POLITICS-U.S.: Experts Urge Bilateral Talks with North Korea Now

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Feb 25 2003 (IPS) - The administration of President George W. Bush should immediately agree to bilateral negotiations to dismantle North Korea’s nuclear programme in return for U.S. security guarantees and normalised relations, a blue-ribbon task force of Korea specialists said Tuesday.

Only one precondition should be satisfied for engaging in such negotiations, according to the 28 members of a Korea task force: Pyongyang should commit itself not to reprocess any of the 8,000 fuel rods that are believed to remain in a storage pond at the North’s Yongbyon nuclear reactor into plutonium, a key element in the construction of nuclear bombs.

The panel includes top officials in the administrations of former presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton.

Convened by the Washington-based Center for International Policy (CIP) and the Center for East Asian Studies of the University of Chicago, it includes such heavyweights as former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. Armed Forces, Adm. Ret. Admiral William Crowe; two former U.S. ambassadors to South Korea, James Laney and Donald Gregg, and former Ambassador Robert Gallucci, who negotiated the 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea that froze operations at the Yongbyon reactor in exchange for economic assistance and the promise of normalised relations.

”The present policy of the administration is not working,” said task force chairman, Selig Harrison of CIP, a long time Korea specialist. ”There is no escape from direct bilateral negotiations.”

A majority of the task force also said the United States should not pre-emptively attack North Korea’s nuclear facilities under any foreseeable circumstances, while a minority concluded that Washington should ”consider” such an attack if it obtained concrete evidence, which it was willing to make public, that Pyongyang had transferred fissile material to a third party.

If North Korea rejected the pre-condition to freeze its Yongbyon reactor or continued its nuclear programme in defiance of any new agreement, a strong majority of the group called for a strategy of containment that would be carried out with other countries in the region, particularly South Korea, Japan, China, and Russia.

The call to engage in bilateral talks as soon as possible, part of a comprehensive package of recommendations by the task force, is consistent with those being conveyed to Secretary of State Colin Powell during his current swing through northeast Asia, highlighted Tuesday by the inauguration of South Korea’s new president, Roh Moo Hyun, who also has urged Washington to negotiate directly with Pyongyang.

Powell, who is believed to favour direct talks but has been stymied by hawks in the Pentagon, Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, and some National Security Council staff, heard the same advice from several regional leaders on his way to Seoul, even from the foreign minister of Australia, which has backed Bush’s hard line against Iraq.

”Whether one likes it or not – and I don’t particularly like it,” said Foreign Minister Alexander Downer on Monday, ”this will have to be resolved bilaterally”. His views were seconded in Beijing by Chinese Vice President Hu Jintao.

Since November, when North Korea admitted that it had developed a uranium-enrichment process at a second reactor, the Bush administration has refused to engage in negotiations with Pyongyang until it dismantles all of its nuclear facilities. Insisting that the uranium-processing programme violates four international agreements signed by Pyongyang, including the 1994 Framework Agreement, Washington insists that any return to direct negotiations would constitute a ”reward” for unacceptable behaviour.

Accordingly, the administration has pressed North Korea’s neighbours to follow its lead by withholding aid and taking other actions to persuade it to accede to Washington’s demands. Although Japan has generally gone along with Bush’s strategy, South Korea, China and Russia have all but rejected it.

The North, on the other hand, has said it is prepared to satisfy all of Washington’s concerns about its nuclear programmes, but only if the administration enters into negotiations for a mutual non-aggression treaty, a formal recognition of North Korea’s sovereignty, and a pledge not to obstruct Pyongyang’s economic development by denying it access to loans from international financial institutions like the World Bank.

Powell and the State Department have suggested over the last six weeks that the United States is probably willing to strike such a deal and have even proposed that they would be willing to meet informally with the North Koreans in the context of a larger, multilateral framework that would include North Korea’s neighbours.

But they have clearly not been able to prevail on Bush himself to drop the demand that the North first dismantle its reactors. That, as well as offhand threats by Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and other senior officials, have fuelled North Korea’s concern that the United States intends to attack it.

”They fear that they are next after Iraq,” said Harrison, who added that U.S. demands that this be taken up in a multilateral framework made little sense. ”Their fear can only be addressed by the United States,” he noted, adding that Powell’s Asian interlocutors conveyed much the same message this week, presumably Roh himself, whose advisers increasingly have suggested to U.S. reporters that Washington’s failure to enter into bilateral talks risks increasing anti-U.S. feelings in South Korea and even the future of the U.S.-South Korean defence treaty.

In its report, the task force, which also included many of the country’s top academic specialists on Korea, warned of the same risks and stressed that Washington needs urgently to harmonise its policies toward North Korea with Seoul. If the current nuclear crisis can be defused, the task force said, Washington should lower its military profile in South Korea by offering to reduce and relocate its 38,000 troops there and provide greater autonomy for South Korean forces in the U.S.-South Korean joint command..

It also called for a gradual shift from the existing U.S. ”tripwire” strategy in which U.S. forces would be automatically drawn into any new North-South conflict to a new role that would give Washington greater flexibility over whether to become involved.

It also called for a resumption of negotiations with North Korea to reconfirm its 1998 moratorium on missile testing and end its development of long-range missiles.