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Seoul, most especially, and Tokyo and Beijing got upset and jittery
when President Bush announced that he was taking North Korea off the
list of countries labeled as “state sponsors of terrorism.” Mr.
Bush was moved to that friendly mood by a fireworks display—the
destruction of the cooling tower of the Yongbyon nuclear complex.
Kim Jong-il, the grand leader of the Democratic People’s Republic
of Korea (DPRK) and heir of the late Kim Il-sung ordered it.
Earlier, the North Koreans surrendered to a US official documents
pertaining to Yongbyon.
The South Koreans were not pleased with what
they—and Beijing and Tokyo—thought was President Bush’s
precipitate generosity. All three thought Kim Jong-il still had a
lot to do before he and his Stalinist state and government could be
trusted not to carry out the manic threats radio broadcasters
regularly issue against Seoul and Tokyo.
South Korea, which has regularly been giving
food and other forms of aid to North Korea, fears that—even if the
whole world witnesses Kim Jong-il vow not to fire missiles at or
send commandos through tunnels to the South —the North’s leader
and military will continue being as crazy as ever. So what Seoul’s
leaders want is to be really sure the DPRK has no nuclear weapons
and is deprived of the capability to make any.
China has been a dutiful elder brother to North
Korea since the Cold War. But now the ideological purists in
Beijing’s hierarchy are a minority (albeit one that still commands
obedience and respect). The pragmatic Chinese leaders are getting a
bit fed up with the burden of keeping Kim Jong-il in power and
making sure the world is safe from him and his army.
For over a decade, trade and investment deals
have made China and South Korea closer than anyone could imagine
during the Maoist decades. Beijing and Seoul’s outlook on North
Korea are alike. It is colored by a love-hate feeling for a problem
sibling. This has made them even closer these days.
Tokyo has the same fears as Seoul of being
the target of North Korean missiles. But it has another major
concern. Kim Jong-il must account for the Japanese that
Pyongyang’s thugs have kidnapped and must apologize for the deaths
of those who have been killed.
All these concerns have probably delayed Mr.
Bush’s removal of North Korea from the list of terrorist states.
Like truce with the Mafia
John Bolton, a Senior Fellow at the American
Enterprise Institute in Washington and whose most recent book is
Surrender Is Not an Option (Simon & Schuster/Threshold
Editions), recently wrote an article “North Korea nuclear deal
with US ‘like police truce with Mafia’ ” in the UK’s Daily
Telegraph.
Bolton wrote: “North Korea has violated every
significant agreement ever reached with the United States, and all
indications are that the North is again following its traditional
game plan. It is quite adept at pledging to give up its nuclear
program, having done so several times in the past fifteen years. Not
once, however, has it actually taken decisive steps to do so.
Indeed, quite the opposite.
“Almost from the moment the North signed the
1994 Agreed Framework, it set about violating it, seeking to offset
the loss of plutonium produced in Yongbyon’s spent fuel by
pursuing uranium enrichment, the alternate route to nuclear weapons.
“Only when America uncovered decisive proof
that North Korea had embarked on a production-scope procurement
effort for an enrichment program was that ruse broken. The North
initially admitted to the enrichment program, but now firmly denies
it. In fact, the evidence suggests the enrichment program is still
underway.”
Bolton made fun of “the North’s handover of
18,000 pages of documents on Yongbyon’s operation” as being
“contaminated by particles of highly enriched uranium, probably
from that enrichment program the North never had. Equally telling is
that these records are incomplete and, given the North’s economy
in the truthfulness department, quite possibly fraudulent.”
6-party talks to resume
The good news is that South Korea’s chief
negotiator Kim Sook has announced that after nine months, the
six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear programs will resume
tomorrow. Beijing, which has been the organizer and host of these
negotiations with Kim Jong-il’s envoys since they began in 2003,
has not said anything about the resumption.
But Kim Sook was on the way to Beijing when he
told reporters on Tuesday that the “chief delegates of the
six-party talks will meet Thursday for the first time in nine
months.”
“I will be in consultation with each country
to secure an important bridgehead for achieving the goal that North
Korea should eventually give up its nuclear weapons programs,”
Agence France-Presse reported Kim to have told reporters.
Pyongyang had said, after the Yongbyon cooling
tower was destroyed, that it could not proceed to the next stage of
entering a denuclearization agreement until other parties make good
on their promised energy aid of one million tons of fuel oil. In
addition, the US must lift some of its economic sanctions.
The six parties are North and South Korea,
China, the US, Russia and Japan.
rqb@manilatimes.net
rq_bas@yahoo.com
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