|
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
|
Update No: 028 - (25/08/05)
Nuclear recess, while ties with South surge
August, a holiday month in much of the world, was a busy time in Korea.
Six-party talks on the nuclear issue, having begun on July 26, unexpectedly
dragged on for almost two weeks until August 7 - albeit without result. Rather
than admit defeat, the meeting recessed, with a commitment to reconvene in
Beijing at the end of the month. In contrast to this nuclear deadlock,
inter-Korean relations, whose revival after a year on ice was discussed in June
and July's New Nations Updates (see archives), continued to forge ahead.
Importantly, this included not only symbolic gestures, like the joint
celebrations in mid-month of the 60th anniversary of Korea's liberation from
Japan, but also a host of practical agreements. Moreover, unlike in the past,
these were not just on paper; in some cases implementation began right away.
Six parties, two weeks, no result
After a hiatus of 13 months, a fourth round of six-party talks (both Koreas,
the US, China, Japan and Russia) on North Korea's nuclear programme finally
convened in Beijing on July 26 - and broke up almost a fortnight later with no
result, not even a joint statement. That might sound like a complete waste of
time, and there was no denying the frustration of all concerned as what had
begun promisingly, dragged on and on.
Yet despite the lack of concrete progress, this fourth round was so different
from any of its predecessors (inconclusiveness apart) as to both be intriguing
and raise hopes for the longer term. Its very length, with no end-date set in
advance, contrasted with the 3-4 day duration of earlier meetings; which, in
this rather unwieldy format, barely allowed time for anything more than a formal
recitation of prepared position papers. By contrast, this fortnight in Beijing
gave plenty of opportunity for the sextet to get to know each other: both
personally - four of the six heads of delegation were new, i.e. all except for
the DPRK's vice foreign minister Kim Kye-gwan and Russia's Alexander Alexeyev -
as well as the nuances of their positions. The latter was further facilitated by
breaking out into smaller groups as appropriate, including no fewer than eight
meetings between Kim and his US equivalent: Christopher Hill, who replaced James
Kelly as assistant secretary of state for east Asia after a brief but popular
stint as ambassador in Seoul, where his family were still living.
It is not only in personnel that the US has altered. As noted in last month's
Update, the fact that earlier Hill and Kim had a secret dinner in Beijing, after
which the revival of the six-party process was announced, already indicated that
Hill was, if not plenipotentiary, at any rate authorized to be far more flexible
than the unfortunate Kelly - who had little leeway to stray from a script vetted
by hawks in the Pentagon and the vice-president's office. Pro forma US
insistence that policy has not changed fails to convince. All the signs are that
the State Department is now firmly in charge; and that Condoleezza Rice as
secretary of state, despite her hardline reputation, wants at least to try to
get somewhere with North Korea.
Several stumbling blocks
But as the fortnight in Beijing reconfirmed, that will be hard going. Even
the limited aim of agreeing a set of principles proved elusive. As ever, there
were several stumbling blocks. The immediate "deal-breaker" - as
Christopher Hill put it: his pithy, mostly upbeat running commentary was another
innovation, and a godsend to a bored press corps - was the North Korean demand
to retain not only a civil nuclear power programme, but specifically the light
water reactors (LWRs) promised in the October 1994 US-DPRK Agreed Framework (AF)
which defused the first North Korean nuclear crisis (see Background for more
detail).
Washington's stand is that as Pyongyang admits abusing its research reactor at
Yongbyon to produce plutonium, it cannot be trusted. This contrasts with US
acceptance that Iran has the right to nuclear power, and its recent approval of
nuclear exports to India - which never signed the NPT. North Korea's sudden LWR
demand also surprised South Korea, whose new role as an active mediator was both
striking and skilful. Seoul's offer to send the North 2,000 megawatts of
electricity annually - credited with luring Kim Jong-il back to the talks - was
based on the LWR project being defunct and its budget transferring to this new
plan.
A US-ROK split?
During the recess, a split seemed to open up when ROK unification minister
Chung Dong-young said that Seoul backed Pyongyang's right to peaceful nuclear
energy. He clarified later, however, that South Korea regarded the LWR project
as defunct. Foreign minister Ban Ki-moon was keener to have the US and South
Korea visibly singing from the same hymn sheet. After talks in Washington with
Condoleezza Rice, Ban professed confidence that "we reached sufficient
consensus … I did not use such an expression before I came here." He also
said that dismantling North Korea's nuclear programme may take two or three
years: emphasizing that this meant physically removing it all, and not just
freezing it.
The likely way to bridge any gap between the US and either Korea is to set a
precondition that North Korea must rejoin the NPT and become fully IAEA-compliant
to be allowed a civil nuclear programme. With Hill now hinting that what had
been a deal-breaker was "not exactly a show-stopper," that is likely
to be the offer when talks resume. Will Kim Jong-il accept? Here too the recess
has been active, with at least three US-DPRK contacts via the New York channel
(using North Korea's mission to the UN). The sense is that none of the six wants
another marathon sans result; or conversely, each has an incentive not to be
seen to be wilfully stalling, the odd man out preventing progress. (Plan B for
the US is to ensure that, if there is such a laggard, the other five agree it is
Pyongyang rather than Washington.)
Who moves first?
Another, familiar difference was over sequencing and rewards. Little was
heard this time of the US demand for complete, verifiable, irreversible
(nuclear) dismantling (CVID). While CVID remains Washington's and indeed
everyone's goal - even North Korea accepts that the eventual goal is the
peninsula's denuclearisation - critics, including South Korea and China, thought
it unrealistic for the US in effect to insist on North Korea disarming right
away. It is unclear whether at the fourth round the US actually got, at last,
any formal reply from North Korea to the detailed, phased programme it had
offered a year earlier. Certainly Pyongyang's latest demand to be compensated at
least twice - first for freezing its admitted plutonium activities, and then
again later if it definitively abandons them - looked cheekily unacceptable. But
in general, this is one area where compromise is in principle attainable.
Little too was heard of another crux, the one that kicked off the current crisis
almost three years: the US allegation that besides its now admitted plutonium
activity, North Korea also has a second, covert nuclear programme, based on
highly enriched uranium (HEU). It will be hard to keep HEU off the agenda. On
August 24 Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, confirmed to Japan's Kyodo
News what had long been suspected: that Dr A Q Khan, the disgraced nuclear
scientist-entrepreneur, had supplied centrifuges (which enrich uranium) and
designs to North Korea. Pyongyang's blanket denial of HEU - which includes
denying US claims that in October 2002 it had admitted to having it - will now
be harder to sustain.
What does Kim Jong-il want?
Still another, rather diffuse problem area is what North Korea requires of
the US in return. In what is a general headache dealing with the DPRK, its
demands tend to vary. Some are relatively straightforward; thus to come off the
State Department's list of nations regarded as sponsoring terrorism, Pyongyang
need only return some ageing Japanese hijackers. But with ties with Tokyo still
tense over the fate of abductees from the 1970s and 1980s - the subject of a
brief bilateral meeting in Beijing, Japan evidently having been restrained by
the others from foregrounding this issue in the main talks - this may not be
swiftly resolved.
Pyongyang's persistent cry is that the US must cease to threaten it. One does
wonder what could ever fully reassure Kim Jong-il on that score, in a context of
deep mutual mistrust. The DPRK demands the withdrawal of US nuclear weapons from
South Korea; puzzlingly, as George Bush senior did so over a decade ago. The US
may not be keen for North Korea to inspect its bases, yet verification is
presumably a two-way street. But neither Washington nor Seoul will accept that
the latter be excluded from the former's wider nuclear umbrella, as Pyongyang
has sometimes demanded.
On the eve of the talks, North Korea resurrected an old demand for a peace
treaty with the US. In the past this had been a spoiling move to exclude South
Korea, which never signed the 1953 Armistice that ended the Korean War but was
never followed by a peace treaty. This time though, something more constructive
may be in the works: the US has hinted that this can be discussed. Beyond
formally wrapping up history's loose ends, this may open a path to extend the
six-party talks' scope beyond the nuclear issue alone. While one has to start
somewhere, North Korea raises many further concerns: chemical/biological
weapons, missiles, human rights, refugees, counterfeiting, drug trafficking and
more. An overarching grand package deal, though formidably hard to attain, seems
preferable to an interminable series of ad hoc negotiations, one issue at a
time. But this may be too much to expect yet.
North-South: ever warmer
Meantime, even while the six-party talks took a break, inter-Korean ties
went from warm to warmer. In stark contrast to the freeze for almost a year
until June, now hardly a day went by without some fresh inter-Korean contact.
Here there is space only for the highlights.
August 15, this year marking the 60th anniversary of Korea's liberation from
Japan (but also its simultaneous partition into north and south), saw a large
200-strong Northern delegation - both official and NGO - fly into Seoul. It was
led by Kim Ki-nam: a senior secretary of the ruling Korean Workers Party (KWP)
and a confidant of Kim Jong-il. Unprecedentedly, the DPRK team briefly paid
their respects at the South's national cemetery, where its war dead are
interred. Conservatives muttered that the North should first admit and apologize
for starting the war, but most Southerners seemed glad of this gesture. In
another first, Kim and his colleagues also visited the ROK national assembly.
They met president Roh Moo-hyun as well as his predecessor Kim Dae-jung, who
went north for the June 2000 summit.
Football teams of both sexes also came south, and (genuinely) friendly matches
were held. In return a noted Southern pop singer, Cho Yong-pil, wowed an
initially reserved 7,000-strong audience at Pyongyang's Ryugyong Chung Ju-yung
Gymnasium (named after the founder of Hyundai, who paid for it) with hits from
both Koreas. The right-wing Seoul daily Chosun Ilbo, no fan of the North, gushed
that "with a few melodies, Cho did in two hours what countless politicians
and businessmen failed to do over a decade: he touched a nerve among ordinary
North Korean people and sparked genuine interest and emotion."
New hot line and farm aid
There was also progress in security matters. In August 10 a new military
hotline was tested, coming into use soon thereafter. This links liaison offices,
the aim being to prevent border clashes at sea like those that led to fatal
firefights in 1999 and 2002. There is also a similar separate new hotline for
merchant shipping, related to the South's now allowing Northern vessels to pass
between its mainland and the southwestern holiday island province of Cheju.
Propaganda loudspeakers at the DMZ, switched off last year, are being
dismantled. High-level military talks have been agreed - at an odd venue, Mt.
Paekdu (Paekdu-san) on North Korea's border with China - but no date or agenda
has yet been fixed.
On the economic front, a major step forward was the first meeting of a new
committee, chaired by vice-ministers, on agricultural cooperation. Meeting in
Kaesong on August 18-19, this reached an agreement which South Korea trumpeted
as the start of joint farming, something it has long sought. From next year, a
few Northern collective farms - number or location yet to be determined, and
with no suggestion that decollectivization as in China or Vietnam is on the
agenda - will receive the ministrations of Southern experts and inputs. It will
be fascinating to see how this works out in practice. South Korea will also
assist more widely with new seeds, pest control, fruit and vegetable
cultivation, sericulture, and badly needed reforestation. All this is
unambiguously positive, though it remains to be seen how far crop yields can be
boosted in what is hardly optimal terrain for agriculture. (The US scholar
Marcus Noland has provocatively suggested that it is not economically rational
to grow food in any part of the mountainous and densely populated Korean
peninsula: they should import it instead and pay for it with industrial exports,
as the South largely does.)
More generally, inter-Korean trade in the first seven months of 2005 rose 55%
over the same period last year to US$582 million. 90% of this was Northern
exports, and over a third was inter-governmental rather than private business.
Meanwhile, an expansion of Hyundai's tourism to two new destinations, Kaesong
city and Mt. Paekdu, was postponed. No explanation was given, but Pyongyang was
thought to be disquieted by power struggles in the Hyundai group, leading to the
ouster of the executive who had pioneered ties with the North, Kim Yoon-kyu.
Nonetheless, three pilot tours to Kaesong were later scheduled.
Waving but not touching
Family reunions too were revived and slightly expanded, thanks to a
technical innovation. On August 15, 40 separated family members - some too frail
to travel - saw each other for the first time in over half a century, thanks to
a new videolink across the DMZ. They could wave and speak, but not embrace.
Later an 11th round of regular reunions, where 100 from each side meet kin from
the other for 2-3 days at the North's Kumgangsan resort, was due to begin on
August 26 after a hiatus of over a year. At this rate, sadly, most of the
relevant group will be dead before they get this one-off chance to meet
(cruelly, no further contact is allowed by letter, telephone or email
thereafter). Out of some 120,000 South Koreans who have applied to this
programme since 2000, about 20,000 have since died. In the South the lucky few
are chosen by lot; the North's method is unclear, but seems confined to the
elite.
In a more contentious area, North Korea also agreed for the first time to
discuss what was coyly termed those missing in the Korean War and thereafter:
code for thousands of South Koreans abducted to the North, prisoners of war kept
there after 1953 (a handful, old men now, have escaped in recent years), and
others - mainly fishermen - seized since the war. The North had hitherto stoutly
denied all of this, so it was unsurprising that these first talks, ongoing at
this writing, did not seem headed for success. In contrast to Japan's absolute
prioritization of its own far fewer kidnap cases, South Korea has gone to the
other extreme: rather than rescue its own citizens, say critics, Seoul preferred
to butter up their abductors. But it is now raising the cases of 542 POWs and
486 civilian abductees, mostly fishermen.
Rights and wrongs
It will be remarkable if the North does the decent thing here, as this could
be the thin end of a large wedge. Officially South Korea claims all North
Koreans too as citizens of the ROK, so there will be pressure to widen human
rights concerns to the entire oppressed population. Meanwhile, on August 19 the
US named Jay Lefkowitz, a former White House adviser, as its special envoy for
North Korean human rights. This appointment, mandated by the North Korea Human
Rights Act passed by Congress last year, had been long delayed. Its timing now
may seem unfortunate, but its low-key manner - late on a Friday with minimal
hoopla, and President Bush away on holiday - seemed calculated to try not to
upset Pyongyang unduly. US concern over North Korean human rights abuses is
likely to remain mainly rhetorical, or at least firmly subordinated to the
nuclear issue and other security concerns.
Domestically, August began a season of celebrations of twin 60th anniversaries:
liberation from Japan on August 15, to be followed by the ruling KWP's founding
on September 8. For this, North Korea has revived from 2002 its largest ever
mass games spectacular, called Arirang, which boasts 100,000 performers. (This
runs till October, so for would-be visitors now is your chance.) The opening
night on August 16 was graced with a rare appearance by Kim Jong-il, to
thunderous applause but to the chagrin of foreign tourists who (unusually) were
forbidden to bring in cameras or recorders, and faced airport-style security
without knowing why; as ever, the royal presence was not announced in advance.
Adored as we are endlessly told he is by all his loyal subjects, the dear leader
is evidently taking no chances.
«
Top
|
