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NORTH KOREA: Defying Inspection of Nuclear Assets

Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING, Dec 12 2008 (IPS) - China has failed to coax its old communist ally North Korea into signing an agreement to verify the state’s secretive nuclear activities.

Multilateral talks on getting the impoverished northern neighbour to give up its long-standing nuclear programme in return for more aid and better diplomatic standing have ended here in failure.

Diplomats said the imminent departure of U.S. President Bush’s administration and North Korean leader Kim Jong-il’s poor health were probably among the factors that precluded progress in the Dec. 8 – 11 round of the six-party talks that also involve Russia, the United States, Japan and South Korea.

Among other things, the North Korean government has baulked at the requirements for taking soil and air samples from around its nuclear facilities for shipping and examination abroad.

China – the initiator of the six-party series of talks that began in 2003 – has tried to bridge differences by drafting a verification protocol but the negotiators failed to agree to it. “Through days of discussion, the six parties came to some consensus, but remained apart on some issues,” foreign minister Yang Jiechi said in a meeting of the negotiators on Thursday.

The envoys from Washington, Pyongyang, Beijing, Seoul, Tokyo and Moscow, who extended the planned three-day meeting for another day in hopes of striking an agreement, failed even to schedule the next round of talks, which will take place under a new U.S. administration.

“We were not able to get an agreed verification protocol,” U.S. negotiator Christopher Hill said before his departure from Beijing airport.

Also unresolved is who will conduct the inspections and when and where they will take place. It also remains to be seen whether the International Atomic Energy Agency will be allowed to join the inspection team.

China decided not to inject extra effort into nudging the North Korean envoys to agree to the protocol, said one Beijing-based diplomat. “The prevailing feeling was that the North is biding its time until the new U.S. administration takes over. The Chinese thought there was not much point investing more effort at this stage.”

U.S. President-elect Barack Obama has pledged to work towards halting the spread of nuclear arms. While on the campaign trail, he criticised the Bush administration for antagonising the North and mishandling the disarmament negotiations.

It was President Bush who labelled North Korea as a member of the ‘Axis of Evil.’ During his presidency North Korea tested its first nuclear weapon. In June, it acknowledged producing roughly 40 kg of enriched plutonium, enough for eight nuclear bombs according to some U.S. estimates.

In Washington’s first official acknowledgment of the North’s nuclear capability, U.S. defence secretary Robert Gates recently admitted that Pyongyang has produced several nuclear bombs. The revelation came after a U.S. defence report was recently released which listed the North as one of five nuclear powers in Asia.

In the past U.S. officials have rarely admitted that Pyongyang has actually produced nuclear weapons while acknowledging that it has extracted enough amounts of plutonium to produce several.

Pyongyang sees its nuclear programme as a vital part of its national security strategy but agreed in February 2007 to abandon it in exchange for normal diplomatic relations with the U.S. and Japan, along with energy aid equivalent to one million tons of heavy fuel oil.

The unpredictable regime later insisted Washington first take North Korea off the list of state sponsors of terrorism. The removal happened in October but then talks stalled again over the North’s reluctance to accept a set of verification measures to allow inspectors check the state of its nuclear activities.

The outlook for the talks is complicated further by the reported ill health of the North’s reclusive leader Kim Jong-il. Pyongyang has been very secretive about his condition but a French doctor who has treated him has confirmed that Kim suffered a stroke in August.

“Kim Jong-il suffered a stroke but did not undergo an operation. He is now better,” Francois-Xavier Roux, who last treated Kim in late October, told the French newspaper ‘Le Figaro.’

If the North Korean leader dies, the fate of not only the denuclearisation process but also of a host of other issues like reunification with the South, the continuing famine, and investigations into abductions of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s will all hang in the balance.

Current food shortages might not reach the same levels of disaster as the previous famine in the late 1990s, but the country faces a serious threat of hunger. The World Food Programme said in September that North Korea needed an additional 503 million dollars in food aid until November 2009 to avoid a full-blown famine.

Kim Jong-il has never publicly given any indication about who would succeed him in the communist world’s only hereditary regime. Some analysts have predicted that the National Defence Commission (NDC) could assume power in the case of his sudden death, with the possibility of a transfer of power along hereditary lines coming later.