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In-depth Business Intelligence
Books on North Korea
REPUBLICAN REFERENCE
Area (sq.km)
120,540
Population
22,224,195 (July 2002 est.)
Capital
Pyongyang
Currency
North Korean won (KPW)
Leader
Kim Jong-il
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Update No: 029 - (29/09/05)
The good news from North Korea in September was that, after
two years, six-party talks on the nuclear issue finally produced an agreement -
if only a vague statement of principles. The bad news was that the very next day
Pyongyang demanded a light water reactor (LWR) from the US as a precondition for
disarming; an idea whose utter unfeasibility, technical as much as political,
hardly suggests that Kim Jong-il is negotiating seriously. Meanwhile, moves to
curb the UN World Food Programme (WFP)'s operations in North Korea, and to force
resident foreign non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to leave by the end of
the year, did not give the impression of a regime minded to open up to the wider
world.
Six-party talks are delayed
Diplomacy with North Korea is a tortuous process. A product of the Bush
administration's insistence on multilateral negotiations, rather than the
bilateral one-on-one that Pyongyang wanted, six-party nuclear talks - both
Koreas, the US, China, Japan and Russia - have been ongoing for over two years.
Hitherto there was little to show, including a 13-month hiatus during 2004-05.
As discussed in our last two Updates, the fourth round broke new ground in some
ways. A new US chief delegate - Christopher Hill, assistant secretary of state
for east Asia - clearly had more leeway to negotiate flexibly than did his
predecessor, James Kelly. Yet 13 days' hard talking failed even to produce a
statement of principles, and the meeting recessed on August 7. It was due to
resume near the end of the month, but North Korea took umbrage on two counts:
the routine annual Ulchi Focus Lens joint US-ROK military exercises (mainly
computer-based, but the largest of their kind in the world); and Washington's
naming on August 19 of Jay Lefkowitz, a former White House adviser, as a special
envoy on DPRK human rights. This appointment was mandated by the North Korea
Human Rights Act passed by Congress last year; the timing was unfortunate, but
it had been long delayed and was announced in as low-key a way as possible. So
Pyongyang was content with a fortnight's pause, and the sextet reconvened in
Beijing on September 13.
A nuclear statement of principles
While a blow-by-blow account would be as wearing to read as it doubtless was
to undergo, basically the same obstacle remained as before. North Korea insisted
on its right to civil nuclear activities, while the US remained adamantly
opposed. There were real fears that the talks would break up in deadlock.
Instead, on September 19, to general relief, the hitherto elusive statement of
principles was finally attained. Its key points are as follows:
* North Korea formally committed to abandoning all nuclear weapons and existing
nuclear programmes, and to return "at an early date" to both the
nuclear nonproliferation treaty (NPT) and IAEA (International Atomic Energy
Agency) safeguards. The US, for its part, affirmed that it has no nuclear
weapons on the peninsula, and no intention to mount either a nuclear or
conventional attack on the DPRK.
* A 1992 inter-Korean joint declaration on denuclearizing the peninsula, which
Pyongyang had repudiated in the past, was reaffirmed. This commits both Korean
states to rejecting the nuclear fuel cycle, including enriching uranium (HEU).
US suspicion that the DPRK has a covert HEU programme, as well as its admitted
plutonium-based reprocessing activity, is the issue which triggered the current,
second North Korea nuclear crisis three years ago.
* More broadly, the US and North Korea committed to respect each other's
sovereignty, co-exist peacefully and take steps to normalize ties. Similar
pledges in the 1994 US-DPRK Agreed Framework (AF), which defused an earlier
nuclear crisis, were never implemented. Pyongyang and Tokyo also agreed to
improve their own currently fraught relations.
* All six states undertook to promote economic cooperation in energy, trade and
investment - bilaterally and/or multilaterally. Specifically, the other five
stated their willingnness to provide energy aid to Pyongyang. Seoul repeated its
earlier offer of 2 million kilowatts of electric power, but the North has yet to
accept this.
* A permanent peace regime on the peninsula will be discussed by "the
directly related parties" - presumably the two Koreas, China and the US -
in a separate forum. This is a longstanding Pyongyang demand. In principle, it
could offer the chance to address a wide range of other concerns - chemical and
biological weapons (CBW), missiles, conventional forces, and more - without all
this complicating or impeding progress on the nuclear issue.
LWRs: how soon, if ever?
As for civil nuclear power: North Korea's insistence on its right to this
was noted; the other five said they "respected" that, and "agreed
to discuss at an appropriate time the subject of the provision of a light-water
reactor [LWR] to the DPRK." This carefully worded phrase is presumably what
broke the deadlock. Pyongyang may well view it as a firm commitment to supply an
LWR; two of which had been pledged, and construction begun, under the 1994 AF.
But to discuss is not to deliver, and Washington looks unlikely to modify its
strong opposition to Kim Jong-il having nuclear facilities of any kind in the
foreseeable future.
The fragility of this verbal legerdemain was rapidly exposed. With the ink
barely dry, just a day later North Korea's foreign ministry declared that the
"the US should not even dream of the issue of the DPRK's dismantlement of
its nuclear deterrent before providing LWRs, a physical guarantee for
confidence-building." As Pyongyang well knows, that demand is as
preposterous technically as it is unacceptable politically; it takes years to
build a reactor, as witness the pair that now languish one-third built under the
presumably moribund AF. For the US and Japan, North Korea would have to be in
full IAEA and NPT compliance before the question of trusting it again with civil
nuclear power could arise. While China, Russia and South Korea are softer, the
bottom line is that no one is ready to fund LWRs.
Though US reaction was low-key, if Pyongyang holds fast to that stance then it
bodes ill for the fifth round of six-party talks, due to reconvene sometime in
early November. Even if it retreats from this maximalism, the issue of who moves
first and appropriate quids pro quo at each stage is bound to be contentious.
No more food aid, thank you
Three days later North Korea set another cat among the pigeons. At the UN in
New York, its vice foreign minister, Choe Su-hon, said he had asked Kofi Annan
to end humanitarian aid by the end of the year. Claiming that "we have very
good farming this year," Choe said that "humanitarian assistance
cannot last too long." He also accused the US of politicizing aid by
linking it to human rights, but said Pyongyang will still seek development
assistance.
This issue has been brewing for some time, and has several aspects. It was
unprecedented for North Korea to appeal for foreign help, as it did a decade ago
in 1995 after floods which helped precipitate the famine of 1996-98. Since then,
not only UN and other international bodies (WFP, WHO, Unicef, Red Cross etc) but
several western NGOs have opened offices in Pyongyang. A rare capital city which
previously had almost no foreign residents, except for a few diplomats, is now
home to about 100 expatriate aid workers: a significant change.
For a proud nation, itself once an aid donor in Africa, to admit that
self-reliance had failed was humiliating. Security too is a concern: for the
Korean Peoples' Army (KPA), giving foreigners unprecedented access - as WFP
monitoring requires - must be anathema. About one-fifth of the country (42
counties out of 203) remains closed, and so gets no WFP aid.
Biting the hand that feeds
Last year Pyongyang refused to let UN bodies issue their usual consolidated
appeal for the DPRK. Its preference for developmental over humanitarian aid is
also longstanding, but the problem is that donors are less willing to fund
infrastructure and the like - especially while the nuclear crisis remains
unresolved. Even on the food front, after a decade donor fatigue is evident. In
recent years WFP and other UN agencies' appeals have been far from fully funded,
causing cutbacks in what was once WFP's biggest operation worldwide, feeding up
to 6.5 million - almost a third of the entire DPRK population. However, other
benefactors with slacker monitoring rules - notably South Korea, which recently
gave 500,000 tons of rice, and China, the amount of whose aid is not known -
plus the prospect of a better than usual local harvest, have evidently
emboldened North Korea to take a tougher line. This has led to arguments among
donors. Opposition MPs in Seoul, echoing a recent critical report by the US
Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, accuse the ROK government of in
effect undermining the WFP by supplying its own food aid virtually
unconditionally.
As often with North Korea, it remains unclear exactly what they want - and
whether they really mean it. But if taken at face value, by the end of this year
not only must WFP end its operations, but about a dozen resident NGOs have also
been told to quit. Most of these are small; they are baffled as well as dismayed
to get their marching orders, as they enjoy good relations with their
counterparts. Many are indeed providing developmental as much as humanitarian
aid: building capacity in areas like health, sanitation, water supply, and so
on. For that matter, WFP reckons that some 70% of its own aid is developmental,
in the form of food for work projects, factories making high-energy biscuits,
and the like.
As of late September, aid agencies were seeking both to clarify and defend their
positions. If activities can be recognized or redefined as developmental, a
compromise looks possible. Otherwise the outlook is grim, above all for
beneficiaries. As North Korea's own studies have shown, 37% of children are
stunted, and a third of nursing mothers are malnourished and anaemic. Good
harvest or no, WFP still estimates a grain shortfall of almost a million tons
this year. It seems both cruel to its own people, and perhaps risky for Kim
Jong-il, if the government really does look a gift horse in the mouth and bite
the hand that feeds it.
Bullying Hyundai
Elsewhere, the momentum for expanded inter-Korean cooperation, so striking
in recent months, eased somewhat in September. The latest inter-Korean
cabinet-level talks, held in Pyongyang on September 13-16, did little except try
to end a row between North Korean authorities and the Hyundai group, which since
1998 has taken over a million Southern tourists North (mostly at a loss). On
August 19 Hyundai's chairwoman Hyun Jeong-eun sacked Kim Yoon-kyu, who as CEO of
Hyundai Asan had led the firm's dealings with the North, for alleged unspecified
corruption. North Korea riposted by halving the daily quota of tourists allowed
to visit Hyundai's Mt. Kumgang resort, delaying other planned projects, and
pointedly searching Ms Hyun (who had met Kim Jong-il just weeks before) when she
visited Mt Kumgang. This shameless meddling in the governance of a private
company in another country may even have worked; it is thought that Kim YK may
soon be reinstated. While hardly on the scale of the nuclear or food aid
controversies, yet again the signal sent is hardly that North Korea is easing
up, or is inclined to behave like a normal modern state.
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