Asia-Pacific, Headlines, North America, Nuclear Energy - Nuclear Weapons, Peace

POLITICS-US: North Korean Nuclear Deal at Risk?

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Apr 3 2008 (IPS) - Growing tensions between North Korea and the new, more hawkish South Korean government are spurring concern among U.S. experts that already halting progress toward implementation of a denuclearisation deal with Pyongyang could unravel.

U.S. officials, notably Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia Christopher Hill, whose dogged efforts to ensure that the deal goes forward are largely credited with keeping it alive, are hoping that the belligerent rhetoric coming out of the North in recent days represents more bark than bite and does not reflect a fundamental change in policy.

Indeed, despite the increasingly nasty exchanges between Pyongyang and Seoul, independent analysts here have been encouraged in recent days by reports that the North has requested a new meeting with Hill to nail down a long-awaited “declaration” about its nuclear activities which, if accepted by Washington and other members of the “Six-Party Talks”, could significantly advance what has been a tortuous negotiations process.

Quoting informed sources, the Nelson Report, an insider newsletter specialising in U.S.-East Asian affairs, reported Wednesday that “rumours of an imminent announcement of resumed Chris Hill/(North Korean negotiator) Kim Gae-gwan negotiations… may hint that (North Korean) leader Kim Jong-il has OK’d some form of the Declaration language deal discussed (by the two men) in Geneva last month.”

The report stressed that U.S. analysts believe that the North’s recent rhetorical belligerence is aimed at influencing next week’s legislative elections in South Korea, rather than at either the U.S. or the denuclearisation deal.

Still, some observers here are clearly worried. “At this point, things are in a very parlous state,” according to Selig Harrison, a Korea specialist at the Centre for International Policy. “The North Koreans are very upset over the new South Korean government, and that could contribute to a collapse (of the deal). Frankly, I think (South Korean President) Lee Myung-bak has queered the nuclear negotiations.”

Lee, whose victory in the December elections brought his conservative Grand National Party (GNP) to power for the first time in 10 years, had long promised to take a tougher line toward Pyongyang than that offered by the “Sunshine Diplomacy” of his two predecessors, Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun.

Since taking office at the end of February, Lee has said he will condition food aid and fertiliser and other economic assistance and cooperation provided by Seoul to the North on improvements in human rights and the dismantling of its nuclear programme.

The threats to reduce aid and cooperation, on which Pyongyang has become increasingly dependent, comes at a particularly difficult moment for the North, which is already struggling with serious food shortages caused by seasonal flooding and declines in food aid from both China and the cash-strapped World Food Programme (WFP).

At the same time, the South’s chairman of the armed forces chief of staff, Gen. Kim Tae-young, testified before parliament that if the North appeared poised to attack the South, then Seoul should consider a pre-emptive, particularly on Pyongyang’s nuclear facilities.

North Korea responded by demanding an apology for Kim’s statement, expelling all 11 South Korean officials from the Kaesong industrial park – a major cooperation project where some 70 South Korean companies employ nearly 25,000 North Korean workers – and subsequently test-firing a number of short-range missiles, while threatening to turn the South into “ashes”.

A North Korean newspaper this week called Lee – whose government rejected demands for an apology – a “traitor” and a “U.S. sycophant” and warned that the new president “is making a mess of the process to de-nuclearise the peninsula.”

“The Lee regime will be held fully accountable for the irrevocable catastrophic consequences to be entailed,” read the editorial in the Rodong Sinmun, the voice of Pyongyang’s ruling party.

Whether the North’s reaction to the South’s tougher stance amounts more to posturing than to a genuine policy change regarding last October’s Six-Party agreement on Phase Two of the de-nuclearisation process is the subject of much speculation here.

The accord included both Koreas, China, Japan, Russia, and the U.S., and required Pyongyang to completely disable its Yongbyon nuclear facility and provide a declaration of all of its nuclear activities – including any proliferation of nuclear-related equipment in which it may have engaged – by the end of the year in exchange for enhanced energy supplies and progress toward normalising relations with the U.S.

While the timetable has lagged due to logistical problems in the supply of energy and the speed with which Pyongyang has dismantled Yongbyon, the “declaration” has become the major sticking point in the process, with Washington insisting that it somehow address two key allegations – that Pyongyang at least acquired equipment for a highly-enriched uranium (HEU) programme and that it provided some form of nuclear assistance to Syria – that the North has repeatedly denied.

Without some accounting for these two issues, according to U.S. officials, Washington would be unable to lift longstanding economic sanctions against North Korea, thus stalling the normalisation process and possibly derailing the Six-Party process.

Hill and Kim met in Geneva in mid-March to try to devise a face-saving way to resolve the two outstanding issues and came up with a formula whereby the formal declaration would address Pyongyang’s plutonium programme at Yongbyon only, but would be accompanied by separate documents – possibly secret – in which the two issues would be addressed. While that formula was initially rejected by Kim Jong-il, according to the Nelson Report, it is hoped that some version of it will be agreed if, indeed, a new meeting takes place.

Whether the ongoing contretemps between Pyongyang and Seoul undermines the prospects for a mutually satisfactory deal on the declaration remains unclear.

“I think we’re at a testing point, rather than at a critical point,” said John Feffer, a Korea specialist who directs Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF). “I think much depends on whether Lee backs up his tougher rhetoric with new policies and what signals (the North Koreans) get from the U.S. in the coming days.”

In that respect, the results of a scheduled mid-April summit meeting between President George W. Bush and Lee at the presidential retreat at Camp David – a venue never before accorded a South Korean president – could be key, according to experts here.

“The North Koreans are very suspicious,” according to Harrison. “They think the U.S. is playing a double game with Hill, on the one hand, stressing a diplomatic solution while, on the other hand, Bush is inviting Lee, with whom they’re very upset, to Camp David.”