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SEOUL: South Korea said Monday it hopes a US move to
drop North Korea from a terror blacklist would warm Seoul’s chilly
ties with the communist state, but conservative media slammed the
move as “unprincipled.”
Unification Ministry Spokesman
Kim Ho Nyoun said South Korea is considering a shift in policy,
including on the issue of providing food and steel.
Inter-Korean ties, which are
handled by the ministry, have been frigid since conservative
President Lee Myung Bak took office here in February and promised to
take a firmer line with the hard line North.
“We hope that [removing the
North from the blacklist] will have a positive impact on improving
relations between South and North Korea,” Kim said.
Despite acute shortages the North
has not asked the South for its customary food shipment this year.
Steel shipments, part of the
international aid promised to the North in return for a nuclear
shutdown, were delayed because a six-nation disarmament pact seemed
in danger of disintegrating.
North Korea said Sunday it would
resume disabling its plutonium-producing nuclear plants and readmit
UN inspectors in response to the US concession.
The North had begun work to
reactivate the plants, which were closed last year, because of a
dispute over “verification” inspections and the country’s
continued inclusion on a US list of states that sponsor terrorism.
The US State Department announced
Saturday that a deal had been reached on the inspections and North
Korea would be taken off the list.
It said the North agreed to
verification of all of its nuclear activities, including an alleged
covert highly enriched uranium program and suspected proliferation.
But, visits to sites not included
in the North’s nuclear declaration delivered in June will require
“mutual consent.”
That declaration dealt directly
only with the admitted plutonium-producing operation based at
Yongbyon.
Conservative media commentators,
however, were scathing.
“This is an unprincipled
concession made by the Bush administration which is desperate for a
diplomatic achievement in its final days,” the largest-selling
newspaper Chosun Ilbo wrote, highlighting the consent issue.
It said agreements at six-party
negotiations, involving the two Koreas, the United States, Russia,
China and Japan, had made it clear that suspicious sites should be
subject to inspection along with declared locations.
Dong-A Ilbo noted that the North
was put on the terror list in 1988 after its agents were implicated
in the blowing-up of a South Korean aircraft with 115 people aboard
the previous year.
“Considering the grief of the
victims’ families, Washington’s decision to delist Pyongyang is
hard to accept,” it said.
The paper said that Pyongyang had
not honored its promise of an accurate declaration and complete
verification.
“On the contrary, verification
could grow more complicated as inspection of nuclear facilities is
now possible only with the North’s consent.”
Many critics in South Korea and
Japan “rightly argue that only North Korea will gain from the
latest deal,” it said.
JoongAng Ilbo was equally
scathing, accusing the Bush administration of “unprincipled”
negotiations.
It acknowledged Washington did
not want its achievements so far going to waste.
“Even so, backing off after
having firmly proclaimed that it would not remove North Korea from
the list of state sponsors of terrorism unless all of North
Korea’s nuclear facilities were thoroughly verified is the result
of a lack of strategy,” the paper said.
“There are many who are
surprised by how the United States repeatedly concedes to North
Korea in negotiations,” it added.
--AFP
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