Hardliners Target Detente with North Korea

Suzy Kim and John Feffer | February 11, 2008

Editor: Emily Schwartz Greco

Foreign Policy In Focus

The Bush administration’s approach to North Korea was once quite consistent with its overall foreign policy. There was name-calling, a preference for regime change, and an emphasis on military solutions. Not surprisingly, then, the relationship between the United States and North Korea, like so many other tense stand-offs, deteriorated over the last seven years. The United States accused the third member of the “axis of evil” of money-laundering, missile sales, and a secret program for the production of nuclear material. For its part, North Korea responded tit for tat at the rhetorical level. And, in October 2006, it upped the ante by exploding a nuclear device. If the United States were not tied up in other military conflicts, and eyeing Iran to boot, a war in Northeast Asia might have been higher on the administration’s to-do list.

But all of that appeared to change in 2007. Chastened by military failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, anxious about the vulnerability of the Republican party on foreign policy issues in 2008, and accused of having allowed North Korea to “go nuclear” on its watch, the Bush administration reversed its hard-line policy. Washington agreed to negotiate seriously with Pyongyang, provide it with incentives on the road to denuclearization rather than only at the end of the process, and meet face to face when necessary.

The results of this turnabout were dramatic. The February 13, 2007 agreement in the Six Party Talks – among the United States, the two Koreas, Japan, China, and Russia – not only illuminated a path toward a denuclearized Korean peninsula. It also outlined steps toward the normalization of political relations with Pyongyang, a replacement of the Korean War armistice with a peace treaty, and the building of a regional peace structure for Northeast Asia.

Many conservatives were aghast that the Bush administration, after six years of ABC (Anything But Clinton), was essentially exhuming the Clinton administration’s engagement policies toward North Korea. From their perspective, the Six Party Talks were only supposed to be a holding pattern until the regime in Pyongyang finally collapsed through a combination of outside pressure and internal weakness. When the Six Party Talks instead produced a breakthrough agreement, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton denied any achievement and declared, “I think the six-party talks failed.” He then recycled his earlier position: “I think the only solution is the enhanced isolation of North Korea, ultimately bringing the regime down and peacefully reuniting the peninsula.”

So far in 2008, progress toward implementing last year’s February 13 agreement has slowed. North Korea has begun shutting down its Yongbyon plutonium facilities and readmitted inspectors, and the United States has sent about 50,000 tons of heavy fuel oil and 5,000 tons of steel products for its power plants. Nevertheless, disagreements remain. North Korea missed the first deadline for delivering a complete declaration of its nuclear program, and a second one looms at the end of February. Meanwhile, the United States has yet to remove the country from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Even if these hurdles are cleared, several more remain. It is not yet clear whether North Korea will entirely give up its nuclear deterrent or whether the United States will remove all economic sanctions and extend diplomatic recognition.

The fragile détente between North Korea and the United States might succumb to its internal challenges. But hard-line opponents don’t want to leave it to chance, and so are marshalling their arguments to strangle this hopeful development in its cradle.

Criticisms of engagement policy fall into several categories. Some critics, like Bolton, continue to hold onto the old Bush strategy of isolation and regime change because, they argue, North Korea cannot be trusted to abide by any agreement. Other critics focus on North Korea’s nuclear program itself, both its internal characteristics and purported external cooperation with countries such as Syria. A third set of criticisms focuses on the February 13 agreement itself and identify flaws, ambiguities, and blind spots, particularly around the question of verification. Another group focuses instead on North Korea’s human rights record. And finally there are conservative critics in Japan and South Korea who are attempting to undermine détente from the sidelines.

In short, the negotiators trying to implement the agreements reached in the Six Party Talks face a host of internal and external challenges. The hard-line criticisms can be addressed. But it’s not certain whether engagement supporters in Washington or in Pyongyang have sufficient political capital to push the process forward in 2008.

The Nuclear Challenge

North Korea’s nuclear program has long been a mystery. It’s never been clear how much fissionable material the country has produced. Although the country froze its plutonium facilities as part of the 1994 Agreed Framework, it is unclear how much time and resources it devoted to pursuing a second path to a bomb, namely highly enriched uranium (HEU). Even the October 2006 nuclear test remains a puzzle. Some experts have declared it a failure, while others speculate that North Korea succeeded with a low-yield experiment.

For a small and relatively weak country, mystery can be very useful, and North Korea has been reluctant to disarm itself of such a weapon. The current conflict over the country’s declaration of the full extent of its nuclear program is a case in point. North Korea claims that it already provided full information in November, in advance of the December 31 deadline. But the United States is not satisfied with the amount of plutonium that North Korea has declared or with the government’s contention that it never set up a HEU program.

These points are negotiable. The amount of plutonium that North Korea has reportedly declared – 30 kilograms – is at the low end of U.S. estimates, so this is well within negotiable range. Getting agreement on the amount of reprocessed plutonium in North Korea’s hands involves some massaging of the numbers, which is what happened in 1994 as well. The HEU program, meanwhile, is more a matter of saving face than dismantling a viable program. The Bush administration wants to demonstrate that its 2002 accusations, which derailed the 1994 Agreed Framework, had some merit. North Korea, however, wants to demonstrate that it did not violate the spirit of that agreement. Both sides have moved closer to agreement. The U.S. government has already admitted that its initial estimates were exaggerated. And experts suggest that evidence of uranium residue in aluminum tubes that North Korea provided to investigators, which would suggest actual enrichment, is the result of contamination from Pakistani material. Christopher Hill has all but admitted that North Korea didn’t use these tubes for uranium enrichment.

Syria Connection

What might not be negotiable, however, is the Syria connection, which hardliners have seized on to prove that North Korea remains an incorrigibly rogue power.

In early September, the U.S. media reported on Israeli military strikes against Syria that destroyed what might have been a nuclear facility. Some reports suggested that the facility had been built with North Korean assistance and that North Korean engineers had even died in the bombing. If the media reports were correct, North Korea had crossed the critical red line established by the Bush administration (after Pyongyang crossed the earlier red line when it tested a nuclear weapon). And yet, the Bush administration didn’t raise a fuss at all. It instead allowed the State Department to go about its business. With hardliners like Bolton and the State Department’s senior arms control and security official Robert Joseph no longer on the inside, the State Department has had more maneuvering room to pursue an engagement policy.

But congressional opponents of engagement certainly raised a fuss about the purported Syria connection. “We regret that the administration has ignored numerous letters from Congress asking that all members be briefed on the Israeli airstrike,” wrote Peter Hoekstra (R-MI) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) in The Wall Street Journal. “Failing to disclose the details of this incident to the legislative branch, preventing due diligence and oversight -- but talking to the press about it -- is not the way to win support for complex and difficult diplomatic efforts to combat proliferation by rogue nations.” The congressional representatives cautioned the administration not to move forward on any agreements with North Korea until this matter was cleared up.

The Syria connection remains sufficiently mysterious that engagement opponents will be able to exploit it at any point when it seems that détente is moving forward. As Bolton has put it, “The idea of North Korea for years engaged in cloning Yongbyon in Syria (or anywhere else -- Burma, for instance) should be a fire bell in the night.”

But the notion that any country would be interested in a clone of Yongbyon is quite farfetched. After all, North Korea’s facility is itself based on a rather old English model – the Calder Hall design – and Syria could just as easily have skipped North Korea and gone back to the original. That is, if Syria were in fact building a nuclear plant, which is still not verified. As Seymour Hersh reports in The New Yorker, a former senior U.S. intelligence official with access to the current intelligence says that "We don't have any proof of a reactor -- no signals intelligence, no human intelligence, no satellite intelligence."

Bolton slips in a sly suggestion that North Korea is cloning Yongbyon elsewhere. In briefings with its Asian allies in early 2005, the United States similarly accused North Korea of providing Libya with uranium hexafluoride. But it turned out that the U.S. government had misled its allies. North Korea had provided the material to Pakistan, which already has a nuclear program, a business transaction that the United States had known about for years.

As such, there still remains no evidence that North Korea is engaged in nuclear proliferation, whether in Syria or elsewhere. North Korea is certainly short of cash, and nuclear know-how and materials are valuable commodities. But no one knows the true marketability of North Korea’s program, and certainly it would pale in comparison to what North Korea could earn from giving up its nuclear program wholesale.

Trust, Then Verify?

If North Korea provides a declaration of its nuclear programs that U.S. negotiators can live with, and the United States then proceeds to remove the country from the state sponsors of terrorism list, the process moves on to the next level. At that point, North Korea is supposed to submit to a more intrusive inspection regime and begin to give over all of its nuclear material.

Opponents of engagement are readying their arguments, and they largely focus on the question of verification. The Heritage Foundation’s Bruce Klingner, for instance, compares the verification protocols from the Cold War with what is being proposed in the Six Party Talks and finds them wanting.

“To verify the extent of North Korean plutonium production, inspectors must be allowed to conduct short-notice challenge inspections of suspect sites as well as to take samples of fissile material,” he writes. “North Korea's refusal in 1992–1993 to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to access two suspect nuclear sites precipitated the first nuclear crisis. The agency has never gained access to the sites.”

In fact, during the lead-up to the first nuclear crisis in the early 1990s, North Korea allowed an initial inspection by Hans Blix of the International Atomic Energy Agency and produced a 150-page document detailing its uranium mining sites and nuclear power plants. “It turned out that the North Korean list closely matched Western estimates of the scope of its nuclear program,” writes Michael Mazarr in his study, North Korea and the Bomb. True, North Korea refused to allow the IAEA to visit the two suspect sites, claiming that they were conventional military facilities. But the real problem was that after allowing six IAEA inspections and providing the detailed list of its programs, North Korea hadn’t gotten anything out of the deal: “no economic aid or investment, no broader political contacts with Washington or Seoul or Tokyo, not even the ability to verify that U.S. nuclear weapons had been withdrawn from the South,” Mazarr concludes.

The current demand that North Korea submit to an intrusive inspection regime as a precondition for moving forward with engagement recapitulates this earlier conflict.

Before it throws open its mostly highly secretive sites, North Korea wants some sign that its longstanding enemies – the United States, Japan, and South Korea – have changed their adversarial policies. South Korea has largely done so. But the United States has only sent over some heavy fuel and rescued a few North Korean sailors who were attacked in the Red Sea by pirates. Japan, still obsessed with the abduction issue, has shown no sign of changing tack.

The verification procedures that the Agreed Framework established are still applicable to the dismantlement of the Yongbyon facility. They worked during the 1990s, and there is no reason to doubt that they will work again. Expanding verification to short-notice inspections of all suspect sites throughout the country can only be achieved through give-and-take negotiations and the building of trust, not through fiat.

Human Rights

If negotiators manage to settle all the outstanding disputes over the nuclear issue, other stumbling blocks loom. Perhaps the most vexing is the issue of human rights. The debate over human rights in North Korea as it intersects with policy discussions over engagement inevitably focuses on the prudence of linking human rights concerns with political issues such as nuclear negotiations and normalization of relations. Central to this debate is not whether there are human rights violations in North Korea. No doubt North Koreans endure major human rights violations. As economic migrants or political refugees who have crossed into China, North Koreans face dire living conditions. They are in danger of being discovered not only by the authorities but also by anyone wanting a reward for turning in undocumented immigrants. For those remaining in North Korea, the list of human rights concerns is long, ranging from the full spectrum of civil and political rights to social and economic rights.

The heart of the matter is: how should these rights be protected and by whom? The answer largely revolves around the issue of regime change. Some, like Bolton, argue that North Korean human rights can best be protected if the regime is toppled. Others, like the German doctor Norbert Vollertsen, go so far as to encourage large refugee outflows to foster the collapse of the regime.

But human rights organizations such as Amnesty International have been leery of linking human rights to such political agendas throughout its long history of human rights activism precisely because such strategies only serve to detract from the issue in several ways. Political agendas take the focus away from human rights and play into geopolitical power struggles. In the short term, they provoke harsher measures that directly affect the most vulnerable. In the North Korean case, this was seen in the crackdowns by Chinese authorities after high profile bids for asylum in the scaling of embassy compound walls. Such strategies foster distrust rather than cooperation. Proponents of regime change seem oblivious to the even greater potential threat to human rights in the chaotic aftermath of regime collapse. In short, most human rights organizations believe that human rights should not be used as a political tool.

A negative example of what happens when human rights are linked to political agendas is the North Korea Human Rights Act of 2004. This legislation authorizes $24 million for each of the fiscal years between 2005 and 2008 for assistance to North Korean refugees, promoting human rights, democracy, and freedom of information inside North Korea. In addition, the bill mandated the appointment of a special envoy for human rights in North Korea, a position subsequently filled by lawyer Jay Lefkowitz.

On the surface, it seems that the legislation stands up for human rights, alleviating a major humanitarian crisis. However, it has another objective. During a speech given to the Heritage Foundation on April 19, 2007, Lefkowitz emphasized the need for increasing flows of information into and out of North Korea by smuggling in radios so that North Koreans might listen to programs like the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. “While all of these are crimes in North Korea, and getting caught could subject the offender to extreme forms of punishment, the long-term trend has been a steady increase in the porosity of the country,” he casually stated. “In the struggle for human rights in North Korea, we not only can help try to save the lives of the North Korean people, most immediately, but we can also try to help make the region and the world safer by helping to bring about a similar transformation [as in the Soviet Union]. In this way, human rights can be a means to a greater end.” Lefkowitz leaves little room for doubt that this “greater end” is the collapse of the North Korean regime.

More recently on January 17, Lefkowitz seemed to consign the Six Party Talks to premature death in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute. He declared that North Korea, despite four years of nuclear disarmament talks, will likely still have its nuclear weapons when the next U.S. president takes office in 2009. He accused Pyongyang of not being “serious about disarming in a timely manner,” pronouncing that “North Korea has not kept its word.” Revealing the longstanding split within the administration on how to deal with North Korea, his statement was hurriedly taken off from the State Department’s website, and its author quickly put in line by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “[Lefkowitz] doesn’t know what’s going on in the six-party talks, and he certainly has no say on what American policy will be in the six-party talks,” she said sternly. “I know where the president stands, and I know where I stand, and those are the people who speak for American policy.”

Lefkowitz deliberately overstepped his bounds to undermine the nuclear talks by linking them to human rights. “Security issues and human rights issues are linked inextricably,” he has said. “They both derive from the nature of the regime, and any long-term effort by the international community to alleviate security concerns in northeast Asia will have to seek to modify the nature of the [North Korean] regime.” Although his job is to press for human rights, Lefkowitz views his role through the prism of national security and regime change. His apparent misunderstanding of his own job presents one of the strongest cases against linking human rights with political agendas.

Japan

Opposition to détente with North Korea isn’t confined to the United States. In both South Korea and Japan, hard-line conservatives have adopted many of the arguments concerning North Korea’s weapons program, verification procedures, and human rights. But they also have other agendas.

The outrage in Japan over North Korea’s admission that its agents had been responsible for kidnapping 13 Japanese citizens during the 1970s and early 1980s hardened into a conservative movement in Japan that opposes engagement with North Korea. North Korea returned five of the 13 abductees to Japan soon after the announcement and pronounced the rest dead. However, conservatives in Japan insist that no progress can be made in normalizing relations between the two countries until the return of the remaining eight along with an unknown number of others, claiming that they are still alive. The confusion over the status of the eight abductees revolves around DNA tests performed on the alleged remains, which came back as those of unrelated people.

However, in February 2005, a world-renowned scientific journal, Nature, concluded that such analyses of cremated specimens are highly inconclusive and easily contaminated by those coming into contact with them. More to the point for Koreans of both the North and South, however, is that the issue of abduction cannot bypass the history of hundreds of thousands of Koreans forcibly conscripted by Japan during its colonization of Korea to serve Japan’s imperial interests as forced laborers, soldiers, and most notoriously as “comfort women,” many of whom were abducted. Japan’s call for justice for Japanese abductees rings hollow next to its stubborn resistance in dealing with its own past.

South Korea

Although Lee Myung-bak, South Korea’s new president-elect, asserts continuity with previous policies, he’s also quick to point out his pragmatic approach toward North Korea. His foreign policy, dubbed the “MB Doctrine,” focuses on a for-profit version of engagement that promises bold economic support to help increase North Korea’s per-capita income to $3,000 within 10 years if it abandons its nuclear weapons program. Tapping into frustrations expressed by many South Koreans at what appears to be stalled progress in North Korea’s opening, Lee has pledged to “move away from the unilateral policy of appeasement that has been implemented without principle and embrace a strategy of reciprocity as a means to induce North Korea’s genuine opening.”

Of course, the quid pro quo is the complete dismantlement of North Korea’s nuclear program. One sign of Lee’s more hard-line approach is his plan to eliminate the Unification Ministry, which has been the locus of South Korea’s engagement policy during the last decade.

On the other hand, capitalizing on his victory at the polls, Lee has come out more strongly than outgoing President Roh Moo-hyun in agreeing to unconditional meetings with North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il. “If a summit between the leaders of South and North Korea will help persuade the North to give up its nuclear programs and benefit both the South and North, I can do it anytime,” Lee has said.

As a former chief executive at the Hyundai conglomerate, Lee has pledged to run his administration more like a business. With an eye to investing in China and the former Communist bloc, Lee may be hedging his bet that economic incentives will be the key to enticing North Korea out of its hermit status. On January 17, Lee confidently announced that his administration will “exert all-out efforts to promote dialogue and exchanges with North Korea. If the North abandons its nuclear program, the South will take the initiative in raising an international cooperation fund amounting to about $40 billion and provide a comprehensive aid package to upgrade five sectors in the North―the economy, finance, education, the infrastructure and living conditions.”

There are similarities among hard-liners in the United States, Japan, and South Korea. They all see human rights as the thin edge of the wedge to open up North Korea and transform, if not eliminate, the regime. They are skeptical that North Korea intends to denuclearize or abide by any international agreements. They are critical of engagement policies for being asymmetrical. Nevertheless, South Korean hardliners are different because, unlike their counterparts in other countries, they must continue to live on the Korean peninsula with North Korea. As such, they generally recognize that the alternative to engagement is economic stagnation at best and at worst the outbreak of hostilities devastating the lives of millions – all of which will have direct impact on the lives of South Koreans. Whatever his pedigree as a conservative, Lee Myung-bak understands that there is no viable alternative to engagement.

In 2006, People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (PSPD), one of South Korea’s largest NGOs, issued a statement on behalf of a coalition of human rights organizations in the country. PSPD criticized the politicization of the North Korean human rights issue within the UN, calling for mutual cooperation rather than the imposition of political pressures. Most importantly, it emphasized the need to establish peace on the Korean peninsula by resolving the relationship between the U.S. and North Korea as a precondition to improving the human rights situation in North Korea. “In approaching the human rights issue in the DPRK,” the statement reads, “the right to peaceful survival on the Korean peninsula is essential to the promotion of all other rights.” Engagement is a prerequisite for peace and human rights.

Pushing Engagement Forward

Over the last year, hard-line opponents to engagement with North Korea have largely been quiet. Special Envoy Lefkowitz has made a couple of speeches, but he has been slapped down by, of all people, Rice. John Bolton and other former administration officials have done what they can from outside the tent, but the louder they criticize the Six Party Talks, the more they underscore their own lack of influence. The hard-line Japanese politician Shinzo Abe, who made his reputation on the abductee issue, has been replaced by Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, who is much less willing to use the abductee issue to win support at home. President-elect Lee Myung-Bak in South Korea, his conservative bona fides notwithstanding, embraces some kind of engagement policy with the North.

The ineffectuality of the hard-line faction, however, might have less to do with a lack of political influence than a perceived lack of need. The hardliners have not strenuously exerted themselves to bring down the Six Party Talks perhaps because they believe that if they wait long enough the negotiations will, like North Korea itself, eventually collapse from within. Although the State Department is committed to reaching agreement with North Korea – and rebutting its critics on the right – it is also peculiarly blind to its own intransigencies. Although North Korea meets all the requirements for removal from the state sponsors of terrorism list, by the State Department’s own criteria, the administration refuses to take this first step – even though it is a revocable decision compared to North Korea’s full declaration of its nuclear programs. The State Department continues to hold firm on its HEU allegations, even though the only tangible proof rests with Pakistan – the claims of President Pervez Musharraf and the proliferation czar A. Q. Khan. The Bush administration has been unable or unwilling to extract documentary proof from its putative ally. With the State Department so ambivalent in its commitments, hardliners don’t need to expend their own political capital to wreck engagement.

The State Department also faces the difficult legacy of the Bush administration’s overall foreign policy. In the last seven years, U.S. foreign policy throughout much of the world has failed to garner the trust necessary to enable negotiations with North Korea to proceed in good faith. What Washington needs is a step-by-step process of building trust. Otherwise, American diplomacy will ring hollow. Engagement is a prerequisite for fruitful progress not only on human rights, but much more.

What’s at stake is an end to more than half a century of hostilities in U.S.-North Korea relations, 20 million North Korean lives, and a peaceful and prosperous East Asia. The United States has to commit to the long haul. It’s time to give engaged diplomacy a chance.



Suzy Kim, a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus, is the former international secretary of MINKAHYUP Human Rights Group in Seoul, Korea, and is currently a visiting assistant professor of East Asian Studies at Oberlin College. John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org) at the Institute for Policy Studies. They are both members of the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea (www.asck.org).

/nForeign Policy In Focus | Hardliners Target D騁ente with North Korea

Interview with Christopher Hill

SEOUL, South Korea (CNN) -- Washington's man in Asia, Christopher Hill, helped broker a breakthrough deal with North Korea. As pressure mounts on Pyongyang to deliver a complete nuclear declaration amid the election of a new president in Seoul, Hill discusses the landmark six-party talks, his thoughts on North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and concerns over China's growing military power. Once the U.S. Ambassador to South Korea, Hill walks CNN's Sohn Jie-Ae through his old haunts in Seoul and sits down for a meal with her at his favorite Korean restaurant, now something of a local landmark thanks to his patronage.

BLOCK A

SJ: What are North Koreans like as negotiators?

CH: Well, I think they have some pretty strict talking points that they come into. They have some very specific things that they're looking for, I think they pretty much stay on task, they don't allow themselves to wander, they go right at the issues that are important to them, and they're pretty well-prepared too. So if you're going to negotiate with them, you better be prepared yourself.

SJ: Pretty tough?

CH: I would say, pretty tough, yeah.

SJ: What part of all this process do you find the most challenging in dealing with North Korea?

CH: Well, it's challenging to get a sense of what they're really looking for, what's really important to them. They often talk about the U.S. hostile policy, which I find kind of strange, because we don't have a hostile policy in North Korea, we have a hostile policy to nuclear weapons in North Korea. I've kind of explained that over and over again, so just identifying what it is they really want is important, because sometimes they tell you what they want, you work very hard on it, you get people back in Washington to redo it, and then lo and behold, it doesn't look like something they want anymore. So having them identify their interest, for me, is very crucial.

SJ: Under these circumstances, it seems like it'd be crucial to give you the leeway to negotiate.

CH: Well, you know, every negotiator wants total leeway, and I'm certainly one of those. But you know at the same time, as I mentioned, at some point you have to take what you've gotten and take it back to Washington, and people need to be pretty convinced that you got all you could get. So while you want flexibility, you don't want a situation. The worst situation is to take something back and have it rejected back there, because as a negotiator, you really can't put yourself in the position of coming back to you interlocutor and say, "Sorry I couldn't sell it back there." So you have to have a pretty good sense of what you can sell once you go back to Washington, and that was true in the last agreement we reached in October. There're some really good points in it, but I was a little concerned whether we could actually sell it, and so I asked for a couple of days and I went back to Washington and I met with Secretary Rice, in fact, in New York. And in fact I met with the president the next day, and then we phoned back to China and said we accept the proposals.

SJ: You've never met Kim Jong Il?

CH: No, I've not.

SJ: But do you feel him in the room? Is he there?

CH: My impression is that my counterpart had direct access to Kim Jong Il, and that when he proposes something, he does it with the full knowledge of Chairman Kim Jong Il. So in that sense, I quote, "feel him in the room", but certainly I've not had the opportunity to meet him.

SJ: What was your first trip like? What was the feeling like as you entered Pyongyang?

CH: Well, I mean, it's--first of all it's a very big airport, not a lot of traffic though, not a lot of things happening there. And then as you drive into the town, it's a very nice tree-lined road, but again, not a lot of automobile or vehicular traffic. So it's a big place, but I would say there's not as much activities as one would expect for such a big place.

SJ: Did you get a chance to get an impression of North Korean society, besides just the lack of cars?

CH: Well, you know, as a career diplomat, I've visited a lot of countries, I've lived in a lot of countries, and you gotta be a little careful, not to draw too many generalizations based on driving at the back of a car and looking out the window. That said, certainly, anyone who's familiar with Korean people -- who's, in my case, lived in Seoul, and known Koreans all over the world -- there's a sense of sadness at seeing Koreans living in this kind of, state of poverty, really. Again it was not an unpleasant looking city, but there should be more cars, there should be more shops, there should be more restaurants, there should be more life. So you had a real sense of sadness at the isolation of this place. And certainly we would like to help them overcome the isolation, but they need to understand that the price of that is getting rid of nuclear weapons.

SJ: About the detonation of the nuclear device -- once you knew it was coming, but you never really knew for sure that someone would actually push the button. Do you remember where you were when you heard that they've actually pushed the button and detonated it? What was going through your mind?

CH: Well, it was fairly late at night on a holiday weekend as I recall, Columbus Day, it was Sunday night, and I recall being at home. And we had a flurry of phone calls as people were notified, and then we had to figure out what we're going to do, and one of the things we want to do is get even closer to our six-party partners, and work very hard on U.N. Security Council resolution. We made very clear what the international community thought of this, and we ended up with a unanimous Security Council resolution, unanimous included China. I'm not sure North Korea ever counted on China supporting that kind of tough resolution, which included some kind of economic sanctions in it. So I think it was a terrible event, as I said, this place is too small to be exploding nuclear weapons. It's a terrible event, but on the other hand, I think it brought us all closer together and made us more resolved to get this thing done.

SJ: Take us back to one of the breakthroughs in six-party talks, the February one, the big one. At what point in this process, do you remember at what point you're thinking "We got it," you know, a turning point that you feel?

CH: Well, these things, they'll go on for a few days, and you don't think that you really have an agreement. For example, we had a big disagreement on the amount of fuel oil that we would deliver to North Korea in respect of denuclearization actions, and so they were looking for a lot more fuel oil than we were prepared to have, just for the active shutting down of the facility, because that which can be shut down, can be turned back on. So it's frankly not worth paying a lot of fuel oil for that action. But they want to have considerably more fuel oil, and so what we were able to do is to agree to additional fuel oil, considerably more fuel oil, provided that they agree to additional denuclearization. And so the crucial moment in that February agreement was their agreement to move on to disabling, and we didn't have a full implementation plan of how the thing was to be disabled, but for the first time we had an agreement that they would take it to the next step of disablement. And that happened at about 2 in the morning, and one thing about negotiation, you got to be wide awake all day and all night, and so that happened around 2 in the morning, and that was a very good moment.

SJ: Is there room for both the United States and China being major powers in Asia?

CH: I think there is. You know, I read and hear a lot about the idea that China is somehow pushing the U.S. out, and out of Southeast Asia. During my many trips to Southeast Asia, when I go to Singapore, when I go to Indonesia, those countries, no one wants to see the U.S. leaving that area. The U.S. I think has been very important to those countries, continues to be important to those countries, not just from a military point of view, but also from the point of view of our economy. So I don't think more China in those countries means less U.S. I think China has been important, you know, for years and years the world looked for a second engine of growth. What is the other country besides the U.S. that can be big enough to cause growth in still other countries, and that country seems to be China.

And so as China's grown, it has really helped raise the growth rate in Southeast Asia, so this is very positive. And we can work with China in this region, I am not worried about any kind of looming conflict. We have different interest, but we have real interest, and I think everyone can respect that.

SJ: Any concerns about China's growing military power?

CH: To date, the Chinese military is a very small institution compared to the U.S., so I think the U.S. would be on pretty thin ice to be complaining about the size of China's military. What doesn't concern us, what definitely concerns us, is the fact that we don't have a lot of transparency on what China is doing in the military area.

Most countries, if you look at the growth of their militaries, you can look very specifically, the budgets, you can see why national assemblies or parliaments are passing those budgets, you can see what kind of capabilities they're developing, why are they developing those capabilities, etc. But in China's case, it's very opaque. You're left at trying to guess what is the growth rate of this thing, of this budget, and we're seeing it in double digits for many years. We're left to have imagination to figure out what are they really trying to invest in, what are they trying to accomplish with military force. And so this opaqueness, this lack of transparency is leading to some lack of trust.

BLOCK B

CH: This is where, if you work at the embassy, you'd come out here and have lunch, and there're just a million places to have lunch here. But the problem in Seoul is when you're having lunch, it's all at 12 o'clock.

SJ: Everyone goes to lunch at 12 o'clock.

CH: Everyone goes to lunch at 12. So if you're here at 12:02, no table. So you pretty much have to blast out at 12 o'clock. But you know, you can see some of these neighborhoods are really changing, because some of these lower buildings are being switched out and you got the high rises coming up all over the place. So it looks quite different from when I was here in the '80s, even different from when I was here just three years ago.

SJ: Are there things from your short and long stay in North Korea that help you in negotiating with North Korea? Does anything really help you get it in terms of talking to Koreans?

CH: Well, I mean, what you understand from being in Korea is how quickly things have changed, and it's not just in Korea. In a lot of countries in Asia, things have moved very fast, and so you know, you walk around a neighborhood like this and you see stuff that you might have seen in the 1930s, and then you see stuff that's definitely from a whole modern era. So you realize that literally, things are being transformed out from other people's feet. Things are moving, and so change is kind of frightening in certain respects, but in another respect, people are kind of used to it.

SJ: Now here's something that actually hasn't changed much, really.

CH: Oh, they're having a demonstration.

SJ: It's a farmer's day demonstration. They're unhappy about opening the market to U.S. imports.

CH: Well, I think it's a demonstration probably against the Free Trade Agreement, which I think majority Koreans would agree with me, is a pretty good thing for Korea. But you know, in any trade deal, it's always tough, you got some people who are unhappy about it. And they have a right to go out on the street and make their views known.

SJ: And when they're unhappy about it, that's what people do here, go out on the street.

CH: That's right.

SJ: I think we're going to have to go around them ... [They arrive at the restaurant.] They're all waiting for you, they love that you're back. This is supposedly the restaurant that you made famous.

CH: Oh really? My soon du boo.

SJ: Yes, your soon du boo comment. See, they have the newspaper article of your saying that you miss the soon du boo stew and they have it.

CH: Hasn't changed a bit.

BLOCK C

SJ: Mr. Hill, you've been a career diplomat and you've had a great success in the Balkans. Is there something from your experience there that you bring with you?

CH: When you come to a place, you do bring some of what you've learned elsewhere. And I would say in terms of my Balkan experiences brought to this area in the world, the first thing to do is respect history, you know, understand what went on, because people's attitudes didn't just get formed that morning. They have long-term attitudes, attitudes that may be kind of ingrained in them, if not in their DNA, then certainly in their elementary school classroom.

Probably more true in the Balkans than in Asia, you deal with attitudes that, you know, if you just looked at the face of them, you would say, "Why would anyone believe this?" But you have to stop yourself and realize that whether you believe it or not, or think they have a right to believe it or not, they do. So respect history and respect people's attitudes and then try to deal with it. You know, changing people by sort of yelling at them or wagging your finger at them, rarely you get a moment where they hit the side of their head with the palm of their hand and say, "Oh, I get it. Thank you very much, Mr. Hill. My life will be different as a result of what you just told me."

You're often dealing with some people that you probably wouldn't want to spend your Sunday afternoon with, and for example, one of those people, Slobodan Milosevic, I spent a lot of time with this guy, not easy to deal with a guy like that. But frankly, you gotta deal with a guy like that because if you're gonna be successful, if you're gonna get the job done, you have to deal with a lot of different people and, uh, that man was different.

SJ: You've spent most of your, as you've said, a lot of your time as Assistant Secretary of State for Northeast Asia, concentrating on North Korea. Do you feel like there are areas that you miss?

CH: Well, you know it's funny. There are some places in Southeast Asia whose success is vital to the region. Indonesia is an example of that -- huge country, I mean we're talking 230, 240 million people -- it's enormous. It's the largest Muslim-majority country in the world. In fact, the number of Muslims in Indonesia is greater than the number of Muslims in the Middle East -- enormous. And I've been there four times, and that's not enough. I should go there more often. I should understand the country better than I do, although I do try. It's very important. So if I didn't have this North Korea issue, I think you'd find [me] in that part of the world.

Another area that I think is very important to get right, and I am spending time on it, is Burma. Burma, historically, is a country where, you know, one could have expected a lot of good things from Burma. In fact, if you look back to the 1950s, Burma was supposed to be one of the great success stories. So here it is, 50, 60 million people, bigger than the Republic of Korea, and yet it has had such a sad history in recent decades. So that's a country that I would like to spend more time on.

SJ: So once you see the North Korean relationship going back on track, we'll probably be seeing a lot less of you here, in Seoul?

CH: Oh, I don't know. I love coming to Seoul, having a bowl of soon du boo, walking around, it's really one of my favorite cities in the world, frankly. And as I'm sitting here with you looking out at this ice-skating rink, I'd love to spend more time here.

SJ: Thank you for talking to us today, Mr Hill. That's it for this week's edition of Talk Asia. I'm Sohn Jie-Ae in Seoul, South Korea. See you next week.

Interview with Christopher Hill - CNN.com

北朝鮮、支援重油を軍事目的に転用か、軍事訓練増える

【2月10日 AFP】韓国の聯合ニュース（Yonhap）は10日、北朝鮮での軍事演習が増加しており、核問題を巡る6か国協議で提供された石油が軍事目的に転用されている可能性があると報じた。

　韓国軍関係者によると、前年までの演習では燃料を必要としない砲撃などが中心だったのに比べ、今年は戦闘機や装甲車両などが使用されている。この関係者はこの変化を燃料供給状況の「改善」によるものと指摘した。

　一方聯合ニュースは、北朝鮮が提供された燃料や韓国との貿易による利益を軍事目的に転用しているかどうかについて、米国と韓国の情報機関が調査を進めていると報じた。

　前年の6か国協議の合意により、北朝鮮は核施設の無能力化と核計画申告の見返りとして重油100万トン相当の支援を受けることになっている。(c)AFP

/n北朝鮮、支援重油を軍事目的に転用か、軍事訓練増える 国際ニュース : AFPBB News