WASHINGTON - The more things change, the more they stay the same. The great
bargaining game to persuade North Korea's leader Kim Jong-il to puh-leeze be so
kind, Dear One, as to send one of your minions over to the party in Beijing is
now in full swing.
As tensions and expectations arise, the sense in some quarters here is what a
great triumph it would be if only North Korea would be so kind, so open-minded
and good-hearted as to rejoin the six-party talks on its nukes that it's been
boycotting for the past year.
United States envoy Stephen Bosworth seems to be in charge of pressing the
invitation on the North Koreans. Back from Pyongyang after holding forth at
press conferences in the capitals
of the other invitees, he's counseling "great patience".
While waiting for North Korea to bestow the honor of its company on host China
and the rest of the guests, the North's new conditions are - despite Bosworth's
reticence - quite rapidly becoming apparent.
It was up to South Korea's Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan to reveal that North
Korea had asked during Bosworth's mission for revocation of the sanctions
imposed after its missile test of April 5, claiming that the long-range
Taepodong-2 was launched to put a satellite into orbit. We can assume that
North Korea is also insisting on revocation of the strengthened sanctions
imposed after its nuclear test of May 25.
This condition, as Bosworth neglected to mention, puts the US in direct and
quite dangerous opposition to North Korea, which for years has counted on its
sales of arms and missiles to Middle Eastern clients to raise funds.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who last February appointed Bosworth, a
former ambassador to South Korea, as special envoy on North Korea, has been
stressing at every juncture the need for enforcing stringent sanctions on North
Korean weapons proliferation. The seizure at Bangkok's Don Muang airport of 35
tons of North Korean arms on a plane likely bound for Iran, North Korea's
partner on missiles and nuclear development, raises a disturbing question: how
much is North Korea managing to ship undetected to Iran and other clients
worldwide?
The commander of US troops in Korea, General Walter Sharp, by no coincidence in
Washington for Bosworth's return, cited the sanctions as the key to halting
North Korean weapons shipments. It was US intelligence that tipped off Thai
authorities to search the cargo plane from Pyongyang during a refueling stop.
Sharp acknowledged, however, the frustration in determining if the cargo
represented just a small percentage of North Korean arms exports. "I'd like to
know the answer," he told Asia Times Online he left a seminar in Washington at
which he focused on all he was doing to strengthen the US military alliance
with South Korea.
Analysts admit the lack of real success in judging the effectiveness of the
United Nations sanctions resolution, adopted in June after North Korea's second
nuclear test on May 25. "I don't think they have accurate figures," said Victor
Cha, director of Asia affairs at the National Security Council during the
presidency of George W Bush. "The big thing we need is better cooperation from
China and Russia."
Although both China and Russia joined in supporting the UN resolution, the
suspicion is that North Korea is still able to ship arms through both countries
by plane or overland. "I don't think we know about them," said Cha, who chairs
the Korea program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in
Washington. "That's the hardest thing."
Cha cited the recent visit of China's Premier Wen Jiabao to North Korea,
followed by that of China's defense minister, as fueling fears that North Korea
may on occasion be able to send arms surreptitiously through China. He was
confident, however, of cooperation from Southeast Asian nations, ranging from
Singapore to Thailand. Even Myanmar, he noted, was refusing arms shipments from
North Korea after the debacle that ensued when a North Korean freighter had to
turn back as US ships tracked it while believed to be on its way there with a
load of arms.
Thai authorities have been holding five men, four from Kazakhstan and one from
Belarus, found aboard the plane, a Russian-made Ilyushin-76 registered in
Georgia. They said they were carrying oil drilling equipment when they asked to
land and refuel, but instead the plane was discovered to have missile
components along with rocket-propelled grenades and other weaponry.
South Korean analysts see the seizure of the cargo as evidence of the
ambivalence of the US in dealing with North Korea. Kim Yeon-soo, a professor at
the Korea National Defense University, was quoted by Yonhap, the South Korean
news agency, as saying the US "has employed a two-track strategy of sanctions
and negotiations". He called the incident "a chance to show that, apart from
dialogue, sanctions will continue for North Korea's behavior".
Quite aside from US determination to press hard for the enforcement of
sanctions, one question is the extent to which South Korea is willing to act
aggressively to stop North Korean arms shipments by sea. South Korea has gone
along with a US request to send several hundred South Korean troops to
Afghanistan, and has its destroyers pursuing pirates in the Indian Ocean, but
the South's enthusiasm for supporting US aims beyond the Korean Peninsula is
far from guaranteed.
General Sharp cited one aim of the US-Korean alliance as providing a jump-off
point for some of the 28,500 US troops in Korea to deploy elsewhere. "We need
our forces in the future to be more regionally engaged and globally deployed,"
he said, "but we are not ready for that to happen today".
South Korea's conservative leaders remain mindful that Bosworth as US
ambassador to Korea was close to the late South Korean president, Kim Dae-jung,
who advocated the "Sunshine" policy of reconciliation with the North during his
presidency from 1998 to 2003.
Bosworth may have sought to allay their concerns about concessions to the
North, but those assurances seem less persuasive as the truth emerges about
details of his mission. He seems to have gone considerably further than
indicated in press conferences at which he spoke of "very useful" and "candid"
conversations to try to get North Korea to return to six-party talks.
Asked in Seoul and then in Washington whether he carried a letter from
President Barack Obama to Kim Jong-il, Bosworth preferred to dissemble. "In
effect, I am the message," he responded. "Nor," he said, in answer to another
question, "did we meet Kim Jong-il."
It is now known that Bosworth did indeed carry a letter from Obama. The
contents have not been revealed, but we can assume it "conveyed President
Obama's view", as Bosworth said he had done, regarding "complete
denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula". Pretending that his presence alone
was "the message", Bosworth implied that he had passed the word from the
president only in conversations in Pyongyang when he had relayed Obama's letter
as well.
By putting his signature on a written plea, Obama honored Kim Jong-il as a
supplicant - a posture that the Dear Leader has to see as a step on the way to
agreeing to negotiations without making concessions. Bosworth's exercise in
diplomatic casuistry suggests how difficult it will be to establish trust with
anyone when it comes to dealing with North Korea.
If nothing else, however, Bosworth did advance the dialogue one small step when
he said that North Korea's enriched uranium program would inevitably come up in
future talks. North Korea's boast several months ago that it was ready to
produce a nuclear device from enriched uranium automatically puts the topic on
the table. The North's uranium program is entirely separate from the plutonium
program at Yongbyon complex, which has already produced enough material for six
to a dozen nuclear warheads.
Christopher Hill, US envoy on North Korea during the Bush presidency, preferred
to overlook the uranium program, though the issue had lurked since Hill's
predecessor, James Kelly, visited Pyongyang in October 2002. North Korea's vice
minister, Kang Sok-ju, the mastermind of its negotiating strategy, acknowledged
the uranium program to Kelly but then persisted in denying anything to do with
enriched uranium.
Hill was willing to overlook the uranium issue just to advance negotiations
step by agonizing step. Presumably Kang was a little more forthcoming about it
during his talks with Bosworth. Disclosure of the reality of North Korea's
enriched uranium program, though, won't speed up the talks themselves or lead
the North to abandon its nukes. The process now is where it was five years ago
- except that Kim Jong-il is far closer to realizing his dream of recognition
of his country as a nuclear power. Here we go again.
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