The United Nations has warned that drought, disease and war are preventing farmers from producing enough food for millions of people across Africa and other regions.Recurring droughts have destroyed most harvests in the Sahel. Credit:Kristin Palitza/IPS

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 11 2019 (IPS)

The United Nations has warned of drought, disease and war preventing farmers from producing enough food for millions of people across Africa and other regions, leading to the need for major aid operations.

A report called the Crop Prospects and Food Situation by the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says that shortages of grain and other foodstuffs have left people in 41 countries — 31 of them in Africa — in need of handouts.

“Ongoing conflicts and dry weather conditions remain the primary causes of high levels of severe food insecurity, hampering food availability and access for millions of people,” U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq told reporters on Tuesday.

Southern Africa has experienced both dry spells and rainfall damage from Cyclone Idai, which made landfall in Mozambique on Mar. 14. The storm caused “agricultural production shortfalls” and big “increases in cereal import needs,” added Haq. 

Farmers in Zimbabwe and Zambia have seen harvests decline this year. Some three million people faced shortages at the start of 2019, but food price spikes there will likely push that number upwards in the coming months, researchers say.

In eastern Africa, crop yields have dropped in Somalia, Kenya and Sudan due to “severe dryness”, added Haq. 

According to the FAO, life for rural herders in Kassala State, in eastern Sudan, has been upended by a drought that has forced them to move livestock away from traditional grazing routes in pursuit of greener pastures.

“Life would be so hard if our livestock died. We wouldn’t have food or milk for the children,” Khalda Mohammed Ibrahim, a farmer near Aroma, in Kassala State, told FAO. “When it is dry, I am afraid the animals will starve — and then we will too.”

Droughts are getting worse, says the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). By 2025, some 1.8 billion people will experience serious water shortages, and two thirds of the world will be “water-stressed”.

In Asia, low yields of wheat and barley outputs are raising concerns in North Korea, where dry spells, heatwaves and flooding have led to what has been called the worst harvests the hermit dictatorship has seen in a decade, the report said.

More than 10 million North Koreans — or 40 percent of the country’s population — are short of food or require aid handouts, the U.N.’s Rome-based agency for agriculture said in its 42-page study.

FAO researchers also addressed the spread of a deadly pig disease in China that has disrupted the world’s biggest pork market and is one of the major risks to a well-supplied global agricultural sector.

China is grappling with African swine fever, which has spread across much of the country this past year. There is no cure or vaccine for the disease, often fatal for pigs although harmless for humans.

By the middle of June, more than 1.1 million pigs had died or been culled. The bug has also been reported in Vietnam, Cambodia, Mongolia, North Korea and Laos, affecting millions of pigs and threatening farmers’ livelihoods.

The FAO forecast a five percent fall in Chinese pork output this year, while imports were predicted to rise to almost two million tonnes from an average 1.6 million tonnes per year from 2016 to 2018.

Conflict is another worry, the FAO said. While Syria and Yemen have seen “generally conducive weather conditions for crops”, fighting between government forces, rebels and other groups in both countries has ravaged agriculture.

Violence in Yemen has triggered what the U.N. calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with 3.3 million people displaced and 24.1 million — more than two-thirds of the population — in need of aid.

Last month, the U.N.’s World Food Programme (WFP) announced a “partial suspension” of aid affecting 850,000 people in Yemen’s capital Sanaa, saying the Houthi rebels that run the city were diverting food from the needy.

Likewise, in Africa, simmering conflicts in the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Sudan have caused a “dire food security situation”. In  South Sudan, seven million people do not have enough food.

Ambassador Choong-hee Han of South Korea with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

By Rose Delaney
UNITED NATIONS / ROME, Aug 14 2016 (IPS)

Ambassador Hahn Choong-hee, UN representative of the Republic of Korea, spoke with IPS about the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 2270, which was unanimously adopted on 2 March 2016.

The resolution calls for the universal condemnation of the nuclear threat from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK / North Korea) and was prompted by repeated missile launches by North Korea in defiance of opposition from the international community.

North Korea’s nuclear weapon and ballistic missile programs not only violate UN Security Council resolutions but also pose a grave threat to global peace and security. Ambassador Hahn, from neighbouring South Korea shared his views on North Korea with IPS.

IPS: Undoubtedly, the North Korean nuclear threat endangers and poses a great threat to global peace and security. In light of the UN Security Council Resolution 2270 discussions in New York on the 30th of June, how will the Security Council tackle nuclear weapon issues? In other words, what role will the UN and the global community play in the North Korea Sanctions Regime?

Ambassador Hahn: The conference on Resolution 2270 held in New York in June 2016 was very significant as key discussions were developed on the topic of North Korean evasion tactics. The discussion was hosted by three major sponsoring countries, South Korea, the United States and Japan, who are all leading voices in the strive against North-Korean nuclear advances.

In order to enforce UN Sanctions on North Korea, the most significant criteria for member states to comply with the sanctions regime is to present a 90-day report. As of yet, we’ve received around 40 reports from a select number of countries. The generation of reports this year has been above average, however, in spite of this great intake, it is still not enough. It is now time to raise global awareness on the importance of the enforcement of this sanction.

The implementation of Resolution 2270 has proved exceedingly difficult as North Korea is defiant and acts out against the international voice. In fact, they’ve launched 7 missiles recently. The missiles were particularly alarming worrisome because if they had been successful, there impact could have reached as far as Japan and US territory. Although North Korea’s Musudan last missile launch attempts have failed. The latest missile to be launched was more successful than the rest, as its maximum delivery was 1000km and its distance 400 km. This is why the international cooperation of state agencies and civil society organizations is critical at this juncture to put the threat of nuclear advancement to a halt.

IPS: Will the development of nuclear technology in the DRPK have a grave impact on the world? How does the UN Security Council plan to address these advancements?

Ambassador Hahn: Most definitely, the impact would be immense if the advancements proved successful. North Korea is continuously trying to improve on tried and tested nuclear methods and are relentless in their belief that nuclear power ensures national security or regime survival. They are currently attempting to work on a nuclear technology referred to as “musudan” in the Korean language. This is an intermediate missile, if it’s further developed it could be used as a delivery means carrying nuclear warhead. It’s a particularly precarious advancement as this missile could cover the US territory of Guam.

Japan is particularly concerned about North Korea’s continued launch of missiles. This has become a critical issue for Japanese security. Whenever North Korea launches any mid to long range missile, Japan has been reacting strongly against the last seven missiles.

Another international preoccupation comes from the launching of missiles from mobile pads. These missiles could be concealed and launched at any time and in any given place. We’ve already born witness to this danger as they’ve attempted to launch missiles in a similar manner 7 times. The UN has issued a press statement each time, even if it was a failure, to communicate the message that the UN is watching and we are, by no means, disregarding what they are doing.

In reaction to North Korea’s defiance, we’d like to share a strong message. The international society are both committed and rigorous in their fight to stop North Korea’s engagement with nuclear weapons.

North Korea has tried to avoid their compliance with the sanction through many evasion tactics. By issuing the publication of case studies on North Korea with all member states, a strong emphasis will be placed on the country’s refusal to comply with international regulation. In this way, each member can compare what they’re doing against North Korea and what other countries are experiencing in relation to implementation of the sanction.

We believe that by condemning the actions of North Korea through global dissemination and by member states openly discouraging their behaviour we will eventually stamp out the North Korean nuclear threat.

IPS: How can North Korean defiance and refusal to comply with Resolution 2270 be resolved in a peaceful manner? How significant will international cooperation and coordination be in countering the impact of North Korea’s violations?

Ambassador Hahn: As we are all too aware, there is a critical need to implement sanction pressure in North Korea at this juncture. In several countries, bilateral sanctions have been introduced. For example, the US passed a law to introduce the so-called “secondary boycott”, this is a way to condemn and place penalties on foreign companies, for example companies from other states operating with North Korea, which is helping North Korea’s WMD capabilities.

This law gives leverage to the administration to decide what kind of sanction measures they can take. The US is trying to penalise regions such as North Korea for human rights violations. The EU has also introduced various forms of sanction pressure.

Bilateral pressure will also be encouraged to put a stop to North Korea’s clandestine cooperation with Middle Eastern and African countries. “Diplomatic demarche” has led to clandestine transactions between companies from North Korea and African and Middle Eastern countries. It is now time for the global community to condemn North Korea’s abuse of the international finance system and shut down their clandestine systems of trade and banking. Through the enforcement of laws together with the strength of bilateral pressure, with diplomatic demarche I believe we can overcome North Korea’s defiance.

IPS: In accordance to the UN Security Council, the implementation of the core Sanctions measures contained in resolution 2270 will counter the North Korea’s illicit activities. In light of this, how has China, a neighbouring country and significant partner in trade to North Korea, fared in their implementation of the sanctions?

Ambassador Hahn: Unfortunately, as of yet, the implementation has been met with nothing more than a series of unmet promises on China’s part. Which is worrying as I truly believe a solution to the “North Korea problem” could come through the continued pursuit and that China take faithful implementation of 2270.

The Chinese government continuously assure us that they’ll implement the Resolution 2270 sanction, however it seems premature to say that China is in full implementation as there is a so-called “livelihood” exception in some of the sectoral ban of the resolution.

We will have continued discussions with China to see how they are going to realistically implement the 2270 general and ensure their future commitment to it.

IPS: In spite of China’s current position on the implementation of Resolution 2270, have North-Korean-Chinese relations worsened due to the nuclear threat North Korea endangers the world with?

Ambassador Hahn: Yes, relations between North Korea and China have been tarnished. In a recent diplomatic visit to China, North Korea demonstrated their need to avoid diplomatic isolation. Lee Soo-Yong, North Korea’s senior worker’s party official, met with the president of China, and expressed the importance of maintaining good relations with China in a bid to avoid isolation.

Chinese President Xi Jinping communicated the message to the North Korean delegation that while China acknowledges the importance of bilateral relations between China and North Korea, they do not support North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons and missile launches.

However, in spite of North Korea’s fear of exclusion and isolation, they did not seem to take heed of China’s advice, protest, and warning. North Korea believe nuclear weapons are the key to their survival and they refuse to compromise anything for it.

IPS: As the number of North Korean labourers in the international workforce grows and illicit negotiations between Middle Eastern and African companies ceases to discontinue, North Korea’s defiance has shown that it not only endangers the world with the threat of nuclear warfare, it also poses a grave threat to the international financial system. How does the UN Security Council together with the aid of the international community aim to eliminate this threat?

Ambassador Hahn: A big stake in North Korea’s relationship with other countries, is its labour force abroad. So far, over 35,000 North Korean workers worldwide are on special contracts, generating over 300 million dollars a year. Some countries are now reviewing and reconsidering these contracts and a couple of countries have made a decision to discontinue some of the contracts.

We’ve approached several countries about the implementations of these types of sanctions. Recently, Qatar, sent over 100 workers back home to North Korea. These actions discourage the continuance of North Korea’s careless attitude. China are also attempting to implement a lot of diplomatic demarche. For example, several North Korean restaurants have now closed in China.

Cooperation with North Korea and some African countries, has led to the development of bilateral military cooperation projects, recently South Korean president Park Geun-hye visited Uganda and condemned this illicit cooperation and Uganda subsequently agreed to discontinue their military cooperation with North Korea.

IPS: Finally, what are the expected outcomes of Resolution 2270 and where will the UN Security Council go from there?

Ambassador Hahn: At present, North Korea’s power consolidation process is very troubling. North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-Un wants to demonstrate his absolute power through the showcasing of North Korea’s nuclear capabilities. In this way, North Korea has demonstrated zero intention to abandon their nuclear weapons program. They consider it to be a form of economic prosperity and ultimately, survival. They are trying to go ahead with “Byungjin”, literally “going together” with nuclear and economic development.

As of yet, it is much too early to judge whether the 2270 general is being implemented in a faithful manner on an international level. As North Korea is defiant and is engaged in the launching of missiles it’s clear that they do not respect the UN sanctions. This attitude will be exceptionally challenging for the future success of the Resolution. North Korea is not interested in complying with internationally beneficial regulations and this is something that will be difficult to reverse.

As I mentioned before, it is not not easy to predict any future measures but what is important to emphasis is that there should be a very steady, orderly mid and long-term process of implementation of Resolution 2270 in North Korea. I hope that the diplomatic demarche from member states will enable us all to work together, along with the critical assistance of China, to ultimately, put North Korea’s engagement with nuclear weapons to a stop.

 Valentina Ieri, IPS UN Bureau, interviewed Ambassador Hahn in New York.

Excerpt:

By Farhang Jahanpour
OXFORD, Sep 5 2015 (IPS)

Article Six of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) makes it obligatory for nuclear states to get rid of their nuclear weapons as part of a bargain that requires the non-nuclear states not to acquire nuclear weapons. Apart from the NPT provisions, there have been a number of other rulings that have reinforced those requirements.

However, while nuclear states have vigorously pursued a campaign of non-proliferation, they have violated many NPT and other international regulations.

Farhang Jahanpour

An advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice in 1996 stated: “There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.” Nuclear powers have ignored that opinion.

The nuclear states, especially the United States and Russia, have further violated the Treaty by their efforts to upgrade and diversity their nuclear weapons. The United States has developed the “Reliable Replacement Warhead”, a new type of nuclear warhead to extend the viability of its nuclear arsenal.

The United States and possibly Russia are also developing tactical nuclear warheads with lower yields, which can be used on the battlefield without producing a great deal of radiation. Despite U.S. President Barack Obama’s pledge to reduce and ultimately abolish nuclear weapons, it has emerged that the United States is in the process of developing new categories of nuclear weapons, including B61-12 at a projected cost of 348 billion dollars over the next decade

India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea cannot be regarded as nuclear states. Since Article 9 of the NPT defines Nuclear Weapon States (NWS) as those that had manufactured and tested a nuclear device prior to 1 January 1967, it is not possible for India, Pakistan, Israel or North Korea to be regarded as nuclear weapon states.“All nuclear powers have continued to strengthen and modernise their nuclear arsenals. While they have been vigorous in punishing, on a selective basis, the countries that were suspected of developing nuclear weapons, they have not lived up to their side of the bargain to get rid of their nuclear weapons”

All those countries are in violation of the NPT, and providing them with nuclear assistance, such as the U.S. agreement with India to supply it with nuclear reactors and advanced nuclear technology, constitutes violations of the Treaty. The same applies to U.S. military cooperation with Israel and Pakistan.

Nuclear states are guilty of proliferation 

Paragraph 14 of the binding U.N. Security Council Resolution 687 that called for the disarmament of Iraq also specified the establishment of a zone free of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in the Middle East.

It was clearly understood by all the countries that joined the U.S.-led coalition to oust Saddam Hussein from Kuwait that after the elimination of Iraqi WMDs, Israel would be required to get rid of its nuclear arsenal. Israel – and by extension the countries that have not implemented that paragraph – have violated that binding resolution. Indeed, both the United States and Israel are believed to maintain nuclear weapons in the region.

During the apartheid era, Israel and South Africa collaborated in manufacturing nuclear weapons, with Israel leading the way. In 2010 it was reported that “the ‘top secret’ minutes of meetings between senior officials from the two countries in 1975 show that South Africa’s Defence Minister P.W. Botha asked for nuclear warheads and the then Israeli Defence Minister Shimon Peres responded by offering them ‘in three sizes’.”

The documents were uncovered by an American academic, Sasha Polakow-Suransky, in research for a book on the close relationship between the two countries. Israeli officials tried hard to prevent the publication of those documents. In 1977, South Africa signed a pact with Israel that included the manufacturing of at least six nuclear bombs.

The 1995 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review and Extension Conference also called for “the early establishment by regional parties of a Middle East zone free of nuclear and all other WMDs and their delivery systems”. The international community has ignored these resolutions by not pressing Israel to give up its nuclear weapons. Indeed, any call for a nuclear free zone in the Middle East has been opposed by Israel and the United States.

The 2000 NPT Review Conference called on “India, Israel and Pakistan to accede to the Treaty as Non-Nuclear Weapons States (NNWS) promptly and without condition”. States Parties also agreed to “make determined efforts” to achieve universality. Since 2000, little effort has been made to encourage India, Pakistan or Israel to accede as NNWS.

The declaration agreed by the Iranian government and visiting European Union foreign ministers (from Britain, France and Germany) that reached an agreement on Iran’s accession to the Additional Protocol and suspension of its enrichment for more than two years also called for the elimination of weapons of mass destruction throughout the Middle East.

The three foreign ministers made the following commitment: “They will cooperate with Iran to promote security and stability in the region including the establishment of a zone free from weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East in accordance with the objectives of the United Nations.” Twelve years after signing that declaration, the three European countries and the international community have failed to bring about a Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction.

While, during the Cold War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) refused to rule out first use of nuclear weapons due to the proximity of Soviet forces to European capitals, this policy has not been revised since the end of the Cold War. There have been repeated credible reports that the Pentagon has been considering the use of nuclear bunker-buster weapons to destroy Iran’s nuclear sites.

For the past 2,000 years and more, mankind has tried to define the requirements of a just war. During the past few decades, some of these principles have been enshrined in legally-binding international agreements and conventions. They include the Covenant of the League of Nations after the First World War, the 1928 Pact of Paris, and the Charter of the United Nations.

A few ideas are common to all these definitions, namely that any military action should be based on self-defence, be in compliance with international law, be proportionate, be a matter of last resort, and not target civilians and non-combatants.

Other ideas flow from these: the emphasis on arbitration and the renunciation of first resort to force in the settlement of disputes, and the principle of collective self- defence. It is difficult to see how the use of nuclear weapons could be compatible with any of these requirements. Yet, despite many international calls for nuclear disarmament, nuclear states have refused to abide by the NPT regulations and get rid of their nuclear weapons.

In his first major foreign policy speech in Prague on 5 April 2009, President Barack Obama spoke about his vision of getting rid of nuclear weapons. He said: “The existence of thousands of nuclear weapons is the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War… Today, the Cold War has disappeared but thousands of those weapons have not. In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up.”

He went on to say: “So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons…”

Sadly, those noble sentiments have not been put into action. On the contrary, all nuclear powers have continued to strengthen and modernise their nuclear arsenals. While they have been vigorous in punishing, on a selective basis, the countries that were suspected of developing nuclear weapons, they have not lived up to their side of the bargain to get rid of their nuclear weapons. (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Farhang Jahanpour
OXFORD, Sep 4 2015 (IPS)

Iran’s nuclear programme has been the target of a great deal of misinformation, downright lies and above all myths. As a result, it is often difficult to unpick truth from falsehood. 

Farhang Jahanpour

As President John F. Kennedy said in his Yale University Commencement Address on 11 June 1962: “For the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliché of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of the opinion without the discomfort of thought.”

In order to understand the pros and cons of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreed by Iran and the P5+1 (United States, United Kingdom, Russia, China, France and Germany) on 14 July 2015, and the subsequent U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231 passed unanimously on 20 July 2015 setting the agreement in U.N. law and rescinding the sanctions that had been imposed on Iran, it is important to study the background to the whole deal.

The Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) regulates the activities of the countries that wish to make use of peaceful nuclear energy. The NPT was enacted in 1968 and it entered into force in 1970. Its objective is to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, while promoting the peaceful use of nuclear technology. Iran was one of the first signatories to that Treaty, and so far 191 states have joined the Treaty.“Iran’s nuclear programme has been the target of a great deal of misinformation, downright lies and above all myths. As a result, it is often difficult to unpick truth from falsehood”

It has been one of the most successful disarmament treaties in history. Only three U.N. member states – Israel, India and Pakistan – did not join the NPT and all of them proceeded to manufacture nuclear weapons. North Korea, which acceded to the NPT in 1985, withdrew in 2003 and has allegedly manufactured nuclear weapons.

This treaty was a part of the move known as “atoms for peace”, which allowed different nations to have access to nuclear power for peaceful purposes, but prevented them from manufacturing nuclear weapons.

The treaty was a kind of bargain between the five original countries that possessed nuclear weapons (all the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council) and the non-nuclear countries that agreed never to acquire nuclear weapons in return for sharing the benefits of peaceful nuclear technology.

The Treaty is based on four pillars:

Pillar One – Non-Proliferation:  Article 1 of the NPT states that nuclear weapon state countries (N5) should not transfer any weapon-related technology to others.

Pillar Two – Ban on possession of nuclear weapons by non-nuclear states: Article 2 states the other side of the coin, namely that non-nuclear states should not acquire any form of nuclear weapons technology from the countries that possess it or acquire it independently.

Pillar Three – Peaceful use of nuclear energy: Article 4 not only allows the use of nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, but even stresses that it is “the inalienable right” of every country to do research, development and production, and to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, without discrimination, as long as Articles 1 and 2 are satisfied.

It further states that all parties can exchange equipment, material, and science and technology for peaceful purposes. It calls on the nuclear states to assist the non-nuclear states in the use of peaceful nuclear technology.

Pillar Four – Nuclear disarmament: Article 6 makes it obligatory for nuclear states to get rid of their nuclear weapons. The Treaty states that all countries should pursue negotiations on measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race and “achieving nuclear disarmament”.

While nuclear powers have worked hard to prevent other countries from acquiring nuclear weapons, they have not abided by their side of the bargain and have been reluctant to give up their nuclear weapons. On the contrary, they have further developed and upgraded those weapons, and have made them more capable of use on battlefields.

Sadly, 37 years after its final ratification, the number of nuclear-armed countries has increased, and at least four other countries have joined the club.

After it was realised that unfettered access to enrichment could lead some countries, such as Iraq and North Korea, to gain knowledge of nuclear technology and subsequently develop nuclear weapons, the NPT was amended in 1977 with the Additional Protocol, which tightened the regulations in order to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.

According to the Additional Protocol, which Iran has agreed to implement as part of the JCPOA, “Special inspections may be carried out in circumstances according to defined procedures. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) may carry out such inspections if it considers that information made available by the State concerned, including explanations from the State and information obtained from routine inspections, is not adequate for the Agency to fulfil its responsibilities under the safeguards agreement.” 

However, as the above paragraph makes clear, these inspections will be carried out only in exceptional circumstances when there is valid cause for suspicion that a country has been violating the terms of the agreement, and only if the IAEA decides that the explanations provided by the State concerned are not adequate. Also, such inspections will be carried out on the basis of “defined procedures”

The countries that have ratified the Additional Protocol have agreed to “managed inspections”, and the Iranian authorities have also said that such managed and supervised inspections can be carried out. This of course does not mean “anytime, anywhere” inspections, but inspections that are in keeping with the provisions of the Additional Protocol as set out above.

Meanwhile, in addition to the nuclear states, there are 19 other non-weapons states which are signatories to the NPT and which actively enrich uranium. They have vastly more centrifuges than Iran ever had. Iran’s array of 19,000 centrifuges (only 10,000 of them were operational) prior to the agreement was paltry compared with the capabilities of other countries that enrich uranium.

During the talks between Iran and the P5+1, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali  Khamenei said that Iran wanted to have at least 190,000 centrifuges in order to get engaged in industrial scale enrichment.

It should be remembered that the sale of nuclear fuel is a lucrative business and the countries that do not have enrichment facilities but which have nuclear reactors, are forced to purchase fuel from the few countries that have a monopoly of enriched uranium. Iran had openly stated that it wished to join that club, or at least to be self-sufficient in nuclear fuel.

However, under the JCPOA, Iran has given up the quest for industrial scale enrichment and is even reducing the number of its operational centrifuges from 19,000 to just over 5,000. (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

The recent agreement between Iran and six nations on nuclear non-proliferation will likely have a “positive impact” on North Korea, according to a senior South Korean diplomat.

Choong-Hee Hanh, South Korea’s Deputy Permanent Representative and former Deputy Director-General for North Korean Nuclear Affairs, told IPS that the Iran nuclear deal bolsters the case for taking a multilateral approach to resolving sensitive international security issues.

“I think the Iran nuclear formula will give us a general hint that these issues should be dealt with in this multilateral approach,” he said. “I think that this case of diplomacy in Iran will (bring) pressure to North Korea and (create) awareness to international society about the benefits of utilising pressure to resolve these issues.”

Iran and the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council in addition to Germany reached an agreement in Vienna last month to limit Tehran’s nuclear energy programme in order to prevent it from developing weapons. The U.N. Security Council promptly approved the deal, which capped prolonged negotiations.

Similar six-party negotiations involving North Korea, South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and United States was begun in 2007 but it stalled in 2009 when North Korea pulled out. Pyongyang has since carried out nuclear tests and withdrawn from the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT).

“I believe the Iranian case can lend a positive impact in North Korea,” Hahn said, but added a note of caution. “On the other hand, North Korea continuously argues that they are a nuclear weapon state according to their constitution. They may think they should not abandon their nuclear weapons programme for the survival of the regime, so it seems not easy to resolve this issue.”

While China, Japan, Russia and the U.S. shared the objective of preventing the nuclearisation of North Korea, he said, “At the same time, their priorities are a little bit different. “

“The Six-Party Talks are meaningful as it is an opportunity to explore the bottom line of North Korea’s mindset on this issue as well as a shared perception among five parties,” he added. “I think this shared perception of five parties on the situation is very important to taking the next step and moving forward.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Gamma spectroscopy can detect traces of radioactivity from nuclear tests from the air. Credit: CTBTO Official Photostream/CC-BY-2.0

By Kanya D'Almeida
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 29 2015 (IPS)

With the four-week-long review conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) underway at the United Nations, hopes and frustrations are running equally high, as a binding political agreement on the biggest threat to humanity hangs in the balance.

Caption: Dr. Lassina Zerbo, executive secretary of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organisation (CTBTO). Credit: CTBTO Official Photostream

Behind the headlines that focus primarily on power struggles between the five major nuclear powers – the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China – scores of organisations refusing to be bogged down in geopolitical squabbles are going about the Herculean task of creating a safer world.

One of these bodies is the Vienna-based Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organisation (CTBTO), founded in 1996 alongside the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), with the aim of independently monitoring compliance.

With 183 signatories and 164 ratifications, the treaty represents a milestone in international efforts to ban nuclear testing.

In order to be legally binding, however, the treaty needs the support of the 44 so-called ‘Annex 2 States’, eight of which have so far refused to ratify the agreement: China, Egypt, Iran, Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea and the United States.

This holdout has severely crippled efforts to move towards even the most basic goal of the nuclear abolition process.

Still, the CTBTO has made tremendous strides in the past 20 years to set the stage for full ratification.

Its massive global network of seismic, hydroacoustic, infrasound and radionuclide detecting stations makes it nearly impossible for governments to violate the terms of the treaty, and the rich data generated from its many facilities is contributing to a range of scientific endeavors worldwide.

In an interview with IPS, CTBTO Executive Secretary Dr. Lassina Zerbo spoke about the organisation’s hopes for the review conference, and shared some insights on the primary hurdles standing in the way of a nuclear-free world.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: What role will the CTBTO play in the conference?

"Right now 90 percent of the world is saying “no” to nuclear testing, yet we are held hostage by [a] handful of countries [...]." -- Dr. Lassina Zerbo, executive secretary of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organisation (CTBTO)
A: Our hope is that the next four weeks result in a positive outcome with regards to disarmament and non-proliferation, and we think the CTBT plays an important role there. The treaty was one of the key elements that led to indefinite extension of the NPT itself, and is the one thing that seems to be bringing all the state parties together. It’s a low-hanging fruit and we need to catch it, make it serve as a stepping-stone for whatever we want to achieve in this review conference.

For instance, we need to find a compromise between those who are of the view that we should move first on non-proliferation, and between those who say we should move equally, if not faster, on disarmament.

We also need to address the concerns of those who ask why nuclear weapons states are allowed to develop more modern weapons, while other states are prevented from developing even the basic technologies that could serve as nuclear weapons.

The CTBT represents something that all states can agree to; it serves as the basis for consensus on other, more difficult issues, and this is the message I am bringing to the conference.

Q: What have been some of the biggest achievement of the CTBTO? What are some of your most pressing concerns for the future?

A: The CTBTO bans all nuclear test explosions underwater, underground and in the air. We’ve built a network of nearly 300 stations for detecting nuclear tests, including tracking radioactive emissions.

Our international monitoring system has stopped horizontal proliferation (more countries acquiring nuclear weapons), as well as vertical proliferation (more advanced weapons systems).

That’s why some [states] are hesitant to consider ratification of the CTBT: because they are of the view that they still need testing to be able to maintain or modernise their stockpiles.

Any development of nuclear weapons happening today is based on testing that was done 20-25 years ago. No country, except for North Korea, has performed a single test in the 21^st century.

Q: How do you deal with outliers like North Korea?

A: We haven’t had official contact with North Korea. I can only base my analysis on what world leaders are telling me. [Russian Foreign Minister Sergey] Lavrov has attempted to engage North Korea in discussions about the CTBT and asked if they would consider a moratorium on testing. Yesterday I met Yerzhan Ashikbayev, deputy foreign minister for Kazakhstan, which has bilateral relations with North Korea, and they have urgently called on North Korea to consider signature of the CTBT.

Those are the countries that can help us, those who have bilateral relations.

Having said this, if I’m invited to North Korea for a meeting that could serve as a basis for engaging in discussions, to help them understand more about the CTBT and the organizational framework and infrastructure that we’ve built: why not? I would be ready to do it.

We are also engaging states like Israel, who could take leadership in regions like the Middle East by signing onto the CTBT. I was just in Israel, where I asked the questions: Do you want to test? I don’t think so. Do you need it? I don’t think so. So why don’t you take leadership to open that framework that we need for confidence building in the region that could lead to more ratification and more consideration of a nuclear weapons-free zone or a WMD-free zone.

Israel now says that CTBT ratification is not an “if” but a “when” – I hope the “when” is not too far away.

Q: Despite scores of marches, thousands of petitions and millions of signatures calling for disarmament and abolition, the major nuclear weapons states are holding out. This can be extremely disheartening for those at the forefront of the movement. What would be your message to global civil society?

A: I would say, keep putting pressure on your political leaders. We need leadership to move on these issues. Right now 90 percent of the world is saying “no” to nuclear testing, yet we are held hostage by the handful of countries [that have not ratified the treaty].

Only civil society can play a role in telling governments, “You’ve got to move because the majority of the world is saying ‘no’ to what you still have, and what you are still holding onto.” The CTBT is a key element for that goal we want to achieve, hopefully in our lifetime: a world free of nuclear weapons.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

By Christine Ahn
NEW YORK, Apr 28 2015 (IPS)

A century ago, the suffragist Jane Addams boarded a ship with other American women peace activists to participate in a Congress of Women in The Hague.

Christine Ahn

Over 1,300 women from 12 countries, “cutting across national enmities,” met to call for an end to World War I. That Congress became the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), which is now gathering in The Hague under the theme Women Stop War.

Just as Addams met women across national lines to try and stop WWI 100 years ago, from May 19 to 25, a delegation of 30 women from 15 countries around the world will meet and walk with Korean women, north and south, to call for an end to the Korean War.

As WWII came to a close, Korea, which had been colonised by Japan for 35 years, faced a new tragedy. After Japan’s surrender in 1945, the United States proposed (and the Soviets accepted) temporarily dividing Korea along the 38th parallel in an effort to prevent Soviet troops, who were fighting the Japanese in the north, from occupying the whole country.

Japanese troops north of the line would surrender to the Soviets; those to the south would surrender to U.S. authorities. It was meant to be a temporary division, but Washington and Moscow failed to establish a single Korean government, thereby creating two separate states in 1948: the Republic of Korea in the south and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the north.We are walking on May 24, International Women’s Day for Disarmament and Peace, because we believe that there must be an end to the Korean War that has plagued the Korean peninsula with intense militarisation.

This division precipitated the Korean War (1950-53), often referred to in the United States as “the forgotten war”, when each side sought to reunite the country by force. Despite enormous destruction and loss of life, neither side prevailed.

In July 1953, fighting was halted when North Korea (representing the Korean People’s Army and the Chinese People’s Volunteers) and the United States (representing the United Nations Command) signed the Korean War Armistice Agreement at Panmunjom, near the 38^th parallel.

This temporary cease-fire stipulated the need for a political settlement among all parties to the war (Article 4 Paragraph 60). It established the Demilitarized Zone, two-and-a-half miles wide and still heavily mined, as the new border between the two sides. It urged the governments to convene a political conference within three months, in order to reach a formal peace settlement.

Over 62 years later, no peace treaty has been agreed, with the continuing fear that fighting could resume at any time. In fact, in 2012, during another military crisis with North Korea, former U.S. Defence Secretary Leon Panetta acknowledged that Washington was, “within an inch of war almost every day.”

In 1994, as President Clinton weighed a pre-emptive military first strike against North Korea’s nuclear reactors, the U.S. Department of Defence estimated that an outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula would result in 1.5 million casualties within the first 24 hours and 6 million casualties within the first week.

This assessment predates North Korea’s possession of nuclear weapons, which would be unimaginable in terms of destruction and devastation. We have no choice but to engage; the cost of not engaging is just too high.

The only way to prevent the outbreak of a catastrophic confrontation, as a 2011 paper from the U.S. Army War College counsels, is to “reach agreement on ending the armistice from the Korean War”—in essence, a peace agreement—and “giv[e] a formal security guarantee to North Korea tied to nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”

Recent history has shown that when standing leaders are at a dangerous impasse, the role of civil society can indeed make a difference in averting war and lessening tensions. In 1994 as President Clinton contemplated military action, without the initial blessing of the White House, former President Jimmy Carter flew to Pyongyang armed with a CNN camera crew to negotiate the terms of the Agreed Framework with former North Korean leader Kim Il Sung.

And in 2008, the New York Philharmonic performed in Pyongyang, which significantly contributed towards warming relations between the United States and DPRK.

Christiane Amanpour, who traveled with CNN to cover the philharmonic, wrote that U.S. Secretary of Defence William Perry, a former negotiator with North Korea, explained to her that this was a magic moment, with different peoples speaking the same language of music.

Armanpour said Perry believed that the event could positively influence the governments reaching a nuclear agreement, “but that mutual distrust and fear can only be overcome by people-to-people diplomacy.”

That is what we are hoping to achieve with the 2015 International Women’s Walk for Peace and Reunification of Korea, citizen-to-citizen diplomacy led by women. We are also walking on the 15^th anniversary of the passage of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325, which calls for the full and equal participation of women in conflict prevention and resolution, and in peacebuilding.

Women from Cambodia, Guatemala, Liberia and Northern Ireland all provided crucial voices for peace as they mobilised across national, ethnic and religious divides and used family and community networks to mitigate violence and heal divisions among their communities.

Similarly, our delegation will walk for peace in Korea and to cross the De-Militarized Zone separating millions of families, reminding the world on the tragic 70^th anniversary of Korea’s division by foreign powers that the Korean people are from an ancient culture united by the same food, language, culture, customs, and history.

We are walking on May 24, International Women’s Day for Disarmament and Peace, because we believe that there must be an end to the Korean War that has plagued the Korean peninsula with intense militarisation. Instead of spending billions on preparing for war, governments could instead redirect these critically needed funds for schools, childcare, health, caring for the elderly.

The first step is reconciliation through engagement and dialogue. That is why we are walking. To break the impasse among the warring nations—North Korea, South Korea, and the United States—to come to the peacemaking table to finally end the Korean War.

As Addams boarded the ship to The Hague, she and other women peace activists were mocked for seeking alternative ways than war to resolve international disputes.

Addams dismissed criticism that they were naïve and wild-eyed idealists: “We do not think we can settle the war. We do not think that by raising our hands we can make the armies cease slaughter. We do think it is valuable to state a new point of view. We do think it is fitting that women should meet and take counsel to see what may be done.”

It is only fitting that our women’s peace walk in Korea takes place on this centennial anniversary year of the first international act of defiance of war women ever undertook. I am honoured to be among another generation of women gathering at The Hague to carry on the tradition of women peacemakers engaged in citizen diplomacy to end war.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

A group of international women peacemakers announced on Wednesday at the United Nations their intention to walk across the two mile De-Militarized Zone (DMZ), in a call for peace and reunification of Korea.

The walk is planned for May 24th, the International Women’s Day for Peace and Disarmament, depending on the approval of the Korean authorities. Leading organiser Christine Ahn said at the U.N. that women will walk “to imagine a new chapter in Korean history marked by dialogue, understanding and ultimately forgiveness. We are walking to help unite Korean families tragically separated by an artificial man-made division.”

The announcement was made in light of the 59th meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women.

Amongst the 30 walkers, there are two Nobel Peace Laureates Mairead Maguire and Leymah Gbowee, various authors, academics, humanitarian aid workers and faith leaders.

The Korean people are still waiting for an official peace treaty to reunify the country. However, a cease-fire has been in place since the 1953 signing of the Korean Armistice Agreement which established a de facto border between the two countries.

The group is planning to meet in Pyongyang and walk south, across the DMZ, meeting with southern Korean women in Seoul, where they will hold an international peace symposium.

Ahn said, “We realise that crossing the most militarized border in the world is no simple task. We are seeking approval from both Korean governments and the U.N. We received a letter of intent last year from Pyongyang supporting our event, with a very stern caveat ‘if the conditions are right’. However, given the tense moment right now they may not be.”

American author and Honorary Co-Chair of the international delegation, Gloria Steinem, remarked, “If this division can be healed even briefly by women, it will be inspiring in the way that women brought peace out of war in Northern Ireland or in Liberia.”

Even without an official approval, the group is urging leaders to reduce military expenditure and redirect public money towards social welfare and environmental protection.

“We are walking to lessen military tensions on the Korean peninsula which has ramifications for peace insecurity throughout the world (and) ensure that women are involved at all levels of the peacebuilding and peacemaking process,” said Ahn.

Professor Chung Hyun Kyung from the Union Theological Seminary said that nuclear militarisation, and the increasing demonisation on both sides have caused serious social and cultural ruptures between North and South. She noted that is important to recreate an idea of wholeness and democracy across the peninsula.

The activists said that they will soon launch an online petition calling on U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, United States and Korean leaders to take the necessary actions to reach a peaceful reunification.

Follow Valentina Ieri on Twitter @Valeieri

Edited by Roger Hamilton-Martin

The Koreas on the globe. Credit: TUBS/ Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

By Ahn Mi Young
SEOUL, Feb 18 2015 (IPS)

The two Koreas are an odd match – both are talking about possible dialogue but both have different ideas of the conditions, and that difference comes from the 62-year-old division following the 1950-53 Korean War.

During this time, North Korea has become a nuclear threat – estimated to possess up to ten nuclear weapons out of the 16,300 worldwide (compared with Russia’s 8,000 and the 7,300 in the United States) according to the Ploughshares Fund’s report on world nuclear stockpiles – and South Korea has become the world’s major economic success story.

In a national broadcast on Jan. 16, South Korean president Park Geun Hye presented her vision for reunification by using the Korean word ‘daebak‘ (meaning ‘great success’ or ‘jackpot’). “If the two Koreas are united, the reunited Korea will be a daebak not only for Korea but also for the whole world,” she said.North Korea has become a nuclear threat – estimated to possess up to ten nuclear weapons out of the 16,300 worldwide – and South Korea has become the world's major economic success story

Since she became leader of the South Korea’s conservative ruling party in 2013, Park has been referring to a new world that would come from a unified Korea. Her argument has been that if the two Koreas are reunited, the world could be politically less dangerous – free from the North Korea’s nuclear threat – and a united Korea could be economically more prosperous by combining the South’s economic and cultural power and the North’s natural resources and discipline.

Denuclearisation has been set as a key condition for daebak to come about. At a Feb. 9 forum with high-ranking South Korean officials, President Park said that “North Korea should show sincerity in denuclearisation efforts if it is to successfully lead its on-going economic projects. No matter how good are the programmes we may have in order to help North Korea, we cannot do so as long as North Korea does not give up its nuclear programme.”

However, observers have said North Korea has no reason to give up its nuclear weapons as long as it depends on its nuclear capability as a bargaining chip for political survival.  “Nuclear capabilities are the North’s only military leverage to maintain its regime as it confronts the South’s economic power,” said Moon Sung Muk of the Korea Research Institute of Strategies (KRIS).

In fact, there are few signs of changes. North Korea has conducted a series of rocket launches, as well as three nuclear tests – all in defiance of the U.S. sanctions that are partially drying up channels for North Korea’s weapons trade.

Amid recent escalating tension between Washington and Pyeongyang over additional sanctions, activities at the 5-megawatt Yongbyon reactor in North Korea which produces nuclear bomb fuel are being closely watched to monitor whether the North may restart the reactor.

In the meantime, South Korea has been denying the official supply of food and fertilisers to North Korea under the South Korean conservative regimes that started in 2008.

During the liberal regime of 2004-2007, South Korea was the biggest donor of food and fertilisers to North Korea.

Then there appeared to be a glimmer of hope when North Korea’s enigmatic young leader Kim Jong Un presented a rare gesture of reconciliation towards South Korea in his 2015 New Year’s speech broadcast on Korean Central Television on Jan. 1.

“North and South should no longer waste time and efforts in (trying to resolve) meaningless disputes and insignificant problems,” he said. “Instead, we both should write a new history of both Koreas … There should be dialogue between two Koreas so that we can re-bridge the bond that was cut off and bring about breakthrough changes.”

In his speech, the North Korean leader even went as far as suggesting a ‘highest-level meeting’ with the South Korean president. “If the South is in a position to improve inter-Korean relations through dialogue, we can resume high-level contacts. Also, depending on some circumstances and atmospheres, there is no reason we cannot have the highest-level meeting (with the South).”

In South Korea, hopes for possible inter-Korean talks have been subdued. “What North Korea wants from dialogue with the South is not to talk about nuclear or human rights, but to have the South resume economic aid,” said Lee Yun Gol, director of the state-run North Korea Strategic Information Centre (NKSIS).

The government in Seoul remains cautious about Pyongyang’s peace initiatives. “We are seeing little hope for any rosy future in inter-Korean relationships in the near future, although we are working on how to prepare for the vision of ‘daebak‘,” said Ryu Gil Jae, South Korean reunification minister, in a Feb. 4 press conference.

North Korean observers have said that economic difficulties have been pushing the North Korean government to relax its tight state control over farm private ownership. North Korean farmers can now sell some of their products in markets nationwide, in a gradual shift towards privatised markets.

Further, according to Chinese diplomatic academic publication ‘Segye Jisik’ (세계 지식), quoted by the South Korean news agency Yonhap News, the North Korean economy has improved since its new leader took office in 2012. From a 1.08 million ton deficit in stocks to feed the 20 million North Koreans in 2011, the deficit now stands at 340,000 tons.

According to observers, this report, if true, could send the signal that if North Korea is economically better off, it may be politically willing to reduce its dependence on the nuclear card in any bargaining process with South Korea.

U.S. sanctions have been used in the attempt to force North Korea to denuclearise, thus restricting North Korea’s trade, and the U.S. government levied new sanctions against North Korea on Jan. 2 this year in response to a cyberattack against Sony Pictures Entertainment. The FBI accused North Korea of the attack in apparent retaliation for the film, The Interview, a comedy about the assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

But, while sanctions may work in troubling ordinary North Koreans concerned with meeting basic food needs, they have little impact on the North Korean government. “North Korea’s trade with China has become more prosperous and most of North Korea’s deals with foreign partners are behind-the-scene deals,” said Hong Hyun Ik, senior researcher at the Sejong Research Institute.

And, in response to the threat that it may be referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC), on the basis of U.N. findings on human rights, Kim Jong Un reiterated: “Our thought and regime will never be shaken.”

South Korea may now stand as the only hope for North Korea, as the United States and the United Nations gather to turn tough against the country over the human rights issue, and South Korea may find itself faced with a ‘two-track’ diplomacy between the hard-liner United States and its sympathy for the North Korean people.

In past decades, North Korea has usually played out a game with the United States and South Korea. “In recent year, the United States has been using ‘stick diplomacy’ against the North Korea, while South Korea may want to shift to ‘carrot diplomacy’,” said Moon Sung Muk of the Korea Research Institute of Strategies (KRIS).

“The Seoul government knows that the pace of getting closer to the North should be constrained by U.N. or U.S. moves,” Moon added.

Edited by Phil Harris    

Fidel Castro arrives at MATS Terminal, Washington, D.C., Apr. 15, 1959. Scores of attempts were later made by U.S. intelligence services to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro, including by hired Sicilian Mafia hitmen. Credit: public domain

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 7 2015 (IPS)

The controversial low-brow Hollywood comedy, ‘The Interview’, portrays the story of two U.S. talk-show journalists on assignment to interview Kim Jong-un – and midway down the road are recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to poison the North Korean leader.

The plot, which has enraged North Korea, accused of retaliating by hacking into the computers of Sony Pictures distributing the movie, is patently fictitious and involves a ricin-laced strip meant to poison Kim while shaking hands with the journalists."It's fine to make comedies about assassinations of the leaders of small countries the U.S. has demonised. But imagine if Russia or China made a film about assassinating the U.S. president." -- Michael Ratner

But, as art imitates life from a bygone era, the plan to kill the North Korean leader harkens back to the days in the late 1960s and 1970s when scores of attempts were made by U.S. intelligence services to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro, including by hired Sicilian Mafia hitmen.

The hilarious plots included an attempt to smuggle poisoned cigars into Castro’s household and also plant soluble thallium sulphate inside Castro’s shoes so that his beard will fall off and make him “the laughing stock of the socialist world.”

Some of the unsuccessful attempts were detailed in a scathing 1975 report by an 11-member investigative body appointed by the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee chaired by Senator Frank Church, a Democrat from the state of Idaho.

The failed assassination plots are likely to be the subject of renewed discussion, particularly in the context of last month’s announcement of the resumption of full diplomatic relations between the two longstanding sworn enemies: the United States and Cuba.

Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Centre for Constitutional Rights, told IPS, “Sadly, and especially to the North Koreans and Kim Jong-un, the movie was not a comedy they could ignore.”

The CIA has a long history of often successful plots to assassinate leaders of countries who choose to act independently of U.S. wishes, he pointed out.

Numerous such plots were exposed in the 1975 U.S. Senate Church Committee report, including attempts against Fidel Castro of Cuba, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem, the first president of South Vietnam, and others, said Ratner, president of the Berlin-based European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights.

The supposed ban on such assassination since those revelations is meaningless; the U.S. now calls it targeted killing, he added.

“Think about Colonel Qaddafi [of Libya] and others killed by drones or Joint Special Operations Command.”

Seen in this context, said Ratner, a North Korean reaction would be expected – even though there has not been substantiated evidence that it was behind the Sony hack.

“Think about this another way: it’s fine to make comedies about assassinations of the leaders of small countries the U.S. has demonised. But imagine if Russia or China made a film about assassinating the U.S. president,” he said.

The United States would not simply laugh it off as a comedy.

“There is no problem as long as the target is small country that can be kicked around; let another country make such a comedy about our president, and I assure you, it will pay dearly,” Ratner added.

Dr. James E. Jennings, president, Conscience International and executive director at U.S. Academics for Peace, told IPS new information from cyber security firms calls into question the doctrinaire assertion by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was behind the Sony hack attack.

“The FBI’s rush to judgment – from which the agency may be forced to retreat – has raised protests from internet security experts and suspicions by conspiracy theorists of possible U.S. involvement in a bizarre plot to further isolate the Korean regime.”

They point out, said Dr. Jennings, that stranger things have happened before.

It would not be the first time that the CIA has used dirty tricks to cripple a foreign regime or try to assassinate a foreign leader.

He said folks are therefore entitled to be sceptical about FBI claims and to raise questions about possible CIA involvement in the fuss over the film “The Interview.”

“We only have to remember Iran in 1953, when the elected leader [Mohamed] Mosaddegh was overthrown; Chile in 1973 when President Salvador Allende was assassinated, and the Keystone Cops hi-jinks that the CIA pulled in trying to assassinate Cuban President Fidel Castro between 1960-75.”

The CIA’s own Inspector General as well as the 1975-76 Church Committee reported that a large number of crazy tricks were attempted in trying to get rid of Castro, including poisoned cigars and exploding seashells.

“One wonders what the top CIA officers were drinking when they came up with such silly notions–more like Kabuki theater than responsible policies of a great nation,” said Jennings. “And we all know by now about Abu Ghraib, torture, rendition, and the black sites.

“If it does turn out that the CIA is implicated in any way in this newest Sony vs. North Korea farce, as some are alleging, it’s high time for a new congressional investigation like that of the Church Committee to whack the agency hard and send some of its current leaders back to the basement of horrors where they belong,” said Dr. Jennings.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

By Christine Ahn and Suzy Kim
HONOLULU, Dec 2 2014 (IPS)

On Nov. 18, a committee of the United Nations General Assembly voted 111 to 19, with 55 abstentions, in favour of drafting a non-binding resolution referring North Korea to the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Christine Ahn

While there is overwhelming evidence that economic and political conditions in North Korea must improve, missing from debates in U.N. corridors is the fact that the unresolved Korean War (1950-1953) underlies North Korea’s human rights crisis."While there is overwhelming evidence that economic and political conditions in North Korea must improve, missing from debates in U.N. corridors is the fact that the unresolved Korean War (1950-1953) underlies North Korea's human rights crisis"

After claiming up to four million lives with at least one member of every family in North Korea killed by the war, the Korean War was halted by an armistice agreement signed by North Korea, China and the United States representing the United Nations Command.

Suzy Kim

As James Laney, U.S. Ambassador to South Korea during the 1990s explains, “one of the things that have bedevilled all talks until now is the unresolved status of the Korean War” and he prescribes the “establishment of a peace treaty to replace the truce.”

What does the past have to do with the present state of human rights in North Korea?

The continued state of war affects the human rights of North Korean people today in at least two ways. Domestically, the North Korean government prioritises military defence and national security over human security and political freedoms. Internationally, North Koreans suffer due to political isolation and economic sanctions.

The fact that the Korean War ended with a temporary ceasefire rather than a permanent peace treaty gives the North Korean government justification – whether we like it or not – to invest heavily in the country’s militarisation.

According to the South Korean government’s Institute of Defense Analyses, North Korea invests approximately 8.7 billion dollars – or one-third of its GDP – on defence.

Pyongyang even acknowledged last year how the un-ended war has forced it “to divert large human and material resources to bolstering up the armed forces though they should have been directed to the economic development and improvement of people’s living standards.”

Since military intervention is not an option, the Barack Obama administration has used sanctions to pressure North Korea to denuclearise. Instead, North Korea has since conducted three nuclear tests, calling sanctions “an act of war”.

That is because sanctions have had deleterious effects on the day-to-day lives of ordinary North Korean people. “In almost any case when there are sanctions against an entire people, the people suffer the most and the leaders suffer least,” said former U.S. President Jimmy Carter on his last visit to North Korea.

International sanctions have made it extremely difficult for North Koreans to access basic necessities, such as food, seeds, medicine and technology. Felix Abt, a Swiss entrepreneur who has conducted business in North Korea for over a decade says that it is “the most heavily sanctioned nation in the world, and no other people have had to deal with the massive quarantines that Western and Asian powers have enclosed around its economy.” 

Whether in Pyongyang, Seoul or Washington, the threat of war or terrorism has been used to justify government repression and overreach, such as warrantless surveillance, imprisonment and torture (“enhanced interrogation techniques”) in the name of preserving national security.

In South Korea, one of the liberal opposition parties, the Unified Progressive Party, is currently on trial in the Constitutional Court on charges made by the Park Geun-hye government that its members conspired with North Korea to overthrow the South Korean government.

Amnesty International says that this case “has seriously damaged the human rights improvement of South Korean society which has struggled and fought for freedom of thoughts and conscience and freedom of expression.”

In the coming days, the U.N. General Assembly will vote on whether the U.N. Security Council should refer North Korea to the ICC, although it is likely to be vetoed by China and Russia. The United Nations vote, while lofty in principle, actually serves to further isolate Pyongyang, which will likely retreat even further behind its iron curtain.

“We’ve said from day one that if North Korea wants to rejoin the community of nations, it knows how to do it,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has said, referring to the precondition of denuclearisation for talks.

Instead of relying on the failed Washington policy of “strategic patience” it is time for a bold move that will truly bring North Korea into the community of nations, leaving no excuse to delay addressing human rights – sign a peace treaty to end the state of war. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Michael Kirby, Chair of the Commission of Inquiry on the situation of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), briefs the press about the Commission's report which documents wide-ranging and ongoing crimes against humanity. Credit: UN Photo/Jean-Marc Ferré

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 25 2014 (IPS)

Has the world reached a stage where nuclear weapons may be used as bargaining chips in international politics?

So it seems, judging by the North Korean threat last week to conduct another nuclear test – if and when the 193-member U.N. General Assembly adopts a resolution aimed at referring the hermit kingdom to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for human rights abuses.

“If North Korea begins a game of nuclear blackmailing,” one anti-nuclear activist predicted, “will Russia not be far behind in what appears to be a new Cold War era?”

Dr. Rebecca Johnson, author of the U.N.-published book ‘Unfinished Business’ on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) negotiations, told IPS the larger danger – exemplified also by some of the rhetoric about nuclear weapons bandied around the crisis in Ukraine – is that nuclear weapons are not useful deterrents but are increasingly seen as bargaining chips, with heightened risks that they may be used to “prove” some weak leader’s “point”, with catastrophic humanitarian consequences.

She pointed out North Korea’s recent threat to conduct another nuclear test – its fourth – is unlikely to deter U.N. states from adopting a resolution to charge the regime of Kim Jong-un with crimes against humanity.

“North Korea’s nuclear sabre-rattling appears to draw from Cold War deterrence theories, but a nuclear test is not a nuclear weapon,” she added.

South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-Se told the Security Council last May North Korea is the only country in the world that has conducted nuclear tests in the 21st century.

Since 2006, it has conducted three nuclear tests, the last one in February 2013 – all of them in defiance of the international community and the United Nations.

The resolution on North Korea, which is expected to come up before the U.N.’s highest policy making body in early December, has already been adopted by the U.N. committee dealing with humanitarian issues, known as the Third Committee.

The vote was 111 in favour to 19 against, with 55 abstentions in the 193-member committee. The vote in the General Assembly is only a formality.

Alyn Ware, a member of the World Future Council, told IPS: “Nuclear weapons should not be used as threats or as bargaining chips.”

Their use, after all, would involve massive violations of the right to life and other human rights.

However, he noted, this applies also to the other nuclear-armed states in the region (China, Russia and the United States) and states under extended nuclear deterrence doctrines (South Korea and Japan).

“The nuclear option should be taken off the table by establishing a North East Asian Nuclear Weapon Free Zone,” he said.

And the states leading the human rights charges against North Korea should make it crystal clear that such charges are not an attempt to overthrow the North Korean government, he added.

The tensions between countries in the region, and the fact that the Korean War of the 1950s has never officially ended (only an armistice is in place), makes this a very sensitive issue, said Ware. If the General Assembly adopts the resolution, as expected, it is up to the 15-member Security Council to initiate ICC action on North Korea.

But both Russia and China are most likely to veto any attempts to drag North Korea to The Hague.

In an editorial Sunday, the New York Times said North Korea’s human rights abuses warrant action by the Security Council.

“Given what is in the public record, it is impossible to see how any country can defend Mr Kim and his lieutenants or block their referral to the International Criminal Court,” the paper said.

“As confidence in the NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty) continues to erode, has the time come to ban all nuclear weapons?” asked Dr Johnson.

She said “a comprehensive nuclear ban treaty would dramatically reduce nuclear dangers and provide much stronger international tools than we have today for curbing the acquisition, deployment and spread of nuclear weapons.”

The status some nations attach to nuclear weapons would soon be a thing of the past, nuclear sabre-rattling would become pointless, and anyone threatening to use these weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) would automatically face charges under the International Criminal Court, said Dr. Johnson, who is executive director and co-founder of the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy.

“This might not stop nuclear blackmail overnight, but it would make it much harder for North Korea and any others to imagine they could gain benefits by issuing nuclear threats.”

As North Korea withdrew from the NPT over 10 years ago, and has already conducted three nuclear tests, it is unlikely that a threatened fourth test would be an effective deterrent, said Dr Johnson.

The U.N. resolution has been triggered by a report from a U.N. Commission of Inquiry on North Korea which recommended that leaders of that country be prosecuted by the ICC for grave human rights violations.

The commission was headed by Michael Kirby, a High Court Judge from Australia.

In a statement before the Third Committee last week, the North Korean delegate said the report of the Commission “was based on fabricated testimonies by a handful of defectors who had fled the country after committing crimes.

“The report was a compilation of groundless political allegations and had no credibility as an official U.N. document,” he added.

Ware told IPS, “I have a lot of respect for my colleague Michael Kirby from Australia, who led a year-long U.N. inquiry into human rights abuses which concluded that North Korean security chiefs, and possibly even Kim Jong Un himself, should face international justice for ordering systematic torture, starvation and killings.

“I find the response of the North Korean authorities to try to discredit his report due to his sexual orientation to be reprehensible,” he added. “Nor do I find credible the North Korean counter-claims that their human rights violations are non-existent, while the real human rights violator is the U.S. government.”

Ware said there are indeed human rights violations in the United States, but they pale in comparison to those in North Korea.

There is a body of U.S. civil rights law and legal institutions that provide protections for U.S. citizens even if it is not fully perfect nor implemented entirely fairly, he pointed out.

But there is a lack of such protection of civil rights in North Korea, with the result that the North Korean administration inflicts incredibly egregious violations of human rights with total impunity, according to Kirby’s report.

“I do not believe that the threat of a nuclear test by North Korea should deter the United Nations from addressing these human rights violations, including the possibility of referral to the International Criminal Court,” Ware declared.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

The disputed Northern Limit Line (NLL) that forms the maritime border between North and South Korea in the Yellow Sea cuts through a number of small islands and winds through rich fishing grounds. Credit: lamoix/CC-BY-2.0

By John Feffer and Michal Witkowski
WASHINGTON, Nov 11 2014 (IPS)

Environmental problems, by their nature, don’t respect borders. Air and sea pollution often affect countries that had nothing to do with their production. Many extreme weather events, like typhoons, strike more than one country. Climate change affects everyone.

These environmental problems can aggravate existing conflicts among countries. But they can also bring countries together in joint efforts to find solutions. A case in point is the Northern Limit Line (NLL) in Korea.

The NLL is the oft-disputed border between North and South Korea in the Yellow Sea off the west coast of the peninsula. Although the two countries agreed to a territorial boundary at the 38^th parallel following the Korean War armistice, they have never agreed on the maritime boundary in the Yellow Sea, which threads between a number of islands and through rich fishing grounds.

Over the years, North and South Korea have exchanged artillery fire across the NLL, and naval vessels as well as fishing boats have clashed in the area on a number of occasions.

Various environmental challenges have only sharpened the conflict. But with a new imperative to address these environmental problems, the NLL can offer the two Koreas an opportunity to chart a new relationship for the 21^st century.

Anatomy of a Dispute

North Korea maintains six naval squadrons on the [Northern Limit Line]. The North’s fleet consists of approximately 430 combat vessels. The South’s fleet is smaller in numbers, with about 120 ships and 70 aircraft. But it has the military edge, due to the size of the vessels and their technological superiority.
The NLL region has been a zone of contention between North and South Korea for more than six decades. It has been the site of several clashes between the Koreas.

Among the most notable are the naval confrontations of 1999 and 2002, the 2009 gunboat incident near Daecheong Island, the 2010 artillery shelling of Yeonpyeong Island, and the sinking of the Cheonan, a South Korean navy ship.

This maritime border is heavily militarised. North Korea maintains six naval squadrons there. According to South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, the North’s fleet consists of approximately 430 combat vessels—around 60 percent of which are stationed around the coastal borders.

Due to the decline of the North Korean economy, the fleet mostly consists of smaller vessels used for covert operations and for escorting fishing boats around the NLL.

The South’s fleet is smaller in numbers, with about 120 ships and 70 aircraft. But it has the military edge, due to the size of the vessels and their technological superiority. It’s further reinforced by the presence of the U.S. Seventh Fleet in nearby Yokosuka, Japan.

South Korean troops, along with their American counterparts, carry out annual drills in the region, which always raise tensions along the disputed maritime border.

North Korea does not recognise the present border arrangement. Furthermore, the 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) regime set by the U.N. – which grants states special resource exploration rights in a sea zone stretching 200 miles from their land borders – cannot be applied in a close-quarter situation such as the NLL.

The fishing zones that lie within the NLL are the source of fierce contention between both South and North Korea.

One of the major arguments that North Korea has made around the disputed NLL is that South Korea has access to the majority of fisheries within the current boundaries, while the North occupies far less territory than it potentially could.

When the NLL was being drawn up, the international standard for territorial water limits was three nautical miles; by the 1970s, however, 12 nautical miles became the norm. The North’s argument is that the current setting prevents it from accessing neighbouring sea areas, which, in Pyongyang’s view, should belong to the North.

Such a border set-up fails to acknowledge that small islands, such as Yeonpyeong Island, are not equivalent to continental masses in terms of generating maritime boundaries.

Environmental issues

Overfishing and other destructive fishing practices that have continued for decades have had perhaps the greatest impact on the NLL’s environmental situation. Such activities have caused habitat destruction and biomass change in the Yellow Sea.

For instance, due to overfishing between the 1960s and the 1980s, the number of invertebrates and fish dropped by over 40 percent. With the decrease in fish populations, more effort is required to maintain the desired catch capacity, and many commercially significant species have been severely depleted. As a result, the species composition and the relative proportions of the fish found in the region have been altered.

One country alone cannot ensure the region’s sustainability. The trans-boundary nature of these issues requires a cooperative approach.

The nature of the Yellow Sea – and in particular the seabed on which the NLL is located – limits water circulation, increasing the amount of harmful sediments and aggravating the quality of the water. This has decreased the sea’s ability to “cleanse itself,” making the area around the NLL even more vulnerable to pollution and the harmful effects of human activities on land.

Habitat depletion can greatly affect local communities as well as cause problems for the fishing industry. Development projects on the South Korean side have been a major factor in this process.

More than 30 percent of marshland fields have been lost in South Korea between 1975 and 2005 due to dam construction, embankment, and dikes. Rice paddy fields have been lost as a result of reclamation and the lowering of water tables in nearby lakes.

An ever-increasing market demand for seafood boosts the profitability of short-term-oriented fishing activities. Insufficient pollution prevention only aggravates the situation.

Possible Solutions

As a result of the tense security situation and the unresolved border – along with the lack of a peace treaty between the Koreas to formally end the Korean War – any sort of consensus on the matter of the NLL in the context of inter-Korean relations is difficult to achieve.

One proposed solution is the establishment of a joint fishing zone between the two countries. This zone would boost the North’s fishing industry and could serve as a start to a trust-building process between the neighbours.

Such a process would be based on increased economic cooperation in the NLL region that could lead to further improvements in relations and make future collaboration more likely.

The “Sunshine Policy,” a period of North-South engagement in the late 1990s and early 2000s, was an attempt at establishing such cooperation. In the negotiations regarding the NLL during that period, North Korea demanded changes in the border situation that had to be met before it could agree to participate in the 2007 inter-Korean summit.

The South reportedly agreed to this condition. However, the summit failed to bring any real closure to the matter: concrete decisions were left to be discussed in the future.

The overall framework dating back to the Sunshine Policy’s prime is still in place. For instance, the Kaesong Industrial Park – a joint North-South venture on the northern side of the DMZ – is still operational. Ties between the Koreas could be further enhanced by cooperation around the NLL region.

Some ideas have already been put forward and were initially agreed upon by both sides. In 2000, for example, the two countries came to an agreement along the maritime boundary on the east side of the peninsula where South Korean boats shared the profits from their squid fishing in Northern waters.

Also in 2000, the two sides agreed to create a special peace and cooperation zone around the west coast of the Korean Peninsula.

Another proposal was to combine a joint fishing zone with a common industrial complex in Haeju, a port city on the Northern side. Finally, the Koreas agreed to establish a “peace sea” from the island of Yeonpyeong right to the estuary of the Han River.

No military presence would be allowed in this area. With the South’s withdrawal from the Sunshine Policy framework under the right-wing President Lee Myung-Bak, however, the joint projects were put on hold.

A resuscitation of such joint projects could potentially move cooperation beyond the issue of the NLL to other areas of both business and policy-making. Two major obstacles would need to be overcome in order for such a solution to work.

First, an independent body to monitor the area would need to be appointed to prevent breaches of the agreement and to ensure that both parties follow environmental rules. This mechanism would have to recognise the specificity of the issues surrounding the NLL and formulate policies accordingly.

Second, the two sides would have to agree on a peaceful dispute resolution mechanism.

A universal solution that can resolve the NLL issue does not exist. A carefully devised policy that takes into account the political and economic tensions between the two Koreas may be the answer.

Importantly, the NLL would have to be gradually demilitarised to reduce the probability of any unwanted conflict that could destabilise the area. However, there is minimal possibility that the two countries will agree to reduce their military positions given that the two countries signed the armistice nearly six decades ago but never agreed on a peace treaty.

Thus, for such a solution to become possible, economic cooperation must come first.

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS-Inter Press Service. Read the original version of this story here.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Excerpt:

Independence Square in Kiev. In the aftermath of the revolution Ukraine now faces a difficult path to EU integration. Credit: Natalia Kravchuk/IPS.

By Somar Wijayadasa
NEW YORK, Sep 4 2014 (IPS)

The crisis in Ukraine is a man-made disaster created by world leaders who have been trying to pull Ukraine apart – either towards Europe or Russia.

As geo-political tensions in the world rage unabated, world powers rush to impose sanctions that cause unintended consequences.

A Washington Post editorial, ‘The Snake Oil Diplomacy: When Tensions Rise, The US Peddles Sanctions’, published as far back as July 1998, stated, “No country in the world has employed sanctions as often as the United States has… it has imposed economic sanctions more than 110 times.”

Historically, the League of Nations, United Nations, United States and the European Union have resorted to mandatory sanctions as an enforcement tool when peace has been threatened and diplomatic efforts have failed.

“No country in the world has employed sanctions as often as the United States has… it has imposed economic sanctions more than 110 times.” -- Washington Post
During the 1990s, we witnessed a proliferation of sanctions imposed by the U.N. and U.S. against Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Liberia, Somalia, Cambodia, Haiti – to name a few.

These sanctions brought disastrous consequences – where those in power thrived and the poor suffered.

A few countries such as Iran, Iraq and North Korea scoffed at U.S. sanctions as they had resources or the will power to survive. Sanctions against China and India failed to change the leadership or hinder the country’s economic drive and growth.

But in most countries, especially Cuba, Iraq and Haiti, sanctions deteriorated their economic, social and healthcare systems.

At times, sanctions were used as an ulterior motive for “regime change” which is a violation of the U.N. Charter and the basic norms of international law.

Such a devious practice has nothing to do with protecting human rights, and promoting democracy and freedom.

Now, the sanctions against Russia – over the crisis in Ukraine – have boomeranged.

By April, “Maidan” protests ousted Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovytch. U.S. missiles near Russia and NATO’s efforts to expand into former Warsaw Pact countries angered Russian President Vladimir Putin. Russia was blocked out of the G8.

The U.S. and the EU imposed sanctions on Russia when Crimea joined Russia after the Crimeans held a referendum to declare independence based on the right of nations to self-determination that is stipulated in Article 1 of the U.N. Charter.

The right to “self-determination” was applied when former Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia were divided, and when several small states like East Timor declared independence.

People in East Ukraine – 70 percent of who are ethnic Russians – felt violated when the Ukrainian Government decided to ban the Russian language from its official status.

They too invoked their right to self-determination and held a referendum to establish their own State.

The U.S. broadened sanctions when the Malaysian plane was downed in East Ukraine. No evidence surfaced from the black boxes, satellite images or OSCE inspectors’ revelations to prove culpability – unless it was a deliberate, pre-meditated act to blame a warring faction.

Also Western leaders claim that Russia provides weapons to the rebels in Ukraine. It may be true, but again the U.S. has not provided any evidence and Putin denies the charge. It’s like Iraq’s WMDs all over again.

More U.S. and EU sanctions against Russia froze the assets of Russians in power, banned their travel to EU countries, restricted Russian banks’ sales of debt or stocks in European markets, and targeted Russia’s defense, energy and financial sectors – to name a few.

On Aug. 7, in a radical response to Western sanctions, Russia retaliated by banning imports of beef, pork, poultry, fish, cheese, dairy products, fruit and vegetables from the European Union, United States, Australia, Canada, Norway, for one year.

Russia’s agriculture minister, Nikolai Fyodorov, said, “We now have the unique chance to improve our agricultural sector and make it more competitive.” He said that Russia has already identified other non-Western countries to import banned food items, and that he is confident that Russians will use locally available food.

From what we hear, European growth has slowed down; some countries creeping back into recession; U.S. investors have withdrawn over four billion dollars from Euro stocks; European farmers and Norway’s fishermen are affected and the EU has set aside 167 million dollars to compensate farmers for their loss of revenue; and companies that transport cargo to Russia have come to a halt.

While it is difficult to predict how this tit-for-tat will ultimately affect both Russian and Western economies, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said that the sanctions have, in fact, harmed the West more than they have hurt Russia. He said, “In politics, this is called shooting oneself in the foot.”

Also the toll on human suffering is increasing. The U.N. claims that the war in Ukraine has already killed over 2,500 and injured nearly 5,000 people.

According to UNHCR, over 730,000 Eastern Ukrainians have fled to Russia. The Ukrainian government acknowledges that over 300,000 of its citizens are displaced inside Ukraine.

The U.N. Charter and international law provide for settling conflicts between states through negotiations based on mutual respect for each other’s independence, sovereignty and non-interference in the internal affairs of the other.

This disaster can be resolved only if power-hungry world leaders renounce their arrogance and interventionism, and help Ukraine become a prosperous but neutral buffer nation between Western Europe and Russia. If not, the partition of Ukraine will be inevitable.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS-Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

South Korea is now a rule-abiding participant in the global economy. If North Korea traded its nuclear weapons programme for a peace treaty, security guarantees, and economic development assistance, it might be able to accomplish the same trick. Credit: yeowatzup/cc by 2.0

By John Feffer
WASHINGTON, May 14 2014 (IPS)

Small underdeveloped countries, unless they suddenly discover oil or gold, are at a distinct disadvantage in the global arena. If they play by the rules, they will remain underdeveloped. Over the last half-century, very few countries have managed to jump from the Third World to the club of richest nations.

South Korea is one of the exceptions. It managed to jump over the development gap with luck, determination, and a willingness to break the rules. The luck was South Korea’s strategic location during the Vietnam War, which provided myriad business opportunities for companies that supported the U.S. military.For better or worse, both Koreas have recognised at some deep level that the rules of the game are rigged in favour of the already powerful.

The determination was the grit of an entire generation of people who sacrificed so much to send their children to university and thereby transformed a country of farmers into a nation of engineers, doctors, and lawyers.

The third factor, a willingness to break the rules, is the most controversial. The modernising authoritarian governments of the 1960s and 1970s were not content with the country’s comparative advantage at that time, which was to exporting raw materials.

Instead, the state directed strategic investments into sectors that produced goods that South Korea, if it were following the rules, would simply have imported from other countries. In this way, South Korea built up its iron, automobile, and shipbuilding sectors, and became a global leader. This commitment to the latest technologies laid the groundwork for future innovations in computers, software, and communications.

North Korea, in its own way, was following a similar path. It refused to take a subordinate position in the Soviet-dominated economic partnership known as Comecon. Instead, Pyongyang broke the rules of the Communist system by building up its own manufacturing capabilities.

Shut out of the capitalist global economy, however, North Korea hit a brick wall with its go-it-alone effort, and its economy began to decline after the 1970s.

But Pyongyang eventually discovered another way to break the rules and achieve something like parity with the most powerful countries in the world. Since its economy was declining relative to its southern neighbour, North Korea could no longer allocate enough money to maintain a conventional military that could serve as a deterrent.

So, it opted for the cheaper alternative: nuclear weapons. To do that, however, North Korea had to violate international rules and challenge the United States.

While other regimes that attempted something similar have failed—Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Muammar Qaddafi in Libya—the Kim dynasty appears to have succeeded with its strategy at least at one level. Although its economy remains marginal and the country labors under considerable sanctions, the political system has remained more or less intact into the third generation.

The rule-breaking spirit that unites North and South Korea has left them in very different circumstances. North Korea is a pariah state, and even its closest ally China treats the country with a measure of suspicion. South Korea, meanwhile, is profoundly integrated into the global economy and a web of security relationships.

The negative consequences of breaking the rules are apparent with North Korea. The regime has survived but at the expense of the people. The negative consequences of breaking the rules for South Korea require a bit more scrutiny.

For instance, South Korea’s ambition to catch up to the wealthier countries within a single generation required some cutting of corners, and those shortcuts sometimes proved fatal.

For many years, construction disasters were common in the country—such as the Wawoo apartment building in 1970s, the Seongsu bridge disaster in 1994, and the collapse of the Sampoong department store that killed more than 500 people and was the world’s deadliest building collapse at that point since the Roman era. All three disasters were caused by construction companies cutting corners.

The recent Sewol ferry tragedy reveals a similar inattention to rules, this time safety regulations. Accidents happen. But often what separates inconvenience from catastrophe is the amount of time and money invested in disaster preparedness. In the case of the Sewol sinking, the crew was clearly ill prepared for dealing with what was in fact a slow-motion disaster.

It’s important not to indict an entire society for the misdeeds of a few. In many respects, both North and South Korea are far more rule-bound societies than, for instance, the more freewheeling United States. But, for better or worse, both Koreas have recognised at some deep level that the rules of the game are rigged in favour of the already powerful.

The challenge is to figure out how to translate rule breaking into legitimate status rather than an outlaw reputation. In this sense, breaking the rules should be a ladder used to scale the heights before being kicked away. South Korea is now a rule-abiding participant in the global economy.

If North Korea traded its nuclear weapons programme for a peace treaty, security guarantees, and economic development assistance, it might be able to accomplish the same trick.

But the greatest challenge still looms. At a time when global inequalities are increasing, North and South Korea have to figure out how they can together break the rules and overcome the enormous economic, political, and social gap between the two countries. The rule, as established by West and East Germany, is that the more powerful absorbs the weaker, effectively canceling out the latter.

If the two Koreas manage to reunify the country in a more equitable fashion, one that honours the contributions and perspectives of ordinary North Koreans rather than simply forces them to behave exactly like South Koreans, then the countries will have transformed their mutual rule-breaking traditions into a new source of legitimacy for the peninsula as a whole.

John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus.

President Barack Obama talks with Vice President Joe Biden before boarding Air Force One at Pittsburgh International Airport for a domestic trip, April 16, 2014. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Apr 22 2014 (IPS)

As he embarks Tuesday on a major trip through East Asia, U.S. President Barack Obama will be focused on reassuring anxious – albeit sometimes annoying – allies that Washington remains determined to deepen its commitment to the region.

Just how annoying some allies can be was underlined on the eve of his departure as Japan’s premier, Shinzo Abe, provoked renewed protests from both China and South Korea over his sending a ceremonial offering to the Yasukuni Shrine, the temple which honours Tokyo’s war dead, including senior officers responsible for atrocities committed by Japan in both countries during World War II.There is little question that security concerns, particularly those aroused by China’s recent assertiveness, will loom large.

As for anxiety, Asian commentators have made little secret of their concern that Russia’s annexation of Crimea and continuing tensions with Ukraine could set a precedent for a resurgent China, whose increasingly assertive behaviour in pressing its territorial claims in the East and South China seas has provoked a number of its neighbours to upgrade military ties to the U.S., as well as increase their own military spending.

Moreover, Obama, whose extrication from the deep hole his predecessor dug for him in the Greater Middle East has gone more slowly than had been hoped, has necessarily been distracted by the ongoing Ukraine crisis which, in turn, has prompted the U.S.’s NATO allies – especially the alliance’s newest member along Russia’s western periphery – to seek reassurances of their own.

“Can Mr. Obama afford to invest more time in Asia when he is bogged down with crises in Ukraine and Syria?” asked the New York Times’ “editorial observer”, Carol Giacomo, Monday.

Obama was originally scheduled to make this trip last fall, but he opted instead to stay home to deal with the Republican shutdown of the government – the latest example of the kind of partisan-driven action that has also sown doubts among Asian allies, as well as others, about the ability of Washington to follow through on its foreign commitments.

This week’s tour will begin with a state visit to Japan, during which he will meet with the troublesome Abe, whose personal visit last year to the Yasukeni Shrine drew a harsh public rebuke from Washington.

The main substantive agenda item on that leg of the trip, according to administration officials, will be to try to narrow differences on agricultural and automobile provisions in the pending 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement, the main pillar of the administration’s non-military “pivot” or “rebalancing” toward the Asia/Pacific launched in 2010.

From Tokyo, Obama will fly to Seoul where he will take up both trade and security issues, including a visit to the Combined Forces Command to address U.S. troops charged with helping defend South Korea against the nuclear-armed North.

Obama will then become the first U.S. president to visit Malaysia since Lyndon Johnson nearly 50 years ago, in part to launch a “Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative” and meet with Malaysia civil society activists.

His last stop will be the Philippines where, among other events, he will attend a state dinner hosted by President Benigno Aquino III and meet U.S. and Filipino soldiers and veterans to underline Washington’s longstanding military relationship.

While Obama and his entourage will emphasise the growing economic links that tie the U.S. to the region – if, for no other reason than to counter the widespread impression that Washington’s “pivot” is primarily aimed at increasing its military presence to “contain” China – there is little question that security concerns, particularly those aroused by China’s recent assertiveness, will loom large.

Indeed, China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea conflict with those of both Malaysia and the Philippines with which the U.S. has a 63-year-old mutual defence treaty and which has not been shy about contesting Beijing claims – both through Law of the Sea Convention and most recently by successfully resupplying a long-stranded Filipino naval vessel blockaded by Chinese naval forces.

Nor has Aquino been shy about tightening military links with Washington, inviting it to enhance its military presence in the archipelago and negotiating an “access agreement” that could eventually return U.S. forces to Subic Bay naval base from which they were essentially evicted in 1991 at the end of the Cold War.

Security concerns are likely to play at least as strong a role in the early part of Obama’s tour.

While North Korea’s nuclear arms programme and missile launches remain a major preoccupation for both South Korea and Japan, China’s claims in the East China Sea – and most recently its declaration last fall of an Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) – increased tensions with both countries, especially Japan which has scrambled warplanes in response to Chinese aircraft that entered the zone near the disputed Senkaku Islands, which China claims as the Diaoyu Islands.

Although Washington responded to Beijing’s declaration with its show of force – an overflight by B-52 bombers – it disappointed Tokyo, with which it signed a mutual-security treaty in 1952, by instructing U.S. commercial airliners to comply with China’s identification requirements.

Some Japanese officials and analysts have publicly criticised what they regard as an insufficiently assertive U.S. response to Russia’s absorption of Crimea despite a 1994 agreement between Washington, Kiev, London, and Moscow guaranteeing Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

They worry that Beijing may now be tempted to make a similar move on the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, just as some in Southeast Asia have expressed similar concerns about China’s intentions in the South China Sea.

But most U.S. analysts, including the administration, reject the analogy.

“We have longstanding alliances in Asia with most of the countries where the maritime territorial disputes with China are most severe, and we have stated time and again that we will meet our alliance commitments,” said Kenneth Lieberthal, a Brookings Institution expert who served as President Bill Clinton’s senior Asia adviser, last week.

“We don’t have any such commitments to Ukraine. We don’t have an alliance. We have never assured Ukraine’s territorial integrity by threatening the use of force…It’s a different situation, and I think the Chinese are very clear about those differences.”

Alan Romberg, a former top State Department expert who now directs the East Asia programme at the Stimson Centre here, agreed. “It’s a totally different situation,” he told IPS.

Besides the lack of any defence agreement, “if you look at the overall importance of East Asia to the U.S. and global peace and security,” he added, “there’s also no comparison.”

Obama, who will travel to China in the fall, has made clear that he nonetheless wants to avoid unnecessarily antagonising Beijing and has tried to tamp down tensions between it and Tokyo, in part by trying to dissuade leaders in both countries from stoking growing nationalist sentiments among their citizens.

Washington has also tried hard in recent months to reconcile Abe and South Korean President Park Geun-Hye – to the extent of personally convening a summit with the two nationalist leaders on the sidelines of a nuclear security conference at The Hague last month.

But Abe’s latest bequest to the notorious shrine, particularly coming on the eve of Obama’s trip, is unlikely to help matters.

“The U.S. can be a leader, a catalyst, and a stabiliser in the region, but it can’t do it all by itself,” noted Romberg. “It’s important that other countries, particularly allies, coordinate and cooperate, and not spend their time nattering at each other all the time.”

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

A new ski resort opened in North Korea last year is drawing many tourists. Credit: Koryo Tours, Beijing.

By Ahn Mi Young
SEOUL, Feb 27 2014 (IPS)

If the North Korea of the 1990s was seen as a starving nation that produced an exodus of hungry people, then the picture should be even gloomier now – six years after it stopped receiving South Korea’s generous aid. But it’s not. The nation of 24 million people, widely said to be the most secretive in the world and a nuclear threat, appears to have weathered the years well.

Today, more people are reported to be better off. Many are engaged in trade. Its communist regime, inherited by the 30-something supreme leader of North Korea Kim Jong-Un after his father’s death in 2011, is actively wooing foreign investors and tourists, and introducing reforms. Pyongyang has even softened its attitude towards Seoul to resume talks.

North Korea has been gradually weaned off South Korean food and goods.Ordinary North Koreans no longer depend on rations from Pyongyang as these have more than halved in the past years.

From 1998 to 2007, the liberal government in Seoul used to supply some 400,000 tonnes of rice, large quantities of milk powder and medicines for infants, cement and construction equipment and fertilisers to North Korea each year. Truckloads of cargo used to cross the heavily-fortified border that has separated the two Koreas since the 1950 to 1953 Korean war.

Each month, thousands of South Korean tourists used to visit the North’s scenic Mount Kumgang, yielding millions of dollars for Pyongyang.

But ties between the two Koreas almost froze after a conservative government took office in Seoul in 2008. South Korea halted all trade with North Korea, and most investment, in May 2010 after the sinking of one of its warships, which Seoul attributed to Pyongyang.

The loss of Seoul as its largest donor resulted in Pyongyang becoming more dependent on China, its largest benefactor and only ally. According to the Korea International Trade Association (KITA), from 2012 to 2013, bilateral trade between China and North Korea increased 10 percent to 6.54 billion dollars.

North Korea has also been forced to become more self-reliant.

There are more now of the so-called “middle class” businessmen, including about 240,000 North Koreans who own 50,000-100,000 dollars worth of assets like apartments, according to the Chosun Ilbo newspaper published from Seoul.

“These new middle classes indicate that Pyongyang allows farmers or ordinary people to do business in the market. Earlier, doing business was unthinkable unless they proved their loyalty to the communist party,” an unnamed Seoul official was quoted as saying in the newspaper.

North Korean defectors in South Korea explain that these well off people are usually former farmers, traders or diplomats. A recent Media Research survey of 200 North Korean defectors indicates that at least 80 percent of ordinary North Koreans are engaged in local trade.

Ordinary North Koreans no longer depend on rations from Pyongyang as these have more than halved in the past years. The so-called “super-class apartments” in the North Korean capital are sold at rates of 100,000 dollars each.

According to the World Food Programme (WFP), fewer North Koreans now say they need more food. Its 2013 survey says 46 percent of respondents have “adequate” food compared to 26 percent in the 2012 survey.

If all this is any indication, then the suspension of aid from Seoul created only short-term difficulties for the North, but in the long run it helped reform the economy.

With no food or aid from the South, workers who used to handle these supplies lost their jobs and had to find something else to do. “Many of them became sellers who are hawking in one market after another,” said Joo Sung-Ha, a Seoul-based North Korea expert.

Also, as the U.S. mounts pressure on China to make North Korea denounce nuclear weapons, Pyongyang will have to continue looking for other sources of funds, say analysts.

Already, North Korea has launched a series of reforms. In June 2012, it introduced a “family farm” system, wherein each farm family gives 30 percent of its harvest to the government and keeps the rest as its private wealth.

North Korea also announced the construction of 14 economic zones, where foreign investors can do business.

This January, a new ski resort was opened in the western city of Wonsan where foreign tourists can mingle with locals and drink European beers and even Coca-Cola.

Pyongyang has also proposed resumption of talks with Seoul. This month, for the first time after 2007, high-level officials from the two Koreas sat down to discuss the reunion of families separated during the 1950 to 1953 war.

Kim Jong-Un has reason to reform. He leads a nation that is perceived as a nuclear threat to the world. To reinforce his legitimacy, he must reduce the country’s heavy dependence on China and try to open up the economy.

But can such reforms bring about real change?

Kim Jong-Un, who succeeded his father Kim Jong-Il and grandfather Kim Il-Sung, is being accused of encouraging cult loyalty to keep his family in power. Last year, he purged the country’s number two leader, his uncle Jang Seong-Thack, executing him on treason charges.

“Kim is now terrifying the nation by sending hundreds of Mr. Jang’s men to concentration camps,” according to Cho Myong-Chull, a lawmaker in South Korea who used to be a professor at North Korea’s Kim Il-Sung University in Pyongyang.

Many North Koreans say their government cares more about itself than feeding its people. Around 90 percent of those surveyed by Media Research feel there is a wide gap between the rich and the poor today due to the emergence of the new rich. Industries have been hit by lack of electricity.

But at the same time, more North Koreans are getting to know about the outside world. The Media Research survey of North Korean defectors finds that 70 percent of them had already seen South Korean TV dramas and heard K-pop songs while living in North Korea.

More than three million North Koreans are believed to own cell phones. Most defectors settled in South Korea speak to their family members back home through mobile phones.

There are more than 26,100 North Korean defectors living in South Korea. They say that in the 1990s they left home to escape hunger. But since 2007, more left in search of a better life and better education for their children.

In recent years, North Korea has tried to woo back defectors instead of persecuting them. In fact, fewer people have left for South Korea since Kim Jong-Un took power, according to the South Korean Ministry of Unification.

A very Shakespearean epic is unraveling today in Pyongyang.

This particular tragedy involves a son and his uncle by marriage. There are plots and counter-plots. There are tragic reversals of fortune, dramatic denunciations, and a rising tide of blood. And North Korea’s official pronouncements on the case sound very Bard-like in their ornate archaisms. No one performs Shakespeare in the theatres of Pyongyang. Instead, he is enacted in the corridors of power.The treachery runs much deeper, and thus the story becomes suitably Shakespearean. It turns out that Jang Sung Taek had likely been plotting a coup since the 1990s.

Let’s start at the end and move backwards. The current leader of North Korea Kim Jong Eun, the third Kim in the dynastic succession stretching back to his grandfather Kim Il Sung, recently executed his uncle Jang Song Taek along with several of his coterie. Some of the crimes listed in the official condemnation seem rather trivial.

Jang didn’t clap hard enough during the elevation of his nephew. He ordered the placement of an inscription from Kim Jong Eun in a less prominent, shaded location. For this he was considered “worse than a dog” who “perpetrated thrice-cursed acts of treachery” and was sentenced to death by overkill before a machine-gun firing squad?

No, the treachery runs much deeper, and thus the story becomes more suitably Shakespearean. It turns out that Jang Sung Taek had likely been plotting a coup since the 1990s. When top North Korean ideologist Hwang Jang Yop defected in 1997, he didn’t provide a full explanation for why he left his high position and exposed his family back home to certain risk of punishment.

Now it has come out that Hwang told the South Korean authorities confidentially that he’d been working with Jang Sung Taek to eliminate the North Korean leader at the time, Kim Jong Il (son of the country’s founder and father of the current power holder). The plot had been sniffed out, and Hwang ran.

Co-conspirator Jang, however, remained behind. For the last 15 years, he bided his time. There are now rumours that he was working with China, perhaps to bring one of Kim Jong Eun’s brothers to the throne. He was accumulating power and money to mount his challenge. He’d clearly lost faith in the system, so no wonder it was difficult for him to clap with enthusiasm.

Plots and conspiracies are not alien to North Korea. Kim Il Sung, the founding father of the system, arrived in the divided country in 1945 alongside a contingent of Soviet troops. He brought with him a couple hundred guerrilla fighters that had joined him in Soviet exile during the war. He was only 33 years old (not much older than his grandson would be on taking power).

On returning to Pyongyang, the aspiring leader faced much larger Communist factions led by more experienced partisans. But he was no hesitating Hamlet. Over the years, Kim Il Sung managed to purge, execute, and otherwise sideline three rival groups: Communists that had been fighting in the north, Communists from the south that journeyed northward after partition, and Communists aligned with the Chinese.

What emerged from this bloodbath was a ruling corps of families connected to his original team of guerrilla fighters. They have been running North Korea ever since.

Jang Song Taek did not come from such a distinguished lineage. He was a member of the elite, to be sure, and studied at Kim Il Sung University. But when he met Kim Kyong Hui at university, her father Kim Il Sung opposed the match because of Jang’s outsider status. Nevertheless, the two eventually married, and Jang went on to become a close confidante of the chosen successor, Kim Jong Il.

The picture of Jang in the West is bipolar. On the one hand, he was a henchman of the system: he “regularly supervised routine audits of state-owned enterprises, presided over executions and incarcerations and dismissed thousands of officials during his career.”

On the other hand, he was considered a “reformer” who supported an economic shift toward the market and was reportedly behind the reduction of labour camps and the release of political prisoners. It’s possible that the great famine of the 1990s – and the deaths of so many Party faithful among the hundreds of thousands who perished — pushed Jang into covert disobedience. In any case, he was engaged in a dangerous game, attempting to soften the edges of the regime even as he plotted to overthrow it.

It’s never been safe in North Korea to be considered a “reformer,” no matter how high you’ve climbed in the system. But often those who have disappeared from the ranks of leadership for being on the wrong side of a policy shift have reappeared after a period of internal exile. Pak Pong Ju, rumored to be in favour of Chinese-style economic reforms, lost his premiership in 2007 and disappeared from view. But he reappeared in 2010 and regained the title of premier in 2013.

Despite his connections to Jang, Pak is still alive and appearing at state functions. So is Jang’s wife, who divorced him shortly before the execution. So, it would seem that the purge in Pyongyang is limited to those identified as coup plotters rather than those considered to be “reformers.”

Indeed, on the day of Jang’s dismissal, North Korea went ahead with a deal with China to build a high-speed rail link that will pass through Pyongyang, and it has continued to back the expansion of export-processing zones. Pyongyang is still proposing negotiations with South Korea over their joint economic zone in Kaesong. And North Korean officials have maintained their openness to negotiations with the United States on security issues, without preconditions.

The United States should not use the execution of Jang Song Taek, however brutal it was, to reinforce its isolationist policy toward North Korea. Our approach of “strategic patience” only encourages greater obduracy in Pyongyang and puts the reform-minded on potentially dangerous ground. The case against Jang reminds us that even those near the very top of the North Korean pyramid harbour hopes of change, if only circumstances were to become more propitious.

Like Richard the Third in Shakespeare’s retelling, Jang plotted, fought, and lost. The death of the “bloody dog” at the end of the 1593 play drew a curtain across the War of the Roses and ushered in the “smooth-faced peace” of the House of Tudor. Except that the reign of the Tudors was not a “smooth-faced peace” at all. It produced such monstrosities as Henry the Eighth and his succession of headless ex-wives, not to mention considerable religious strife. Even the Tudor queen to whom Shakespeare gave fulsome praise, Elizabeth the First, had much blood on her hands, her cousin’s among others.

Kim the Third might seem, with his Falstaffian girth, more a figure of humour than a figure to be feared. Appearances have proven deceptive. He has quickly demonstrated that, like his grandfather, he will act decisively and ruthlessly to maintain his perch.

A future plot might one day dethrone him. But the odds have just gone up in his favour. Washington would do well to reconstruct its North Korea policy around the reality that Kim the Third will not depart the stage any time soon.

U.S policymakers indulge in a variety of child’s play called collapsism. They close their eyes when they want a particularly despised adversary to go away. And poof! Kim Jong Eun’s North Korea eventually disappears. Raul Castro’s Cuba eventually vanishes.

Except that they haven’t.Washington is locked in a foreign policy drama that only Samuel Becket could have written: a lot of waiting and nothing much happening.

Of course, the United States doesn’t simply ignore North Korea and Cuba. Both countries have been under stringent economic sanctions and a tight military cordon practically since their creation. But attempts at military rollback like the Bay of Pigs fiasco are history. Today, other than tightening the screws from time to time, Washington has largely been content with a waiting game.

Even diplomatic engagement is often predicated on expectations of eventual collapse. For instance, when the Clinton administration negotiated the Agreed Framework with North Korea in 1994, it sold the agreement to Congress with the argument that the regime in Pyongyang wouldn’t be around by the time the United States finished building the two promised light-water nuclear reactors.

Kim Il Sung died, and so did his son, Kim Jong-Il. But the regime lives on. In Cuba, meanwhile, Fidel Castro stepped aside in favour of his brother Raul. But the regime lives on. And Washington is locked in a foreign policy drama that only Samuel Becket could have written: a lot of waiting and nothing much happening.

There’s no point, according to the prevailing wisdom among collapsists, to engage with North Korea or Cuba as long as the governments there are tottering on the edge. This was the argument also used with China in 1989 and with Iran during the Green movement uprising in 2009. Both those countries stabilised themselves through the time-honoured approach of repression.

John Feffer, Courtesy of FPIF.

Collapsism has largely given way to engagement with China. And after the recent election of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, tentative signs of U.S.-Iranian rapprochement have emerged.

North Korea and Cuba, however, remain the Teetering Twosome. In Pyongyang, the young leader Kim Jong Eun has defied early predictions that a Swiss education and a fondness for basketball could somehow combine to create a Gorbachev of the East. After a long-range missile test last year and a third nuclear test this year—not to mention his shake-up of the high-ranking military staff and his hardball negotiations with South Korea—Kim has signaled that for now he’s not Mr. Perestroika.

Pundits and policymakers have now concluded that, having declared itself a nuclear power, North Korea has given up on the strategy of trading its bomb-making capabilities for a golden ticket of entry into the international community. The Obama administration failed to advance the promising initiatives that had gained steam in the last years of the Bush administration.

Last year, on leap day, the United States and North Korea came to an agreement trading food aid for a moratorium on uranium enrichment and missile tests as well as a return of inspectors to the plutonium facility at Yongbyon. North Korea’s subsequent satellite launch scotched that deal. Pyongyang recently rejected a non-aggression pact that Secretary of State John Kerry offered in exchange for denuclearisation.

Engagement with North Korea is major political risk in Washington, and the Obama team certainly doesn’t want to expose its flank when it’s making headway with another adversary, Iran. So, what’s left? Waiting for collapse.

Or, to paraphrase a recent RAND report that is all the rage among Korea hands, preparing for collapse. For myriad reasons, from economic decline to increased flow of information into the country, the RAND report concludes that North Korea is again close to the edge.

Although the date of collapse remains frustratingly obscure, the United States and South Korea in particular should ramp up their contingency planning. This planning, as outlined in the report, boils down to: sending in ground forces at the first sign of instability, securing weapons of mass destruction, providing humanitarian aid to discourage out-migration, and putting down all signs of military resistance.

Making plans is an admirable exercise. No one wants to be caught with pants down if the Kim Jong Eun regime suddenly implodes. But by suggesting that collapse and intervention form the most likely future scenario—not if, but when—the RAND report implicitly recommends that the U.S. and South Korean governments should abandon diplomatic engagement that might lead to a peaceful and perhaps more gradual rapprochement on the Korean peninsula (a “far less likely outcome,” according to the report).

The furthest the report goes in the direction of diplomacy is to suggest that Washington and Seoul would be wise to sit down with Beijing to coordinate a division of responsibilities in the case of collapse.

Worse, by proposing to reshape policy in Washington and Seoul around an imminent collapse/intervention scenario that requires early action for its success, the RAND report encourages policymakers and intelligence services not only to seek out signs of instability in Pyongyang but encourage them as well.

“If a collapse really is likely at some point in the future,” author Bruce Bennett writes in the report, “actions to prepare for it are really more likely to accelerate a collapse rather than cause it.”

The situation with Cuba is slightly different. Instead of a nuclear programme to attract the attention of Washington, there is geographic proximity. The Obama administration made some moves toward an easing of the tight embargo on the island, for instance lifting some restrictions on travel and remittances and beginning negotiations on the resumption of direct mail service after 50 years. An earlier piece of legislation allowed states to negotiate agricultural export deals with Cuba, which has sent over 4.3 billion dollars  in food from 2001 through 2012.

Further attempts to chip away at the blockade, however, have come up against significant political resistance. Republican Party moderates once indicated a willingness to reconsider. As Richard Lugar said in 2009, “We must recognise the ineffectiveness of our current policy and deal with the Cuban regime in a way that enhances U.S. interests.” But Lugar got tea-partied out of the Senate, and Republican Party moderates are an endangered species.

The collapsists have not secured the kind of consensus in Washington that seems to exist around North Korea. They face U.S. business interests and Cuban-American entrepreneurs that want fewer trade restrictions with the island and a cross-section of the policymaking community that prefers the stable status quo to a risky collapse scenario.

Unlike North Korea, Cuba is close to home, so spillover effects of regime change like refugee flows can’t be blithely ignored. So, the Cuba hawks continue to wait and watch for Raul Castro’s economic reforms to peter out, for Venezuelan aid to dry up, and for the long-awaited collapse to happen.

North Korea and Cuba cannot be simply wished away. They have both survived economic squeeze and military punch. Yes, some day, things will change dramatically in Pyongyang and Havana. The questions are: how will they change and what can be done to ensure a minimum of suffering and a maximum of public participation? Sudden collapse, followed by outside military intervention, is not the best-case scenario in this regard.

We’ve been stuck in a Samuel Beckett play for some time. The last thing we want at this point is a Quentin Tarantino ending.

John Feffer is co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus.

Over 700 people were arrested in a protest on the Brooklyn Bridge in October 2011. Credit: Paul Stein/CC by 2.0

By Lucy Westcott
NEW YORK, Jun 17 2013 (IPS)

Stories of struggle can be found all over the world, from a law classroom in Oklahoma and the brutal borderlands between the United States and Mexico to a Bedouin village in Jordan and wedding parties in Morocco, as the 24th Human Rights Watch Film Festival is showcasing.

Some films cover subjects that have been widely reported, such as the Occupy movement and Anita Hill’s sexual harassment case against Supreme Court judge Clarence Thomas, but they nevertheless delve beneath the surface, bringing fresh perspectives to well-known events.

In New York, the festival runs through the end of the week in two Manhattan cinemas. The festival revolves around themes such as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights, disability rights and migration. It has a separate category this year for U.S. human rights issues."The audience was really upset and moved by how far this country has gone in suppressing protests."
-- John Biaggi

“We don’t want anyone to ever think that we’re giving our country a pass,” John Biaggi, director of the festival, told IPS.

“99 Percent – The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film” (Audrey Ewell, Aaron Aites, Lucian Read, Nina Krstic, 2012), which presents the story of the Occupy movement, is part of this theme and has been of particular interest to moviegoers, Biaggi said.

“People have reacted very strongly to [the] film in a positive way…the audience was really upset and moved by how far this country has gone in suppressing protests,” he said.

Remembering Occupy

Kindled by the Arab Spring and a summer of European unrest, the Occupy movement began in downtown New York City on Sep. 17, 2011 as Americans felt the rush of revolution take hold in Zuccotti Park.

Filmmakers Audrey Ewell and Aaron Aites told IPS that the film was set up as an experiment with 100 collaborators.

“We went to Zuccotti Park and saw how everyone congregated; [there was] a pastiche quality, a collage-like element, with people talking about a patchwork of issues,” Ewell said.

The filmmakers issued press releases and created a web site asking for collaborators on their project, with a large response. While some people who signed up were inexperienced, Ewell and Aites ensured that an experienced filmmaker always led shoots.

It wasn’t a “free-for-all”, Ewell said; rather, it was a highly coordinated and organised process between coasts.

“A lot of people just wanted to go and film a rally or a march and that was fine,” Ewell said. The filmmakers wanted collaborators to be able to choose the extent of their contributions.

Ewell and Aites became interested in the Occupy movement on Oct. 1, 2011, the day 740 protesters were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge. They noticed that the mainstream media wasn’t covering the event at all.

“I was so disturbed by that…I grabbed my camera and went down,” Ewell said. After the Brooklyn Bridge arrests, the media switched from a blackout to a circus, Aites added.

“Now the media writes history,” Ewell said.

The primary goal of “99 Percent”, the filmmakers said, was to present an accurate history of what really happened with Occupy, especially for those who didn’t have access to footage of the movement, whether on television or the Internet, at the time protests and demonstrations were taking place.

Invisible tales of hardship

South of the U.S. border, “The Undocumented” (Marco Williams, 2013) examined the lives of those working on the border, watching hawk-eyed for migrants and tracking the patterns of soles in the sand.

Deaths of border-crossing migrants have increased since the 1990s, with hundreds of bodies found in the scorching Arizona desert every year.

As the immigration reform debate continues in the U.S. senate, “The Undocumented” shows the lengths some migrants will go to achieve their dream of coming to America, even to the extent of ultimately losing their lives.

“Fatal Assistance” (Raoul Peck, 2012) revealed the complications of humanitarian aid following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, uncovering the destructive decisions made by foreign governments and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

Haiti received 5 billion dollars of aid money in 18 months, but the funds were not allocated rationally, Peck, former minister of culture in Haiti, argued. Two years after the devastation, by which time many outside Haiti cease to remember the earthquake, the rebuilding continues.

On the other side of the world, “Camp 14 – Total Control Zone” (Mark Wiese, 2012) followed a former North Korean labour camp inmate, Shin Don-Hyuk, as he adjusts to a new and normal life in South Korea.

Two hundred thousand people live in North Korean camps. Shin was born in one, his first memory of a public execution he watched with his mother.

Shin’s story of escape, which he now travels the world to tell, seem almost unbelievable, but footage smuggled out of North Korea by activists of a violent interrogation show that the horror is indeed real.

“Energising people who come and see the films, to get involved and to take action, that’s really what the festival is about,” Biaggi said.

The Human Rights Watch Film Festival runs until Jun. 23. Co-presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Centre and the IFC Centre, the festival has included a number of New York premieres.

Human Rights Watch recently established a disability rights division, which accompanies the festival’s dedication to screening films that focus on the issue of disability. The group estimates that there are around 1 billion disabled people across the world.

More films showing this week include “The Act of Killing”, executive produced by Errol Morris and Werner Herzog and directed by Joshua Oppenheimer, which shows a group of Indonesian former killers re-enacting their crimes in by mirroring films they enjoy, and “Camera/Woman”, about a divorced Moroccan woman who films wedding parties in Casablanca.

The U.N. Security Council unanimously adopts resolution 2094 (2013), strongly condemning the Feb. 12 nuclear test by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and imposing new sanctions on that country, Mar. 7, 2013. Credit: UN Photo/Evan Schneider

By George Gao
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 3 2013 (IPS)

U.S. President Barack Obama is set to host his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on Jun. 7-8 for their first bilateral meeting as heads of state. Figuring on their agenda is how to address a precarious North Korea, which is armed with a small nuclear arsenal and vying for a bigger one.

In the past seven years, North Korea has suffered a spate of U.N. Security Council sanctions, the most recent of which was co-drafted by the U.S. and China in March under resolution 2094. The resolution prohibits the transfer of any materials and financial assets into North Korea that may contribute to its nuclear programme. The resolution also prevents some luxury goods from entering the country.

But in general, U.N. sanctions have yet to halt North Korea’s nuclear developments, much less disarm its nuclear arsenal.

“Clearly, U.N. sanctions have not been effective, as evidenced by North Korea’s continued development and testing of nuclear weapons since sanctions were first introduced in 2006,” said Charles K. Armstrong, a professor of history at Columbia University and the director of the Center for Korean Research.

Sanctions are seen as provocative by Pyongyang and are often met with pugnacious threats against the U.S. and its allies, including promises to burn down Washington in a “sea of fire”. Armstrong told IPS that a diplomatic approach instead was possible, albeit very difficult given how far apart the U.S. and North Korea have drifted on the nuclear issue.

“North Korea has declared it will never give up its nuclear weapons, (and) the U.S. insists Pyongyang must give them up,” he said. “For now, the best we can hope for is an agreement to freeze North Korea’s programme where it is, while diplomatic negotiations work toward reducing and ultimately eliminating weapons on the Korean peninsula.”

According to the U.S. policy of “strategic patience”, Pyongyang must first reconfirm its commitment to denuclearise before Washington opens up for dialogue.

Part of the solution lies in China, which has maintained diplomatic and economic relations with North Korea as its neighbour to the north. Trade between the two countries has reportedly grown in the past decade, or at least up until a Chinese banking decision curtailed financial ties in early May.

China and the U.S. have different visions of the Asia-Pacific moving forward. China hopes for stability on the Korean peninsula and has taken a less coercive approach to North Korea.

Other issues plaguing the U.S-China relationship include security violations via cyberspace, of which both countries have accused the other of carrying out and instigating; as well as the U.S.’s “rebalancing” or “pivot” of military forces away from the Middle East and into the Asia-Pacific.

At The Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore on Saturday, U.S. Secretary of Defence Chuck Hagel announced a variety of military assets that his country is planning on diverting into the region, including submarines, long-range bombers, carrier strike groups, F-22 and F-35 fighter jets and ground troops. Hagel also boasted forthcoming laser and drone technologies, the latter of which can now take off from aircraft carriers.

Chinese General Yao Yunzhu rebuked Hagel’s speech and alleged that the U.S.’s military build-up in the Asia-Pacific was an attempt to counter China’s rising international influence and offset China’s increasing military capabilities, reported the Guardian.

But North Korea’s nuclear developments, missile launches and threats of late has irritated China as well, said Stephan Haggard, a professor of Korea-Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego.

On May 7, the state-run Bank of China cut off financial ties with North Korea’s Foreign Trade Bank, which is North Korea’s main international business liaison. And on May 21, during a bilateral meeting with North Korean envoy Choe Ryong Hae, President Xi “reaffirmed China’s stance of denuclearisation on the Korean Peninsula” and called for North Korea to return to six-party talks, reported China’s Xinhua News Agency.

“On the opportunity side, this issue might be a way for the U.S. and China to cooperate, given that they have common interests in the denuclearisation of the peninsula,” Haggard told IPS.

North Korea’s last nuclear test shows that it is on the cusp of having an efficient nuclear device, warned Leon V. Sigal, director of the Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project at the Social Science Research Council.

“The Chinese position’s been clear for a long time. They absolutely do not want the North Koreans to test longer-range missiles and nuclear weapons. They understand the reactions of the nuclear states and South Korea will adversely affect Chinese security,” he told IPS.

“The problem is that they’re not prepared to bring North Korea to its knees… Their influence is therefore limited because the North Koreans know they don’t want to topple the regime,” he said.

If North Korea falls, its refugees may pour across the Yalu River and over the Sino-Korean border. A collapsed regime may also lead South Korea, a U.S. ally, to take over the peninsula, bring U.S. presence right into China’s backyard and ratchet tensions between the two superpowers.

“The U.S. and China have to work out further accommodations… It’s not only the key to the North Korean problem, but even more, it’s the key to the larger Asian security problem,” said Sigal.

Crowds line the red carpet to greet film stars at the Okinawa film festival. Credit: Courtesy Suvendrini Kakuchi

By Suvendrini Kakuchi
GINOWAN, Japan, Apr 10 2013 (IPS)

The island of Okinawa has long been known as the base camp for a majority of the United States’ 50,000 troops in Japan. But now, against the backdrop of escalating nuclear threats from North Korea, local leaders are pushing hard to promote this island – the largest of 60 that comprise Japan’s southern prefecture – and its surrounding islets as a lucrative site for commercial enterprises.

“Okinawa, with its unique culture and natural surroundings, wants to expand its tourism industry and become an Asian hub for education and entertainment,” Shigenobu Asato, chairman of the Convention and Tourism Bureau, said in his keynote address at the Okinawa Film Festival that ended Mar. 30.

“The Okinawan slogan now is ‘Be Innovative’,” he added, referring to official efforts to push investment in entertainment and entrepreneurial activity on this island.

Under the terms of the U.S.-Japan Mutual Cooperation and Security Treaty Okinawa is home to two-thirds of U.S. military and naval bases in Japan and has long played a critical role in East Asian security. For the U.S., the archipelago fanning out into the Pacific Ocean towards Taiwan is the perfect spot from which to observe – and contain – China’s naval presence in the region.

The island witnessed the only land battle fought between Japan and the U.S. in World War II that ended with Japan’s defeat in 1945. Though the U.S. handed control over the island back to Japan in 1972, it retained bases on 18 percent of the territory, a situation that over 90 percent of Okinawans continue to protest today.

Striking an upbeat note about an incendiary topic, Asato outlined a host of new strategies developed by local governments in the prefecture—such as plans to establish university campuses and transform the island into an Asian entertainment centre — as priority goals in a bid to replace Okinawa’s dependence on military bases.

Currently, U.S. military and naval bases lease large swaths of land, mostly in central and southern Okinawa where 80 percent of its 1.5 million residents live. The rent, which amounts to a little less than six percent of the prefecture’s gross income, supports local landowners and allows those areas hosting camps to receive large government subsidies: In 2012, central government subsidies for Okinawa amounted to over two billion dollars; in 2013, the number was estimated at 3.1 billion dollars.

The U.S.’ military presence has shored up the island’s struggling economy: Okinawa’s per capita income is roughly 20,000 dollars, the lowest in Japan. The bases have not only provided rent and subsidies but have created a market for entertainment venues, bars, restaurants and taxi services for military personnel.

But the resulting social and political costs have been high.

The security cooperation treaty brought with it impunity for U.S. servicemen based here. A wave of violent crimes – including several rapes of local women — by U.S. personnel, combined with environmental damage and pollution, pushed many more Okinawans into the ranks of the anti-military base protest movement.

With opposition heating up since last November, local officials have been working hard to “wean” Okinawa’s economy off the military bases.

The city of Ginowan, home to military stations like the controversial Futenma Air Base, is one of the locations in urgent need of alternative forms of development and income.

Ginowan Mayor Atsushi Sakima used the recent film festival as a platform to present plans for the establishment of the Ginowan City Entertainment Village, an ambitious project being done in partnership with Yoshimoto Kogyo Company, a major mainland-based player in the entertainment industry. The project aims to establish art schools and creative spaces as alternatives to military sites.

Enter geopolitics

But Okinawans’ aspirations for a military-free island must contend with a hostile political climate. On top of North Korean threats, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s conservative administration faces difficult territorial and fishing disputes with China and South Korea.

“Making peace with the Okinawans has become a crucial domestic challenge for Abe. Okinawa (has been) a vexing issue for Japanese prime ministers, (none of whom) have made much breakthrough,” Tetsuo Kawakami, professor of international relations at Takushoku University, told IPS.

He believes the hawkish prime minister is especially keen to win Okinawa’s support for his attempts to change Japan’s “peace” constitution that “renounces war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes” under Article 9.

Abe argues that constitutional revision regarding this article is crucial to guarantee Japan some protection and make provisions for self-defense as tensions rise in the Asia Pacific region.

The latest annual Diplomatic Blue book report unveiled last week by Japan’s Foreign Ministry stressed the need for strengthening the Japan-U.S. Security Alliance to contain “threats” to Japan’s land, sea and airspace and the lives of its people.

The report cites territorial clashes with China over the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, claimed by both sides. Known in China as Diayou, the chain of uninhabited islets is rumoured to shelter large deposits of natural gas. Though the territory has long fallen under Japanese jurisdiction, South Korea, which refers to the islands as Dokdo, and Taiwan, calling them the Tiaoyutai Islands, have also laid claim to the archipelago.

Set against this tense background, the Japanese government made the landmark decision last week to publicise its timeline to return land leased to the United States military near the Kadena Air Base in Okinawa to the municipal government.

The deal was reached last year, based on the condition that U.S. troops would be transferred overseas. Abe has attempted to accelerate the process with Washington with the intention of nudging Okinawa to agree to the relocation of the Futenma Air Base in the densely populated city of Ginowa to Nago, a picturesque seaside resort.

Miko Higa, who heads the Okinawa-based Research Institute for Peace and Security, told IPS the government’s proposal to return the land at the Kadena base is welcome, but will face opposition if linked to the concept of relocation.

“The core issue facing Japan’s security is building trust with Okinawa. That process will take long and should not be linked to Abe’s defence plans that aim to strengthen military relations with the United States, which will be a heavy burden on Okinawa,” he said.

A Mar. 23 editorial in Okinawa’s leading newspaper ‘Ryukyu Shinpo’ expressed similar sentiments, describing Abe’s proposed plan as “nothing less than a denial of democracy in Japan”.

Now, according to Higa, “Abe faces an excruciating gamble” – and so do the people of Okinawa, who may only experience peace at the expense of economic security.

(END)

With all sides seeming to climb further up the escalatory ladder over the last several days, defusing the ongoing crisis on the Korean Peninsula — let alone persuading Pyongyang to give up its nuclear arsenal as it once promised to do — looks daunting.

Indeed, the latest moves by the major players – the two Koreas and the United States – evoked new appeals Tuesday by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for calm to be restored.The concern is that there will be a stray shell from either side that could set in motion a chain of events that would be tragic.

“The crisis has gone too far,” said the former South Korean foreign minister during a news conference in Andorra. “Things must begin to calm down; there is no need for the DPRK (North Korea) to be on a collision course with the international community. Nuclear threats are not a game.”

Ban was reacting specifically to recent threats by Pyongyang and specifically its announcement Tuesday that it was re-activating its nuclear complex at Yongbyon that U.S. intelligence officials believe had extracted enough plutonium to produce as many as eight nuclear bombs, at least two of which are likely to have been used in underground tests in 2006 and 2009.

The complex also includes a sophisticated uranium enrichment plant that could provide a second fuel source for building bombs. It was partially dismantled seven years ago in a denuclearisation-for-aid deal negotiated under the auspices of the long-stalled Six-Party Talks that included the two Koreas, the U.S., China, Japan, and Russia.

“This work will be put into practice without delay,” according to a statement released by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), which also stressed that the complex would be used for the generation of electricity as well as “for bolstering up the nuclear armed force both in quality and quantity till the world is denuclearised”.

For its part, the United States sent a second guided-missile destroyer to join the USS John McCain, whose systems are designed to shoot down ballistic missiles shortly after they are launched, which was ordered into the region’s waters Monday.

Those deployments came amidst ongoing annual joint U.S.-South Korean manoeuvres that have so far included, among other well-publicised features, fly-overs by B-52 bombers and mock bombing runs close to the North’s border by two B-2 Stealth bombers that flew directly from the U.S.

The exercises, code-named Foal Eagle, appear to have provoked the latest escalation in tensions that were already at near-record highs after the U.N. Security Council imposed new economic and diplomatic sanctions against Pyongyang last month.

The Council, which included China, the North’s closest ally and its main source of fuel and food assistance, voted unanimously to impose the sanctions in response to Pyongyang’s Feb. 12 underground nuclear test, its third since 2006.

Since the sanctions’ approval, which co-incided with the start of the “Foal Eagle” exercises, the regime headed by the 29-year-old Kim Jong-un, the grandson of the DPRK’s founder, has claimed that Washington and Seoul were planning a nuclear attack against the North.

Since then, it has, among other measures, launched its own manoeuvres, renounced the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War, cut off “hot lines” between Pyongyang and Seoul, threatened a “pre-emptive nuclear strike” against South Korea, the U.S., and its bases in the Pacific, and, more recently, declared that it has entered a “state of war” with the South.

While the administration of President Barack Obama has stressed throughout the crisis that it has seen no specific preparations by North Korea to act on its threats, fears that hostilities could break out by accident with both the North and the South on high alert and the hot lines between them disconnected, have risen steadily.

“The concern is that there will be a stray shell from either side that could set in motion a chain of events that would be tragic,” said Alan Romberg, a former senior State Department Asia expert who currently heads East Asia programmes at the Stimson Center.

“This is not a purposeful march to war, but it could accidentally lead us into a very dangerous situation.”

In an interview with IPS, Romberg said Tuesday’s announcement by Pyongyang was not necessarily all bad news, although it appeared to make clearer than ever that Pyongyang is determined to be recognised as a nuclear-weapons state and will not consider denuclearisation until the other nuclear powers agree to disarm.

He pointed, in particular, to the adoption by the North’s Supreme People’s Assembly Monday of a new law on “consolidating the position of nuclear weapons state for self-defence” which laid out the legal framework for the country’s nuclear strategy.

Among other provisions, the new law states that the main purpose of the North’s nuclear weapons is for deterrence and that they can be used only to “repel invasion or attack from a hostile nuclear weapons state and make retaliatory strikes.” It also provides for cooperation with international non-proliferation and disarmament efforts.

“They’re doing two things at the same time – taking steps to show they’re persisting in their nuclear programme, but also that they’re doing this in some orderly legal fashion,” according to Romberg.

“There’s no hint of retreat from the nuclear programme, but perhaps a standing down to some extent of the rhetoric which has had people so nervous.”

The latest developments, he said, pose difficult problems for the Obama administration, which has repeatedly stressed its openness to dialogue with Pyongyang on a range of issues, including negotiating a permanent peace accord, but only if the North re-commits itself to de-nuclearisation.

“At this point, North Korea says it will not address that issue any further, and, in the meantime, they’re clearly moving in the opposite direction,” he noted in a reference to Tuesday’s order to resume operations at Yongbyon.

A growing number of analysts outside the administration are urging it to re-consider its refusal to fully engage Pyongyang and note that failure to do so risks driving a wedge between Washington and Seoul whose new president, Park Geun-hye, has not made a de-nuclearisation commitment a condition for North-South talks.

In one widely noted column published by the Washington Post this week, one expert, Mike Chinoy of the University of Southern California, urged Obama to send a high-level envoy to meet with Kim “to explore possibilities of reversing the recent downward spiral.”

“(O)nly face-to-face discussions with Kim Jong Un will enable the United States to judge whether there is any hope of dialogue and revived diplomacy,” he wrote. “The alternatives are so bleak – at a minimum continued tension; at worst, a new Korean conflict or a frightening wave of proliferation – that it is worth Obama taking the political risk to test Kim’s intentions.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Amidst growing tensions with North Korea and, to a lesser extent, China, the White House Monday insisted that its “re-balancing” toward the Asia/Pacific remained on track and that Washington is fully committed to its allies there, especially Japan and South Korea.

In a major policy address to the Asia Society in New York City, National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon offered an overview of U.S. strategy in the region, stressing that the “re-balancing” – sometimes referred to as the “pivot” – will be comprehensive, focusing at least as much attention on Washington’s economic role there as its military posture.

While much of the speech echoed previous administration policy statements, Donilon, President Barack Obama’s closest foreign policy aide, also announced new U.S. sanctions against the Foreign Trade Bank of North Korea, a step that some analysts said could make trade by third countries with Pyongyang more difficult.

He did not explicitly link the move to recent North Korean threats to pre-emptively strike the U.S. and South Korea with nuclear weapons or to its announcement Monday that it will no longer abide by the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War.

But he suggested in the clearest terms to date that Washington would respond to any aggressive move by Pyongyang with military force.

“North Korea’s claims may be hyperbolic – but as to the policy of the United States, there should be no doubt: we will draw upon the full range of our capabilities to protect against, and to respond to, the threat posed to us and to our allies by North Korea,” he declared.

He also called on China to deepen its military-to-military dialogue with the U.S. and to take “serious steps” to end the hacking of U.S. government and private-business computer networks – a practice which he said “has become a key point of concern and discussion with China at all levels of our governments”.

His remarks on the latter subject, which included a call for the two countries to hold a “direct dialogue to establish acceptable norms of behaviour in cyberspace”, marked the first time a top-ranking U.S. official has accused China by name of carrying out such attacks many of which, according to a recent New York Times investigation, have been launched by a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) unit based in a 12-story Shanghai office tower. Beijing has strongly denied it is responsible.

“(T)his is not solely a national security concern or a concern of the U.S. government,” he said. “Increasingly, U.S. businesses are speaking out about the serious concerns about sophisticated, targeted theft of confidential business information and proprietary technologies through cyber intrusions emanating from China on an unprecedented scale. The international community cannot afford to tolerate such activity from any country.”

Donilon’s speech came amidst threats and counter-threats between North and South Korea in the wake of last month’s underground nuclear test by Pyongyang, the inauguration of the South’s new president, Park Geun-hye, and Monday’s launch of a major joint U.S.-South Korean military exercise which purportedly provoked the North’s announcement to renounce the 60-year-old armistice and disconnect its “hotline” with Seoul.

The rapid build-up in tensions between the two Koreas has reportedly spurred growing demands within the South to consider developing a nuclear weapon itself, just as renewed tensions between Beijing and Tokyo over a group of islands in the East China Sea has provoked a somewhat similar reaction in Japan.

The hawkish reactions in both Seoul and Tokyo – where doubts are growing about whether Washington can actually follow through on its military re-balancing when the Pentagon budget appears headed for decline – are clearly of concern to the Obama administration. Donilon went out of his way to reaffirm its goal of moving 60 percent of the U.S. naval fleet to the Asia-Pacific by 2020 and expanding radar and missile defence systems to protect U.S. allies from the “dangerous, destabilising behaviour of North Korea”.

“In these difficult fiscal times, I know that some have questioned whether this rebalance is sustainable,” he said. “But make no mistake: President Obama has clearly stated that we will maintain our security presence and engagement in the Asia-Pacific.”

In addition to reassuring Tokyo and Seoul, Monday’s speech also appeared intended in part to dispel any doubts about the region’s priority in its global strategy, particularly given Secretary of State John Kerry’s choice to make Europe and the Middle East the site of his maiden overseas tour and Obama’s decision to make his first second-term trip also to the Middle East.

“There have been a number of people in the region looking at Kerry’s trip and saying maybe they’re looking to re-balance the re-balance,” noted Alan Romberg, the head of East Asia programmes at the Stimson Center here.

In addition, the State Department’s top Asia strategist, former assistant secretary for Asian affairs Kurt Campbell, just stepped down, and no one has yet been nominated to take his place.

But Donilon noted that Japan’s new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, was one of the first foreign leaders to visit the White House this year and announced that Park would be coming to Washington for talks in May. Obama, he said, had determined that the U.S. will participate every year in the East Asia Summit at the head-of-state level.

Donilon also stressed the importance of Southeast Asia in the U.S. re-balancing effort and of including India, whose “look East” policies he praised, as an integral part of that strategy.

“The United States is not only re-balancing to the Asia-Pacific, we are re-balancing within Asia to recognise the growing importance of Southeast,” he said. “Just as we found that the United States was underweighted in East Asia, we found that the Untied States was especially underweighted in Southeast Asia. And we are correcting that,” he noted. He specifically cited Indonesia, like India, as a potential “global partner”.

In defining re-balancing, Donilon stressed that it will not mean “diminishing ties to important partners in any other region”, nor will it mean “containing China or seeking to dictate terms to Asia. And it isn’t just a matter of our military presence,” he insisted, noting the importance of Washington’s economic engagement, particularly through the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

In addition to U.S. concerns about Chinese cyber-spying, Donilon stressed the importance of a mutual understanding between the militaries of the two nations, particularly as Beijing expands its presence in Asia, “drawing our forces into closer contact and raising the risk that an accident or miscalculation could destabilise the broader relationship.”

He also praised China’s cooperation at the U.N. Security Council in imposing new sanctions on North Korea, which depends almost exclusively on Beijing for its supply of fuel and other basic commodities.

Despite its support for those sanctions and its evident frustration with the North for engaging in provocations, such as last month’s nuclear test, Beijing has made clear that it will not use that dependence to risk the regime’s collapse.

While Donilon said Washington must co-operate closely with Beijing in dealing with Pyongyang, he stressed that “no country, including China, should conduct ‘business as usual’ with a North Korea that threatens its neighbours.”

Robert Manning, an Asia specialist at the Atlantic Council here, said the speech, while mainly a re-statement of policy, would “keep the momentum on Asia-Pacific” and came at a useful moment.

On China, he told IPS, he would have “liked to see more focus on the need for the U.S. and China to work out an understanding of our respective roles in East Asia”, in part because the “level of strategic distrust” between has appeared to be on the rise.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice speaks to journalists following the Mar. 7 adoption of a Security Council resolution condemning the Feb.12 nuclear test by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and imposing new sanctions on that country. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

By Thalif Deen and Jim Lobe
UNITED NATIONS/WASHINGTON, Mar 8 2013 (IPS)

North Korea, which has survived three rounds of diplomatic and economic sanctions since its first nuclear test in 2006, reacted with predictable fury, threatening to nuke the United States, in retaliation for a Security Council resolution imposing new sanctions against Pyongyang.

The White House dismissed the threat. “I can tell you that the United States is fully capable of defending against any North Korean ballistic missile attack,” said White House spokesman Jay Carney Thursday.If the U.S. and the other nuclear powers finally got serious about a nuclear weapons-free world, this sort of thing would no longer happen.

After the unanimous 15-0 Security Council Thursday, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice assured delegates the new punitive measures, including an effort to counter the abuse of diplomatic privileges to advance North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile activities, will “bite – and bite hard.”

“It will now be much harder for such diplomats to procure technology or divert funds to the nuclear programme without being detected and expelled,” she told the Security Council.

The resolution, which was jointly drafted by the United States and North Korea’s political ally China in reaction to Pyongyang’s Feb. 12 underground nuclear test, also bans the transfer to and from North Korea of specific ballistic missile, nuclear, and chemical weapons-related technology.

The resolution empowers countries to inspect suspicious North Korean cargo traversing their national territory as part of the enforcement regime. It also freezes financial transactions that could help Pyongyang’s nuclear or weapons-related programmes.

Independent analysts said it was difficult to predict the impact of the new sanctions – the most far-reaching against Pyongyang to date – on North Korea’s behaviour.

“If you look at these sanctions in addressing banking in a more serious way and also inspections of planes and ships going through national territory, there’s a potential for these to actually impinge far more than previous sanctions,” said Alan Romberg, East Asia programme director at the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank. “But whether they will do so will depend on their implementation.

“One of the things people are concerned about is that, in the past, China has not been as rigorous in implementing sanctions as might have been hoped. We’ll have to see what it will do in this case,” according to Romberg, who previously served as senior Northeast Asia official in the U.S. State Department.

Peter Weiss, president of the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, told IPS that since North Korea’s idea of diplomacy is totally sui generis, predicting its reaction to Thursday’s Security Council resolution “would be like predicting tomorrow’s weather when all the meteorological data have become unavailable”.

The fact that China co-authored the resolution with the United States, would lead one to believe it may have some effect, he added.

“But the only thing I would take a bet on is that if the U.S. and the other nuclear powers finally got serious about a nuclear weapons-free world, this sort of thing would no longer happen,” said Weiss, who is also co-president of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms.

Asked whether the repeated patterns of provocations/sanctions would work if the sanctions are not fully implemented, Rice told reporters: “The choice and the answer to your question lies of course with the decisions that the North Korean leadership make.”

“We have been very clear as an international community and as a Security Council that we are united in demanding that North Korea comply with its obligations or face increased pressure and isolation,” she added.

For his part, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, a former South Korean foreign minister, praised the Council’s actions, insisting that it “sent an unequivocal message to (North Korea) that the international community will not tolerate its pursuit of nuclear weapons.”

The latest round of sanctions came only three weeks after North Korea’s nuclear test, the first conducted under the auspices of the country’s young new leader, Kim Jong-un. Pyongyang’s two previous nuclear tests – in 2006 and 2009 – also provoked U.N. sanctions whose implementation, however, has been uneven.

They include an arms embargo on North Korea and a prohibition on trade with it involving nuclear or missile technology, as well as a ban on the export of luxury goods to the country. The new resolution adds to these measures and closes a loophole that until now had permitted countries to decide what constitutes a “luxury good”.

The new resolution blacklists specific goods, including yachts, racing cars, high-priced automobiles and certain kinds of jewelry, among other items.

While most officials both at the U.N. and in Washington consider North Korea’s new threats as bravado, they are concerned about a sharp rise in tensions on the Korean Peninsula itself.

The U.S. and South Korean militaries are currently conducting joint manoeuvres that are scheduled to intensify over the next week. As it became clear over the past several days that Washington and Beijing had agreed on a new sanctions resolution, Pyongyang’s rhetoric became increasingly bellicose.

It called the impending sanctions an “act of war” and declared that the armistice that halted the Korean War 1953 would expire Mar. 11.

At the same time, Seoul’s newly elected president, Park Geun-hye, who pledged during her campaign to pursue a somewhat softer policy toward Pyongyang than her hard-line predecessor, took office only two weeks ago, and analysts are concerned that the North’s leadership may be tempted to take some form of military action to test her intentions.

But the major question hovering over the impact of the new U.N. sanctions is how vigorously China, on which Pyongyang relies almost exclusively for its fuel and other vital supplies, will enforce them.

The fact that it took only three weeks for China to agree on co-sponsoring the sanctions resolution – a much shorter period than with previous round of sanctions – was taken as a sign that Beijing is increasingly losing patience with the Pyongyang regime.

The language and tone were also tougher, according to Romberg, who said it “reflected great frustration with the way North Korea is proceeding”.

“The strategic concerns that lie behind China’s North Korea policy have not changed – that is, to avoid either chaos in the North or an outcome that would mean unification under South Korean leadership allied to the United States,” he told IPS.

“But as we are seeing in many Chinese commentaries on the subject, quite a number of people are questioning whether continuing Chinese support for North Korea is in the PRC’s best interest.”

Indeed, Mao Xinyu, the only grandson of China’s revolutionary leader, Mao Zedong, and a major general in the People’s Liberation Army, called this week on Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

“North Korea must go towards denuclearisation and peaceful development,” the Xinhua news agency quoted Mao saying Tuesday. North Korea’s denuclearisation, he added, “is the cherished wish of the Chinese people.”

Meanwhile, the top U.S. envoy on North Korea, Glyn Davies, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Washington shared that wish.

“The United States will not engage in talks for the sake of talks,” he said. “Authentic and credible negotiations …require a serious, meaningful change in North Korea’s priorities demonstrating that Pyongyang is prepared to meet its commitments and obligations to achieve the core goal of the September 2005 Joint Statement: the verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in a peaceful manner.”

North Korea has vowed to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the United States, hours ahead of a U.N. vote on whether to level new sanctions against Pyongyang for its recent nuclear test.

North Korea has accused the U.S. of using military drills in South Korea as a launch pad for a nuclear war and has scrapped the armistice with Washington that ended hostilities in the 1950-53 Korean War.

“Since the United States is about to ignite a nuclear war, we will be exercising our right to pre-emptive nuclear attack against the headquarters of the aggressor in order to protect our supreme interest,” the North’s foreign ministry spokesman said in a statement carried by the official KCNA news agency.

The North conducted a third nuclear test on Feb. 12, in defiance of U.N. resolutions, and declared it had achieved progress in securing a functioning atomic arsenal.

Although North Korea boasts of nuclear bombs and pre-emptive strikes, it is not thought to have mastered the ability to produce a warhead small enough to put on a missile capable of reaching the U.S. mainland.

It is believed to have enough nuclear fuel, however, for a handful of crude nuclear devices.

The North’s unnamed foreign ministry spokesman also said it would be entitled to take military action as of Mar. 11 when U.S.-South Korea military drills move into a full-scale phase, as it had declared the truce invalid.

It is the latest in an escalation of tough words from both sides of the armed Korean border this week as the U.N. Security Council deliberates a resolution to tighten financial sanctions and a naval blockade against the North.

U.S. double standards

North Korea, which held a mass military rally in Pyongyang on Thursday in support of its recent threats, has protested against the U.N. censures of its rocket launches.

It says they are part of a peaceful space programme and that the criticism is an exercise of double standards by the U.S.

In 2010, the North bombed South Korea’s Yeonpyeong Island killing two civilians. It is widely accused of sinking a South Korean navy ship earlier in the year, killing 46 sailors.

North Korea was conducting a series of military drills and getting ready for state-wide war practice of an unusual scale, South Korea’s defence ministry said earlier on Thursday.

South Korea and the U.S., which are conducting annual military drills until the end of April, are watching the North’s activities for signs they turn from an exercise to an actual attack, a South Korean official said.

“It hasn’t been frequent that the North conducted military exercise at the state level,” South Korea’s defence ministry spokesman, Kim Min-seok, said.

“We are watching the North’s activities and stepping up readiness under the assumption that these drills can lead to provocation at any time.”

A top North Korean general said on Tuesday that Pyongyang was scrapping the armistice. But the two sides remain technically at war, as the war did not end with a treaty.

South Korea’s military said in a rare warning on Wednesday that it would strike back at the North and target its leadership if Pyongyang launched an attack.

* Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

Tuesday’s nuclear test by North Korea poses major new questions about the sustainability of President Barack Obama’s first-term policy of “strategic patience” in dealing with Pyongyang.

Both hawks and doves have jumped on the underground test, which appears to have had a greater explosive force than the North’s two previous tests in 2006 and 2009, respectively, as grounds for substantially changing Washington’s approach.

“The nuclear explosion proves that American policy has been a failure and that a new path is needed,” said Michael Auslin of the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), who called for much more aggressive efforts to prevent Pyongyang from exporting weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or missile technology and punishing China if fails to cooperate.“If North Korea keeps testing like this, it will start a debate in South Korea and Japan about whether they should build their own nuclear weapons,” said Cirincione.

Washington, he said, should be “declaring that containment is our new policy and threatening overwhelming retaliation to kill the Kim (Jong-un) regime should North Korea use any of its WMD on us or our allies.”

“I think the policy of strategic patience – of not talking to them – has failed,” agreed Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a prominent nuclear-disarmament group. “For most of the last 12 years, during which North Korea held four long-range missile tests and three nuclear tests, we haven’t talked to them. When we’ve talked to them, they haven’t tested.

“There should be another round of sanctions and more pressure, but don’t expect that that’s going to work,” he told IPS. “After a decent interval, the U.S. should reach out to North Korea and engage in direct talks. We’ve got to provide them an off-ramp, or else they’re just going to keep doing this.”

In the wake of Tuesday’s test, which provoked stern protests from the major powers, including China, North Korea’s closest ally, Obama, who was expected to announce new plans to unilaterally reduce Washington’s nuclear arsenal at his annual State of the Union Address Tuesday night, denounced Pyongyang’s action as “highly provocative” and called for “swift and credible action by the international community” to punish it.

After condemning the test as a “clear threat to international peace and security,” the U.N. Security Council was meeting Tuesday afternoon to begin working out specific measures to be taken against Pyongyang.

“These provocations do not make North Korea more secure,” said Obama, who later spoke with outgoing South Korean President Lee Myung-bak to reaffirm Washington’s defence commitment.

“Far from achieving its stated goal of becoming a strong and prosperous nation, North Korea has instead increasingly isolated and impoverished its people through its ill-advised pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery.”

Since taking office, Obama has pursued a policy of “strategic patience”, a policy that has conditioned any substantial move toward normalisation of bilateral relations on concrete steps by Pyongyang to suspend and eventually abandon its nuclear-weapons programme.

Last February, the administration thought it had achieved a breakthrough when Pyongyang agreed to suspend its long-range missile tests in exchange for 240,000 tonnes of U.S. food aid.

But just a few weeks later, the North announced plans to launch a satellite into space using a multi-stage rocket. Although Washington warned that such a launch would be considered a violation of the accord, the regime went ahead with the launch – by all accounts a failure – anyway, effectively shelving hopes for further progress.

Last December, Pyongyang launched another multi-stage rocket that successfully put an 80-kg satellite into orbit, an achievement that provoked greater concern here because it demonstrated a much greater advance in mastering inter-continental ballistic missile technology than had been anticipated.

The action drew strong condemnation and additional sanctions by the U.N. Security Council, including China.

Since North Korea suggested last month that it was preparing a nuclear test as well, both the U.S. and China, as well as the other members of the Six-Party Talks (Japan, South Korea, and Russia) warned that it would result in additional sanctions.

But Pyongyang rejected those warnings, vowing instead to “boost and strengthen our defensive military power including nuclear deterrence.”

Washington and its allies have so thoroughly sanctioned North Korea for its “bad behaviour” that it has very few ways to punish it short of war. Indeed, the only serious source of external pressure on Pyongyang at this point is China, which provides it with fuel and other vital assistance.

But while North Korea’s continuing defiance of China’s appeals not to test and to instead return to the Six-Party Talks has clearly taxed Beijing patience, Beijing remains more worried that cutting off its support could result in the regime’s collapse.

“China is in a very difficult position at this point,” noted Alan Romberg, a Northeast Asia specialist at the Stimson Center. “On the one hand, its long-standing strategic calculation remains unchanged: they don’t want to see Korea re-unified under the leadership of Seoul closely allied to the United States. I don’t think anything has changed about that.

“On the other hand, the way China handled this before the test and after it has been noteworthy. They have been very outspoken in opposition. They even announced publicly that they had called in the North Korean ambassador (to receive a protest),” he noted. “You have a new leadership in China, and it seems there’s a level of impatience that wasn’t as obvious as before.”

That impatience may not only have to do with Pyongyang’s defiance of its wishes, but also growing concerns in Beijing that if North Korea continues on its current path, it risked destabilising the region, as well as itself.

“If North Korea keeps testing like this, it will start a debate in South Korea and Japan about whether they should build their own nuclear weapons,” noted Cirincione. “If we see a regular series of tests, the pressures in those countries will build.”

Indeed, Donald Gregg, a former ambassador to Seoul, noted Tuesday that, despite Pyongyang’s insistence that its nuclear programme is designed to deter, rather than threaten, it has already “prompted Japan to consider developing its own nuclear programme, which highlights the need for dialogue”.

For now, analysts here and in the region are particularly focused on discovering more about Tuesday’s test, particularly whether it involved a miniaturised nuclear device that could fit in a missile warhead or on a bomber aircraft and whether the device itself used plutonium, which it used in its two previous tests, or enriched uranium, which would be unprecedented.

“If we find out it’s a uranium bomb, that means they have a whole new stream of material that can be used to build nuclear weapons, and they might export this bomb design to Iran,” according to Cirincione, who noted the two countries have cooperated on missile technology in the past.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Kim Sung-hwan, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade of the Republic of Korea and President of the Security Council for the month of February, delivers a Council press statement strongly condemning the nuclear test conducted by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 12 2013 (IPS)

North Korea, which conducted its third nuclear test Monday, is following closely in the heavy footsteps of Israel as one of the world’s most intransigent nations, ignoring Security Council resolutions and defying the international community.

“Israel has the United States as its patron saint,” says a Middle Eastern diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, “and North Korea has China’s protective arm as an enduring shield.”

Still, three Security Council resolutions – in 2006, 2009 and 2013 – critical of North Korea’s nuclear programme and tightening sanctions on Pyongyang – had the blessings of China, a permanent member with veto powers."Giving status to those who flout the world's collective security treaties such as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the NPT is like a slap in the face to the law-abiding majority..."

But the harshest of possible sanctions – a naval blockade, an oil embargo or a cutoff of economic aid from China – have escaped Security Council resolutions, at least so far.

The 15-member Council met in an emergency session Tuesday and issued a predictable statement condemning the test as “a grave violation” of its three resolutions and describing North Korea as a country which is “a clear threat to international peace and security”.

When the Council adopted its third resolution last January, it expressed a determination to take “significant action” in the event of a “further” nuclear test by North Korea.

But that “significant action” will have to wait another day.

On Tuesday, the Council claimed it “will begin work immediately on appropriate measures” in an upcoming, possibly watered down, resolution.

Currently, there are five declared nuclear weapon states, namely the United States, Britain, Russia, France and China, all five permanent members of the Security Council (P5), along with three undeclared nuclear weapon states, India, Pakistan and Israel.

The three undeclared nuclear powers have all refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), as against the five declared nuclear powers who are states parties to the treaty.

Dr. Rebecca Johnson, co-chair of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, told IPS that the logic and optics of nuclear deterrence means that North Korea’s tests are designed to convince the United States (at least) that it has the ability to make and deliver nuclear warheads.

“It is entirely counterproductive to talk about the countries that conduct nuclear tests or deploy nuclear weapons as ‘nuclear powers’ – giving status to those who flout the world’s collective security treaties such as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and the NPT is like a slap in the face to the law-abiding majority – over 180 countries – that have renounced nuclear weapons and testing,” she added.

The nuclear-armed states – whether defined under the NPT or posturing outside the NPT like North Korea – are security problems for the world, she said.

And North Korea has demonstrated once again that nuclear weapons are what weak leaders think they need to divert attention from their failed economic and social policies at home, said Johnson, author of “Unfinished Business”, the authoritative book on the CTBT published by the United Nations in 2009.

Asked if the test proves that North Korea, also known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), is ready to go nuclear, Phillip Schell, researcher on the Nuclear Weapons Project, Arms Control and Non-proliferation Programme at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), told IPS Tuesday’s test doesn’t prove that North Korea is on the verge of becoming a full-fledged nuclear power, comparable to the P5.

However, the series of three tests – although the first one is widely believed to have been a failure – certainly indicate progress in the DPRK’s nuclear weapons programme, he said.

At the same time, while it appears to be the DPRK’s goal is to develop a miniaturised nuclear warhead that could be fitted on a ballistic missile, there have been no signs so far that the DPRK has actually achieved “weaponisation” of the nuclear devices that were tested.

Whether the DPRK currently possesses the necessary long-range missile technology is also doubtful, he said. However, the successful launch of a multi-stage rocket suggests that it is gradually mastering such technology.

Schell also pointed out that the DPRK withdrew from the NPT (although some states don’t recognise its withdrawal). Furthermore, it did not sign or ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

However, the Security Council Resolutions 1718, 1874, and 2087 prohibit DPRK from conducting future nuclear tests or launches that involve ballistic missile technology. These resolutions, said Schell, are de facto legally binding. On the other hand, the DPRK sees these as discriminatory.

Asked about the DPRK argument that its nuclear tests are few and far between compared to all the nuclear tests conducted by the P5, Johnson told IPS this argument is “specious nonsense”.

“Do we absolve a murderer who argues that he only occasionally kills people, contrasting this with the mass murders carried out by serial killers and other criminals? Of course not.”

She said that just as each act of murder is a crime, each nuclear test violates international treaties, laws and collectively agreed means for establishing global security.

“The fact that others sinned with impunity before the international community could establish the nuclear test ban treaty is no excuse now,” Johnson said.

The daughter of South Korea’s former military ruler has won the country’s presidential election, promising in a speech to her supporters to heal a “divided society”.

The win over her liberal rival Moon Jae-in on Wednesday makes Park Geun-hye the country’s first female head of state.

The office of South Korean President Lee Myung-bak congratulated party colleague Park on her win, even before officials had finished counting votes.

The 60-year old conservative Park will now return to the presidential palace where she served as her father’s first lady in the 1970s, after her mother was assassinated by a North Korea-backed gunman.

With 92 percent of the national vote counted, Park had an insurmountable lead of 51.6 percent to the 47.9 percent of Moon, her liberal rival, according to the country’s election commission.

Her raucous, jubilant supporters braved sub-zero temperatures to chant her name and wave South Korean flags outside her house. When she reached her party headquarters, Park was greeted with shouts of “president”.

An elated Park reached into the crowd to grasp hands of supporters wearing red scarves, her party’s colour.

“This is a victory brought by the people’s hope for overcoming crisis and economic recovery,” she said. “I will be a president who fulfills in every way the promises I made to the people.”

High voter turnout

The election was marked by a high turnout of more than 75 percent, compared to 63 percent in the 2007 presidential poll.

Park is the daughter of one of modern Korea’s most polarising figures, the late leader Park Chung-hee, who is both admired for dragging the country out of poverty and reviled for his ruthless suppression of dissent during 18 years of autocratic rule.

Moon, who was chief of staff to the late left-wing president Roh Moo-hyun, is a former human rights lawyer who was once jailed for protesting against the Park Chung-hee regime.

“I feel so sorry and guilty that I have failed to accomplish my historic mission to open a new era of politics,” Moon told reporters outside his Seoul residence. “I humbly accept the outcome of the election,” he added.

Al Jazeera’s Harry Fawcett, reporting from Seoul, said that Park had been able to appeal to enough of “middle ground” voters to swing the poll in her favour.

“This conservative candidate, who has really tacked away from some of the more right wing policies of her party, seems to have done enough not just to consolidate her own core constituency vote, but also to appeal to enough of a middle ground in this very high turnout election,” he reported.

“This is still a divided country in terms of generations, party lines and regions. People have stuck to quite long-held party allegiances.”

Engagement with North Korea

Both candidates’ campaigns highlighted the need for “economic democratisation” – a campaign term about reducing the social disparities caused by rapid economic growth – and promised to create new jobs and increase welfare spending.

Matthias Maass, assistant professor of international relations at Yonsei University in Seoul, told Al Jazeera that domestic politics had driven campaigns for both sides.

“The issues include the country’s economy, talk about measures to address a low birth rate, questions of unemployment, the wealth income gap, and social injustice,” Maass said.

The new president will face numerous challenges, including a belligerent North Korea, a slowing economy and soaring welfare costs in one of the world’s most rapidly ageing societies.

While both candidates had signalled a greater engagement with North Korea, Park’s approach was more cautious than Moon’s promise to resume aid without preconditions and seek an early summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

Park has promised strong leadership that would steer the country through the challenges of global economic troubles.

“I have no family to take care of and no children to pass wealth to. You, the people, are my family and your happiness is the reason that I stay in politics,” Park, who has never been married, said in a televised press conference on Tuesday.

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

After three years of frozen relations between North Korea and the United States, the two longstanding adversaries are on the verge of a thaw.

In what has been called the “leap day deal”, North Korea has pledged to stop uranium enrichment and suspend nuclear and missile tests. The United States, meanwhile, will deliver 240,000 metric tonnes of food to the country’s malnourished population.

The Barack Obama administration has maintained a policy of “strategic patience” toward North Korea, which amounted to a wait-and-see approach while Washington was preoccupied with other foreign policy issues. Obama administration officials portray the leap day deal as a modest first step in reengaging the North.

“After the really tough sanctions that were put in place by the U.N. Security Council and the North Koreans announced that they wanted to return to Six-Party Talks, talks that they had previously abandoned, we and our allies made clear that North Korea needed to take a number of steps that would demonstrate their seriousness of purpose,” said a senior U.S. official at a background briefing on Feb. 29.

“We were firm that we were only interested in credible negotiations leading to the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula.”

The death of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il in late 2011 interrupted the preparatory steps toward this deal. Although the country remains officially in its 100-day mourning period, the leader’s youngest son and successor, Kim Jong Un, has continued key elements of his father’s policies. Foremost among these is the more energetic diplomacy North Korea has conducted over the last year.

As the Obama administration attempts a “Pacific pivot” to refocus its geopolitical energies from the Middle East to Asia, North Korea has been executing a pivot of its own. The centennial of the birth of the country’s founder Kim Il Sung, 2012 is also the year that North Korea has pledged to achieve the status of kangsong taeguk: an economically prosperous and militarily strong country.

To attract the economic investment necessary to achieve this goal, North Korea has reached out to friend and foe alike.

North Korea has been negotiating with Russia, for instance, over a natural gas pipeline that would extend down the peninsula to customers in South Korea and possibly Japan. Extensive deals with China have been concluded over access to minerals and ports. Even inter-Korean relations, which bottomed out over the last several years as a result of low-level military clashes and high-level belligerent rhetoric, promise to improve as both ruling party and opposition party leaders in the South lean toward a more conciliatory policy.

Meanwhile, the industrial zone at Kaesong, run by 123 South Korean firms on North Korean territory, has expanded to employ more than 50,000 North Korean workers.

But the focus of the North Korean negotiating strategy has been the United States, with whom it has frequently insisted on bilateral discussions.

“The North Koreans have been interested in reaching some accommodation with the United States for a while now,” observed Joel Wit, a former State Department official and currently a visiting fellow at the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

“It’s been a year now that they’ve been sending signals that they’re interested in talking and taking some limited steps forward. The Obama administration didn’t take them up on it because the South Koreans were against it. But South Korea’s position changed last summer,” he said.

Another reason for the North Korean pivot is its perennial push-pull relationship with China.

“The North Koreans feel that they’ve become very close to China over the past few years because of the U.S. policy of ‘strategic patience,’ which has forced them into the Chinese arms,” Wit continued. “But the North Koreans aren’t comfortable with that. They’re trying to create some distance with the Chinese, using the United States as a balancer.”

U.S. reaction to the leap day deal has ranged from relief at North Korea’s moratorium on testing and missile launches to scepticism that the deal represents anything new.

“North Korea’s promise to suspend certain nuclear activities can’t be taken at face value, given the almost certain existence of several undeclared nuclear facilities,” said U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in a press statement. “Pyongyang will likely continue its clandestine nuclear weapons program right under our noses. We have bought this bridge several times before.”

North Korea, meanwhile, seems to interpret the agreement somewhat differently from the United States. A Korean Central News Agency article reported that the Six-Party Talks would prioritise “the lifting of sanctions on the DPRK and provision of light water reactors”, neither of which are mentioned in U.S. government statements.

The humanitarian community has reacted with unambiguous support for the resumption of food aid, which will consist of nutritional supplements designed particularly for children and pregnant women.

“There have been over six nutritional assessments, most everything done on our own dime, to verify that there is a need for food,” says Robert Springs, the head of Global Resource Services, one of the five NGOs involved in the last round of U.S. food aid distribution. “We welcome this nutritional assistance. It’s responding to a need. It should have been done a long time ago.”

A new round of multilateral negotiations through the Six-Party Talks has not yet been announced. North Korea must first make arrangements for International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors to return to the country after being expelled in 2009. Monitoring protocols for the U.S. food aid deliveries must also be negotiated.

U.S. officials remain upbeat. “They’re doing it within the 100-day mourning period that’s self-declared in North Korea,” says a senior administration official. “So it shows that they’re interested with some alacrity to reach out, to get back to the table, and begin to try to make diplomatic progress, and I think that’s a positive sign.”

(END)

For the last two decades, U.S. administrations have come in like a lion and out like a lamb with their policies on North Korea. Determined to demonstrate Washington’s resolve, U.S. presidents have played hardball with Pyongyang in an effort to precipitate regime change or at least bully the intransigent country into knuckling under.

When this strategy failed to achieve its intended results, successive administrations ended up, however reluctantly, negotiating with the hard-nosed team in North Korea.

The Barack Obama administration has been no exception to the lion-lamb rule. It did little to follow up on the initial bargains that George W. Bush negotiated in the latter part of his second term. Instead, after North Korea’s second nuclear test, Obama adopted a tactic of “strategic patience” that amounted, essentially, to ignoring the country in favor of other foreign policy priorities.

In the last few months, however, the administration began finally to sit down with negotiators from Pyongyang and hammer out a deal. According to reports by the Associated Press, the United States was on the verge of announcing a food aid package for North Korea that would have been followed by Pyongyang’s announcement of a freeze of its uranium enrichment programme.

These dual announcements, however, have been preempted by the death over the weekend of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. His son and successor, Kim Jong Eun, has yet to indicate his position on the incipient deal with Washington – or his position on any other issue for that matter.

Currently, North Korea is in a 13-day mourning period for his father, who was only the second leader that the country has ever known. Rumors of a shift to collective leadership, with Kim Jong Eun sharing power with the military, have leaked out of Pyongyang.

The elder Kim has bequeathed to his son a decidedly mixed legacy. On one hand, he leaves behind a country poorer than when he took over, a population more malnourished, and a political system no less autocratic and antiquated.

On the other hand, Kim managed to keep his regime relatively intact even as outside powers helped oust his peers in Iraq, Libya, and Serbia. He preserved the country, at times ruthlessly, during famine and economic collapse. Across three administrations and 17 years, he weathered the often dramatic shifts in U.S. policy, only for the international media to call him, and not U.S. leaders, “mercurial” and “unpredictable”.

The North Korean leader negotiated when that path was available, freezing his nuclear programme during the Bill Clinton years and even starting down the path of dismantlement during the subsequent Bush years. But he also hedged his bets by developing a secret uranium enrichment programme as a second path to the bomb. And by testing two nuclear weapons in 2006 and 2009, Kim Jong Il officially ushered his country into the nuclear club.

Outside observers are scrambling to make predictions about the contours of the post-Kim Jong Il era. Washington analysts have long despaired over the lack of solid intelligence about North Korea, a fact underscored by the failure to discover that Kim Jong Il had died until 48 hours after the fact. This lack of information extends to Kim Jong Eun, about whom little is known beyond his rough age (late twenties), schooling (a stint in Switzerland), and leisure-time interests (basketball).

Even less is known about how the younger Kim fits into the political order in Pyongyang. Like his father, he has a close but largely contrived relationship with North Korea’s most effective institution, the military, having become a four-star general despite no known record of military service and certainly no battlefield experience.

He may well listen to the advice of his putative regents, Kim Jong Il’s sister and brother-in-law, even to the point of becoming little more than a figurehead. The North Korean system, presided over by a gerontocracy, is not set up to accommodate a young man with bold ideas of reform even if it turns out that Kim Jong Eun is inclined in that direction.

At the same time, a technocratic elite schooled in the West has been waiting in the wings for some years for the chance to chart a new path for the country. A new middle class has also emerged that conducts business deals with China, operates the newly available cell phones, drives the increasing number of private cars, and crowds the new restaurants in Pyongyang.

So far, Kim Jong Eun has not demonstrated whether he sides with this technocratic elite or this new middle class. He has kept his mouth shut, which either reflects his age, his personality, or a measure of wisdom beyond his years.

The Obama administration, having finally jettisoned strategic patience to negotiate in good faith with North Korea, is now back in wait-and- see mode. The State Department has indicated that the food aid discussions are still ongoing but that further progress is unlikely before the New Year.

Washington shouldn’t let this opportunity slip to test the new leadership in Pyongyang. With 2012 an election year, Obama is not likely to risk charges of “appeasement” from his Republican rivals because of an overture to Pyongyang. Moreover, the administration has already expended some political capital and undertaken some risk by sending Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Burma. But North Korea’s strategic location and its mysterious nuclear programme require Washington to pay attention.

When Kim Il Sung died in 1994, the Clinton administration followed through on the negotiations for the Agreed Framework that negotiated the freeze in North Korea’s nuclear programme. Because of congressional resistance, however, the administration didn’t pursue the diplomatic and economic engagement it promised. An opportunity to end the Cold War with North Korea was effectively lost.

The Obama administration has a similar chance to use the death of Kim Jong Il to open a new chapter in its relationship with North Korea. Patience is certainly a virtue. And it’s important to wait for Pyongyang to put its political house in order. But Washington shouldn’t waste this second opportunity to end hostilities with its longest-running adversary.