Commentary

This is the first issue of Pyongyang Report since July last year, a hiatus caused ironically by my spending the second part of the year teaching at Korea University in Seoul. For technical reasons it also proved impossible to update the website from Seoul; that is now being done, albeit less thoroughly than I would like.

As it happened, there were no major new developments during that period. The developing quagmire in Iraq (and Afghanistan) overshadowed events on the Korean peninsula and constrained US policy. One example of this was the assumed deal between Roh Moo-hyun and the US by which he committed ROK troops to the US occupation of Iraq – a very unpopular and potentially dangerous action – in exchange for a softening of American policy towards the DPRK. How successful that was is open to conjecture, but there has been no precipitate US action, and pressure from Seoul must be part of the equation.

The Chinese brokered another round of talks – the Six Party Talks held in Beijing in August. Few were surprised that these did not yield any tangible results, and that the next round of talks, bruited for December, have been postponed indefinitely. Pyongyang, with its back to the wall, has stood firm on the need to have guarantees before it abandons its search for a nuclear deterrent. At the same time, again because it is in a critical position, it has displayed considerable flexibility. Whilst Washington has been trying to disguise the fact by talking of ‘diplomatic solutions’ in fact it refuses to negotiate, demanding that Pyongyang verifiably disarm before ‘concessions’ can be considered. This has been acknowledged, and condemned, by Americans of various political persuasions, including former Secretary of Defense, and Clinton’s ‘North Korea adviser’, William Perry and veteran commentator Leon Sigal. They are not alone and their criticism has just been endorsed from an unexpected quarter – Charles ‘Jack’ Pritchard.

Pritchard was the Bush administration’s North Korea envoy until he resigned in August, evidently exasperated by White House policy. He has just published a blistering attack on Neocons within the administration and US intelligence, diplomatically exonerating Bush himself. Intelligence underestimated Pyongyang’s ability to reprocess spent fuel rods ‘, giving policymakers a false sense that time was on their side as they rebuffed North Korean requests for serious dialogue.’

Pritchard was in Pyongyang early January with nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker and academic John Lewis. There is some disagreement between Pritchard and Hecker on the state of the DPRK nuclear programme- Hecker ‘saw no convincing evidence that Pyongyang can build a plutonium-based nuclear device.’

More important was the DPRK reiteration that it did not have a uranium weapons programme. Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan said that the DPRK has ‘no program, no equipment, no scientists trained’ in uranium enrichment. It will be recalled that it was allegations about this programme, and a claim that the DPRK has ‘admitted it’ that led to the present crisis. The DPRK has long denied both the programme and the admission.

It turns out now that, according to the Washington Post, the Chinese don’t believe that North Korea had an enriched uranium programme, and they claim that the Japanese don’t believe it either. The Russians are sceptical about US intelligence in general. It would appear that South Korea was also not convinced, because it has not made any formal complaint to the North. An enriched uranium would not have directly violated the Agreed Framework as Bush has falsely claimed, but it would have infringed the North-South denuclearization agreement.

In November US Today reported that ‘Experts say it is possible some U.S. officials exaggerated the extent of the uranium program to torpedo’ the Agreed Framework.’ Sound familiar?

Even Senator Lugar, Republican chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee seems to have his doubts. Introducing a hearing in which Hecker testified (in closed session because of White House pressure) he said that one of the two key issues was to determine ‘whether North Korea has a highly-enriched uranium program.’

It is widely accepted that the Bush administration tried to justify its pre-determined policy of invading Iraq in an overlapping and merging melange of lies and self-deception, fuelled by inaccurate, ‘sexed-up’ intelligence about WMD. It seems increasingly likely that the same process has been at work in respect of Korea.

The Bush administration tore up the Agreed Framework that Clinton had signed, precipitating the present crisis and propelling DPRK into developing a nuclear weapons program (successfully or not) on grounds which are becoming increasingly suspect.

One result of this contrived crisis is that foreign aid to North Korea is drying up and the World Food Programme is having to cut off assistance to 2.7 million people in the midst of the cruel Korean winter.

Tim Beal

N Korea Fibs versus Facts

Leon V. Sigal

While its faith-based intelligence and downright deceptions about Iraq are now being exposed, the Bush administration has been just as misleading about North Korea. North Korea has grudgingly accepted multiparty talks. It had been balking - not, as administration officials suggest, because it was insisting on bilateral talks with the United States, but because Washington has shown no interest in negotiating.

In three-way talks in Beijing in April, North Korea made a proposal to freeze and eventually dismantle its nuclear programs. Allies South Korea and Japan want the Bush administration to make a counterproposal, but it has not. Yet administration officials say they seek a "diplomatic solution."

Winston Churchill would have called that a "terminological inexactitude." That phrase was Mr. Churchill's way around a rule in parliament against accusing fellow MPs of lying. The Bush administration is propagating other inexactitudes on North Korea, all of them designed to keep talks from turning into negotiations and all of them at odds with the facts. ..//..

One is that North Korea is determined to nuclear arm, so negotiating is an exercise in futility. Yet Pyongyang has said repeatedly it will accept a verifiable end to both its plutonium and uranium programs and yield any weapons it has. //..

A second inexactitude advanced by the administration is that the United States kept its word but North Korea cheated. As President Bush said March 6, "My predecessor, in a good-faith effort, entered into a framework agreement. The United States honored its side of the agreement; North Korea didn't. While we felt the agreement was in force, North Korea was enriching uranium."

His advisers misinformed him. ..//..

A third inexactitude is that North Korea is on the verge of collapse and that an economic embargo and naval blockade will bring it down. But trying to compel North Korea will provoke it to nuclear arm a lot sooner than to collapse. A strategy of strangulation cannot be effective unless all of the North's neighbors are willing to join in. None is willing to. They know exactly what the Bush administration has yet to learn, that pressure without negotiations won't work with Pyongyang

Source: Nautilus Policy Forum Online 5 August 2003

What I Saw in North Korea

Jack Pritchard

WASHINGTON - "Time is not on the American side," Kim Gye Gwan, vice foreign minister of North Korea, told me a few weeks ago. "As time passes, our nuclear deterrent continues to grow in quantity and quality." Those words are an indictment of United States intelligence as well as a potential epitaph on the Bush administration's failed policy in North Korea.

On Jan. 8, North Korean officials gave an unofficial American delegation, of which I was a member, access to the building in Yongbyon where about 8,000 spent fuel rods had once been safeguarded. We discovered that all 8,000 rods had been removed.

Whether they have been reprocessed for weapons-grade plutonium, as Pyongyang claims, is almost irrelevant. American intelligence believed that most if not all the rods remained in storage, giving policymakers a false sense that time was on their side as they rebuffed North Korean requests for serious dialogue and worked laboriously to devise a multilateral approach to solving the rapidly escalating crisis…//... It is just the most recent failure in a string of serious North Korea-related intelligence failures…//..

American policy in North Korea is hardly better than American intelligence. At best it can be described only as amateurish. At worst, it is a failed attempt to lure American allies down a path that is not designed to resolve the crisis diplomatically but to lead to the failure and ultimate isolation of North Korea in hopes that its government will collapse…//..

The Bush administration needs to reassert itself - but responsibly. It should appoint a North Korean policy coordinator of the stature and integrity of former Defense Secretary William Perry to bring sanity and adult supervision to the administration's infighting.

I take President Bush at his word that he desires a peaceful and diplomatic solution to this crisis. He deserves someone who can articulate his vision for the Korean Peninsula and make policy decisions while holding off the worst impulses of some within the administration…//..How many nuclear weapons does North Korea have to make before this administration gets serious about its policy in East Asia?

Source: New York Times 21 January 2004

N. Korea Progressing, U.S. Visitor Says

An unofficial U.S. delegation to North Korea last week saw a vibrant and thriving capital, with the main market in Pyongyang selling clothes, vegetables, meat and electronics, according to a former State Department official who was part of the delegation.

"I was stunned by the activity," Charles L. Pritchard said at a briefing organized by the Brookings Institution. He said there were many vehicles on the street, compared with almost none a few years ago.

Pritchard said the visit indicated that change is occurring in one of the world's most closed societies, even during a crisis over its nuclear ambitions, and that North Korea is far from economic collapse.

Pritchard resigned as senior North Korea specialist from the State Department in August after failing to persuade Washington to engage in direct talks with Pyongyang. ..//..

Source: Washington Post 16 January 2004

Expert Unconvinced on North Korea Nukes

WASHINGTON (AP) -- An American nuclear weapons expert who recently visited North Korea's main nuclear complex said Wednesday he saw no convincing evidence that Pyongyang can build a plutonium-based nuclear device, but it most likely can make plutonium.

Siegfried Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos, N.M., nuclear research laboratory, also said he remained unconvinced that the North Koreans could convert any such nuclear device into a nuclear weapon. Hecker, who visited North Korea's secretive Yongbyon nuclear site on Jan. 8 as part of an unofficial U.S. delegation, was speaking to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee…//..

Hecker also alluded to the ongoing dispute between the United States and North Korea about whether Pyongyang acknowledged to U.S. officials in October 2002 that it had a highly enriched uranium program in addition to the plutonium-producing capability it possesses at Yongbyon.

``The disagreement concerns a difference between what DPRK officials believe they said and what U.S. officials believe they heard,'' he said.

Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan told the U.S. delegation, according to Hecker, that North Korea had chosen the plutonium path to a nuclear deterrent.

Kim also reported to the visiting Americans that the country had no facilities, equipment or scientists dedicated to a uranium-bomb program. Hecker quoted Kim as saying ``'We can be very serious when we talk about this. We are fully open to technical talks.'''

Source: New York Times 21 January 2004

Chinese Not Convinced of North Korean Uranium Effort

China told Asian diplomats last week it is not convinced of U.S. claims that North Korea has a clandestine program to enrich uranium for use in nuclear weapons, according to U.S. officials who have been briefed on the discussions.

The previously unreported conversation -- raising doubts about the central element in the Bush administration's case against Pyongyang -- underscores how Chinese and U.S. aims appear to be diverging in the diplomatic effort to restrain North Korea's nuclear ambitions. China has taken the lead in organizing another round of six-nation talks, but the effort has bogged down over disputes among the parties about the scope and content of the negotiations. ..//..

U.S. officials have said that North Korean officials admitted they had a clandestine program during a meeting in October 2002 -- which sparked the current crisis -- but the North Koreans have since denied that. ..//..

Although the Bush administration has been deeply divided over how to respond to the North Korean crisis, there is little disagreement inside the government over the intelligence indicating North Korea has been secretly building uranium enrichment capability in violation of the 1994 accord. The main question has been when the program would be fully functioning and capable of making fissile material, with the Energy Department and Defense Intelligence Agency estimating the end of this year and the CIA and State Department providing a more conservative forecast of 2006 or 2007. ..//..

But last week, at a meeting in Seoul between Chinese, South Korean and Japanese officials on the North Korean crisis, one of the most senior Chinese diplomats dealing with the issue declared China did not believe North Korea had a highly enriched uranium program, according to U.S. officials who have been informed about the meeting by the Japanese.

At the meeting, the Chinese official, Fu Ying, and her Japanese counterpart, Mitoji Yabunaka, were discussing a possible freeze of North Korea's nuclear programs when Yabunaka noted it would be necessary to freeze both Yongbyon and the highly enriched uranium program.

Fu responded that North Korea has denied having an enrichment program, and that China also did not believe that it had one. She added that the U.S. government briefing provided to China had not been sufficient to convince China that North Korea had such a program. ..//..

Chas Freeman, a former assistant secretary of defense and senior U.S. diplomat in China, said to some extent the administration is paying the price for the controversy over its intelligence on Iraq's weapons. "Post-Iraq, the credibility of U.S. intelligence is not very high" around the world, he said.

But Freeman said that increasingly "we've been the odd man out" among the five nations meeting with North Korea on the crisis, offering a policy that he described as "all sticks and no carrots." ..//...

Sun Weide, spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, ..//.. noted that at the first round of six-nation talks in August, North Korea and the United States disagreed on whether Pyongyang had been pursuing uranium enrichment.

"China has never taken part in DPRK's nuclear program," Sun said,..//.."We have no knowledge of DPRK's nuclear program or its capabilities. We do not know if DPRK has a HEU [highly enriched uranium] program. According to our understanding, the Japanese are not completely aware of the situation, either."

Japanese officials declined to comment. ..//..

Source: Washington Post 7 January 2004

American Group Says North Koreans Are Eager to Deal With West

The leader of an unofficial American delegation that visited North Korea this month said Tuesday that North Korea seemed anxious to resolve differences with the United States over its nuclear program.

North Korean officials told the delegation that the Bush administration's central concern, complete and verifiable dismantlement of their nuclear weapons program, was within reach, said John W. Lewis, the group's leader, in a telephone interview. ..//... On this visit to North Korea, his 10th since 1987, Dr. Lewis said he had seen evidence of real change in North Korea.

One sign, he said, was a bustling market several blocks long in Pyongyang that was divided into hundreds of privately run stalls, many of them full of meat and vegetables for sale. The visitors were told that the farmers were allowed to sell their goods after meeting production quotas.

In addition, Dr. Lewis said he and his colleagues had noticed brisk traffic in the capital and the use of cellular phones and the Internet. And they noted the availability of cable television in their hotel rooms. ..//..

Source: New York Times 21 January 2004

In North Korea, First, save lives

Masood Hyder

UN humanitarian Coordinator in North Korea

The 2004 appeal for North Korea was launched on Nov. 19, when the press was seized with the nuclear issue -- and little else. Yet 3 million children desperately need proper nourishment and clean water, and an entire population needs basic medicine and better hospital care. If you could see what we see -- widespread industrial decrepitude, hardscrabble farming and abysmal health services -- you would have no doubt these ordinary yet heroic folk fully deserve the help we are requesting. ..//..

We did not fail. Lives were saved; we are helping turn the situation around. The malnutrition, stunting and maternal mortality rates, while still high, have fallen. Above all, we have established preventive capacity: Another famine cannot happen while we are here and properly supported.

Some critics advocate ending humanitarian aid to North Korea and passing the burden to the government. If we did not help, resources would have to be diverted from more aggressive purposes to take care of the vulnerable, they argue. This is a dangerous assumption. Let us not place unrealistic expectations on the ability of the humanitarian imperative to dictate national security priorities. ..//..

Fundamentally, what is changing is the attitude toward change itself. Instead of stoutly defending a supposedly perfect system that needs no amendment, authorities now allow for the possibility of change and adaptation. The question is: Will the world stand aside or help the process along?

We must also address the allegation that WFP assistance is diverted to the North Korean military. While we cannot guarantee that every sack of grain goes where it should, there are good reasons to believe -- foremost among them the impressive results of last year's nutritional survey -- that the great bulk of it does. ..//..

Source: Washington Post on 4 January 2004