of
the "Sunshine" policy of reconciliation with North Korea during the presidency
of the the late Kim Dae-jung, told Asia Times Online during a seminar on
unification. "You cannot solve anything in the first round." Lim, who
accompanied the late president to Pyongyang to meet Kim Jong-il for the first
inter-Korean summit, still expects US and North Korean negotiators to be able
to discuss "the modality" of six-part talks "as well as the agenda" but not "in
the first attempt".
Park Yong-ok, former arms control officer for South Korea's defense ministry,
offered quite a different view. "No matter how many agreements they [the North
Koreans] sign, they will be useless," he remarked. "We have to make sure they
change their ways." Citing the nuclear tests conducted by North Korea in
October 2006 and again last May, he stated flatly, "Any agreement made by North
Korea holds no significance."
Larry Niksch, senior analyst with the Congressional Research Service, predicted
the US "will call it a success if they get a commitment for six-party talks"
but doubted if North Korea under any circumstances would give up its nuclear
program despite economic difficulties exacerbated by UN sanctions. "What
worries me most is if in the next two or three years they develop a nuclear
warhead for their missiles or an intercontinental ballistic missile that can
reach US territory," he said.
Those two issues get to the heart of the debate among analysts about the
significance of North Korea's nuclear and missile programs to date. US
negotiators "will have to develop a different nuclear strategy," said Niksch,
if the North's nuclear and missile programs reach the point at which they pose
a direct threat to the US. At that stage, he warned, "We will have to go back
to the drawing board."
So far North Korea is not believed capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to a
target. North Korea's long-range Taepdong-2 missile landed in the western
Pacific when test-fired last April - far short of Hawaii or Alaska, though it's
believed an advanced Taepodong-2 could eventually go that far.
Such worries, though, did not seem to have permeated Bosworth's meetings in
Pyongyang. Instead, the State Department was awaiting the call from Pyongyang,
or the North's UN mission, on "the next step" - whether assent to six-party
talks or another bilateral meeting - though where the yakking would go, and
why, or whether it mattered, was not clear.
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