By way of non-stop talks about talking, N. Korea advances toward its nuclear goal
Saturday, December 19, 2009 E-Mail this story Free Headline Alerts
By Donald Kirk
WASHINGTON Ñ 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 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 Ñ despite Bosworth's reticence Ñ 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 U.S. 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 U.S. troops in Korea, Gen. 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 U.S. 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 WorldTribune as he left a seminar in Washington at which he focused on all he was doing to strengthen the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. "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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. aims beyond the Korean Peninsula is far from guaranteed.
Gen. Sharp cited one aim of the U.S.-Korean alliance as providing a jump-off point for some of the 28,500 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 Ñ 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, U.S. 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.
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 Ñ 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.