対北「テロ支援国」指定解除せず＝拉致進展ない場合－日米が確認

　6カ国協議で拉致問題の進展がない場合、北朝鮮に対する米国の「テロ支援国家」指定を解除しないことを日米両政府が確認していたことが8日、明らかになった。これを踏まえ日本政府は、北京で同日再開した協議で北朝鮮に拉致問題の解決を強く迫る方針だ。
　日米関係筋によると、こうした方針は、同協議の米首席代表を務めるヒル国務次官補（東アジア・太平洋担当）が事前調整のため来日し、6日に佐々江賢一郎アジア大洋州局長らと会談した際に確認した。日本側が拉致問題の解決を指定解除の条件とするよう要請。ヒル氏も応諾し、6カ国協議で北朝鮮に伝える意向を示した。　

Yahoo!ニュース - 時事通信 - 対北「テロ支援国」指定解除せず＝拉致進展ない場合－日米が確認

Korean Six-Party Hopes

Updated: February 8, 2007
Prepared by:
Carin Zissis

The New Year has brought cautious optimism about the Six-Party Talks on North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, which resumed Thursday in Beijing (BBC). Up until last month, the talks seemed to hold little hope of offering resolution to the standstill over the North’s nuclear weapons program. The negotiations stalled for more than a year after Pyongyang walked away from the talks, held with China, the United States, South Korea, Japan, and Russia. Beijing brought North Korea back on board, but only after Pyongyang joined the nuclear club with its October 2006 test. Christopher Hill, the U.S. State Department’s chief negotiator, left the last Six-Party round in December “disappointed” over the lack of progress. This new CFR.org Crisis Guide offers an in-depth look at the crisis on the Korean peninsula.

In an interview with Bernard Gwertzman, CFR Director of Studies Gary Samore says Hill was recently “given more negotiating flexibility than he previously enjoyed.” The Bush administration eased up on its hard-line stance of refusing to hold the bilateral talks Pyongyang has long demanded when Hill met with his North Korean counterpart last month in Berlin. Samore says in the February round of Six-Party Talks, Hill will be able to negotiate for “an interim step rather than going directly to full disarmament.”

The Heritage Foundation’s Bruce Klingner says the United States should ask for nothing less than full dismantlement, saying, “Talking is not success, and North Korea should not be rewarded for its intransigence or its noncompliance with U.N. resolutions.” Each meeting round in Beijing “provides perfect international diplomatic cover for an unobstructed North Korean nuclear arms buildup,” writes the American Enterprise Institute's Nicholas Eberstadt, who calls the negotiations a “farce.”

Ahead of the talks, Hill admitted he did not expect to achieve full denuclearization, but that “we have a basis for making progress at this round” toward implementing the Six-Party September 2005 agreement. Under its terms, North Korea would suspend its nuclear program and allow inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency in exchange for humanitarian aid. The fact that President Bush’s fiscal year 2008 budget request (PDF) includes $2 million in aid for North Korea, the first such aid request since 2005, may also signal a more open approach from Washington.

Pyongyang also shows signs of interest in complying with the September 2005 agreement, but may want more than a modest aid package. Former U.S. State Department official Joel Wit, who visited Pyongyang last week, told Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun that North Korea says it will freeze operations at its nuclear facilities, including Yongbyon―the largest, in exchange for five hundred thousand tons of fuel oil and a U.S. promise to lift financial sanctions targeting North Korean accounts in Macau. The last issue has been a sticking point between the two countries: Washington accuses Pyongyang of money laundering counterfeit dollars in the Macau-based Banco Delta Asia. This Congressional Research Service report (PDF) details evidence of North Korea’s counterfeiting activities. Recent U.S.-North Korea financial talks failed to resolve (AP) the disagreement over Washington’s financial restrictions, although officials doubted the impasse would stall progress at the Six-Party Talks.

Korean Six-Party Hopes - Council on Foreign Relations

Korea nuke talks: Optimism is in the air

By Donald Kirk

SEOUL - Nobody wants to appear overly upbeat about the six-party talks going on in Beijing on North Korea's nukes. Still, the impression shared by many observers, as the talks resumed on Thursday, was that this time may be different from the others, including the last round in December that failed to go beyond the usual rhetoric before ending to universal expressions of "disappointment".

"It's clear there's a real note of optimism in the air," said Edward

Reed, Korea representative of the Asia Foundation. "That has not preceded previous sessions. It leads one to think something has been agreed to."

Indeed, the chief US and South Korean envoys to the talks both hinted that the current round may result in a preliminary agreement - the first substantive step in a long process that should end, ideally, with North Korea abandoning its nuclear-weapons program in exchange for vast amounts of economic and energy aid.

Christopher Hill, the US envoy, stopping off first in Seoul and then in Tokyo on his way to Beijing, let it be known that he and his North Korean counterpart, Kim Kye-gwan, had actually reached an agreement in one-on-one talks last month in Berlin. After getting to Beijing he denied that he had signed anything, but the implication was clear: those bilateral meetings, which he characterized as "discussions", should be seen as setting the stage for the six-party "negotiations" hosted by China.

As the talks opened, the question remained whether Kim would offer - and accept - the terms set forth in Berlin. If all goes well, said Hill, the two sides may agree on "the first tranche" - an exchange of "give and take" in a "step-by-step" process that should lead to a "second and a third tranche". Kim, arriving in Beijing, said he was indeed ready to discuss "first-stage measures" but all depended on "whether the United States will give up its hostile policy" in favor of "peaceful co-existence" - a circumlocution that gave rise to as much doubt as hope.

North Korean acquiescence, in fact, hinges on long-sought US concessions, according to two Americans who talked to Kim Kye-gwan in Pyongyang in the run-up to the six-party talks. David Albright, head of the Institute for Science and International Security, and Joel Wit, a former State Department official who has focused for years on the nuclear issue, told reporters that North Korea would insist both on an end to financial sanctions imposed by the US Treasury Department and agreement right away on the supply of oil or electricity to help meet its energy needs. Those were just the most immediate of a number of issues that might form the crux of negotiations - this week and later.

Some observers, though, were troubled by the role assumed by Albright and Wit as message-bearers. Ralph Cossa, of the Honolulu office of the Pacific Forum of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, based in Washington, observed that attempt to use Americans "to pre-negotiate" is "a familiar tactic" but seemed surprised that Albright and Wit should have played along.
Their visit would be understandable "if talks had been in a prolonged stalemate period", said Cossa, but to report on North Korea's demands "a day or two before sensitive negotiations" was "the height of irresponsibility". North Korea's demands, he said, were "not new" - though "seldom so conveniently packaged right before formal negotiations are to resume".

Moreover, Cossa observed, North Korea has ignored the whole issue of its program to produce highly enriched uranium, the reason for the breakdown in late 2002 of the 1994 Geneva agreement on the nuclear issue. Without acknowledgement by Pyongyang of its "clandestine enrichment program", said Cossa, "prospects for any real progress are slim".

In fact, there may not be any progress at all if the Americans hold fast against North Korea's insistence on an end to the order barring any financial institution from doing business in the US, or with a US firm, from dealing with Banco Delta Asia in Macau, through which North Korea purportedly channeled counterfeit US$100 bills printed on a Swiss-made press in Pyongyang. Macau authorities promptly froze $24 million in North Korean assets in Banco Delta Asia, while North Korea made the ban the reason for refusing to return to talks for more than a year until last December.

One face-saving way out of the impasse, said Ryoo Gil-jae, professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, may be for North Korea to admit that "some people acted illegally but are not related to North Korean authorities" - and to promise "nomore illegal actions". North Korea has hinted before at that way out of the dilemma, but the Americans may now be open to considering a solution that saves face for all sides if they can keep the talks going and move on.

An understanding on Banco Delta Asia, according to this scenario, may lead to preliminary agreement on the basic issue of what to do about the nukes. "If you have a reasonable expectationlevel, then we can get what we want," said Chun Bong-geum, a professor at the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security, affiliated with the South Korean Foreign Ministry. "We know what the difficulties are."

Chun expects a freeze of the Yongbyon complex to include the shutdown of the 5-megawatt reactor and the reprocessing facility where North Korea has been making plutonium for nuclear warheads for the past four years. The US Central Intelligence Agency estimates that North Korea has fabricated at least six and possibly a dozen warheads at Yongbyon, including the one that it exploded in its first underground test on October 9. In return for closing operations there, Chun predicted the US will work out a deal under which the US and others resume shipping heavy fuel oil for the first time since late 2002.

North Korea also is demanding the light-water nuclear reactors as promised in 1994 in Geneva, for which South Korea's Korea Electric Power Corp was to do most of the work at a cost of $5 billion. The Geneva agreement fell apart when Hill's predecessor, James Kelly, in talks in Pyongyang in October 2002 claimed that North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kang Sok-ju had acknowledged the program for building warheads with highly enriched uranium - an admission that Kang has repeatedly denied.

In any case, Chun In-young, political-science professor at Seoul National University, doubts the US side is ready to agree on a new deal for those reactors. The underground nuclear test in October is widely believed to have exploded Pyongyang's chances for getting those reactors until North Korean has gotten rid of its nukes - something that's not at all likely in the near future.

Nor is the US expected to agree to other North Korean demands, including removal from the State Department's list of terrorist states or opening of diplomatic relations, though President George W Bush might offer another assurance that the US will not stage the "preemptive" strike that North Korean rhetoric often cites as an integral aspect of Washington's game plan. So tendentious are all these issues that some observers believe the talking will dribble on until after the US presidential election next year - on the assumption that a Democrat wins and is ready for serious concessions.

Still, Chun In-young seemed fairly confident "they will come out with some agreement", possibly on oil shipments. The US "is in a hurry to make some progress while stuck in Iraq", he said, while "North Korea will gradually back off" from impossible demands.

Forecasts of even a modest deal are generally accompanied by reminders of all the difficulties encountered in previous talks. "Don't expect a big breakthrough," Chun warned. "I'm afraid to be optimistic," said Reed at the Asia Foundation. "We've been burned too many times."

The question, said Reed, is, "Will they get to the point of signing a significant step forward, or will North Korea sense American weakness and hold out for more?" Still, he said, "I don't see any way forward except to keep going step by step."

Journalist Donald Kirk has been covering Korea - and the confrontation of forces in Northeast Asia - for more than 30 years.
(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

Asia Times Online :: Korea News - Korea nuke talks: Optimism is in the air