U.S. scrutinizes 18,000 documents for evidence they're worth what N. Korea seeks
Wednesday, May 14, 2008 Free Headline Alerts
By Donald Kirk
SEOUL — The head of the U.S. State Department's Korea desk and four other U.S. officials crossed the line from North to South Korea at the truce village of Panmunjom at the weekend lugging 18,000 documents the North Koreans gave them on their nuclear program.
Now they and their cartons of paper are back in Washington, and translators and nuclear analysts are poring over them for fresh insights into the extent of the North's nuclear program.
The White House, eager to show progress from all the six-party talks and meetings between Hill and Kim Kye-gwan, also appears likely to decide that delivery of 18,000 pieces of paper suffices to ask the U.S. Congress to remove the North from the terrorist list and lift sanctions.
North Korea is bargaining hard for these concessions, crucial for entry into the international financial community from which its leaders dream of increased foreign investment and commercial deals for exploitation and export of untapped natural resources ranging from gold to zinc.
If nothing else, say experts in South Korea, daily logs may provide clues on how much plutonium North Korean technicians have managed to reprocess at the nuclear complex at Yongbyon for nuclear warheads. It's unlikely, however, they will reveal anything about the North's separate program for developing warheads with enriched uranium. Nor do they say a thing about alleged nuclear proliferation to client states such as Syria.
The U.S. mission to Pyongyang was intended to break the impasse in efforts to get the North to give up its nuclear program, and North Korea needs to put on a show of cooperation as long as the U.S. is willing to ship 500,000 tons of emergency food aid. The infusion of all that food for the North's famished people may actually take immediate precedence over North Korea's longstanding demand that the U.S. remove its name from the list of nations sponsoring terrorism and lift economic sanctions.
It is quite possible, moreover, that North Korea will embellish the handover of documents by blowing up the cooling tower of its five-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon as symbolic evidence that it is making good on its promise to give up the entire program. The North has already shut down the reactor itself, and destruction of the cooling tower would stand as visible proof of its commitment to live up to last year's agreements.
Despite the volume of papers handed over to the Americans, however, no way do analysts believe North Korea is about to give up its deepest nuclear secrets - or destroy the six to 12 warheads it has already fabricated with plutonium at their core. "Fundamentally, I don't think the North Koreans will be very correct and honest in their declaration," said Kim Tae-woo, senior fellow of the Korean Institute for Defense Analyses, affiliated with the Defense Ministry. "It's impossible they will give up their nuclear option."
Sung Kim of the U.S. State Department's Korea desk presumably gave the North Koreans when he saw them in Pyongyang the graphic evidence offered publicly by the White House last month of North Korea's role in the nuclear complex in Syria that was bombed by Israeli planes. The White House briefing was to pressure North Korea into coming up with a full declaration of the Syrian program and EUP, the enriched uranium program, all of which the North denies.
U.S. officials are pinning hopes on a memorandum worked out by the U.S. chief nuclear negotiator, Christopher Hill, and North Korea's nuclear negotiator, Kim Kye-Gwan. The memorandum is believed to call for North Korea to recognize concerns without making a full admission.
North Korea needs to appear cooperative while writhing in mounting economic problems that approach the years of suffering during the late 1990s. The party newspaper Rodong Sinmun editorialized that the country's "most imperative issue now is making a decisive increase in grain production so to smoothly solve the nation's food problems by ourselves". The newspaper called on citizens to fight the problem without foreign help - an apparent response to warnings by foreign aid organizations that starvation may claim the lives of as many as 300,000 people in the next two months.
It is not clear if the U.S. team in Pyongyang came to terms on a deal for emergency food aid, but North Koreans crossing the Tumen River border into China testify to the urgency of the food crisis.
"The situation is extremely dire right now," said Tim Peters, founder of Helping Hands Korea, providing sustenance for North Korean refugees. "People are comparing it to 1994 and 1995. The poor harvest and poor weather are the worst in 13 to 14 years." An influx of aid from the U.S. and South Korea, on top of aid the North receives from China, "could be a big help", Peters said, "but my question is, how far will it filter down to the little people?"
Lee Chang-choon, a former South Korean ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, believes the North's need for food will promote dialogue from which the North stands to derive still more benefits. "The food situation is getting very, very worse," he said. "If the Americans provide 500,000 tons, it's quite probable the South Koreans will follow suit."
North Korea has not made its annual request for aid from South Korea while denouncing the government of President Lee Myung-bak for conservative, hardline demands for "reciprocity" and "verification". Signs, however, are growing that the South Korean government will soften its stance.
Might South Korea offer the aid without being asked? "North Korea has not ruled out humanitarian assistance," said Lee, the former ambassador. "They have been very adept at playing cards." He doubts if North Korea has changed its underlying attitude. "It's just drama on their part," he said of the handover of documents. "Less than one page is enough to say what they're doing."
South Koreans accuse North Korea of bypassing the South by negotiating directly with Washington. The ultimate fear is that the U.S. deal with the North Koreans will sanctify the division of the Korean Peninsula between "two Koreas" if it leads to diplomatic relations between the U.S. and North Korea and the signing of a peace treaty to replace the 1953 Korean War armistice.
South Korea's Korean War president, Rhee Syng-man, boycotted the original truce talks in 1952 and 1953 for the same reason. He wanted no part of an armistice that would legitimize the permanent division of the Korean Peninsula. The South is not a signatory to the truce, signed by U.S., North Korean and Chinese generals, and might have nothing to do with a peace treaty either.
"Now is the time for the South Korean administration and ourselves to raise the following questions," said Kim Sang-chul, lawyer and chairman of the National Crisis Council of Korea. "Is it okay if the North is a foreign nation? Is it okay if North Koreans become foreigners and the armistice line is considered the national border, and North-South separation is perpetuated?"
Moreover, he asked, "Do the miserable human-rights conditions of North Koreans have nothing to do with South Koreans since that's a matter of the internal affairs of a separate nation?"