News Compass

Thursday, November 06, 2003

North Korea Nuclear Crisis-
(continuing...) PART II: Unravelling the 1994 Agreed Framework

Read HERE Essay by Desaix Anderson " Crisis in North Korea: the U.S. Strategic Future in East Asia " (March 27, 2003) ... Desaix Anderson was the Executive Director of KEDO from 1997 until April 2001.

Excerpts:

"Under the 1994 Agreed Framework, the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization ( KEDO) was established to build two proliferation-resistant nuclear reactors and provide 500,000 metric tons annually of heavy fuel oil in exchange for termination of North Korea's nuclear programs at a place called Yongbyon.

When I took over KEDO in late 1997-98, the Agreed Framework verged on collapse.

DPRK officials told me, this was because the United States remained hostile to the DPRK and had NOT lifted economic sanctions or moved forward to normalize relations, as promised in the Agreed Framework.

For its part, the United States was demanding inspections of a suspected nuclear facility under a North Korean mountain at Kumchang-ri. Some in US Congress clamored for abrogation of the Agreed Framework; others advocated military action against North Korea.

The underlying cause of the 1994 crisis, the near collapse of the Agreed Framework in 1998, and the current crisis with Pyongyang all stem from the same root cause that the administration seems to ignore.

For ten years, North Korea, cut from support from the Soviet Union and China, has become profoundly insecure about its survival. The DPRK economy is dysfunctional. South Korea has surpassed the North in virtually every facet of national power.

U.S. military prowess in Afghanistan, the "pre-emptive attack" on Iraq, hostile rhetoric from the Bush administration exacerbate fears in Pyongyang of an American attack.

In each of the three recent crises in US relations with North Korea the scenarios have been virtually identical:

Out of growing weakness, Pyongyang cried out for attention, making increasingly dangerous threats, to try to ensure its security and survival in the post-Cold War world.

The sub-text each time has been North Korea's desire to break from its isolation and establish a non-hostile relationship with the United States, and through the United States to gain access to economic assistance, funds from Japan, the IMF, World Bank, Europe, South Korea, to resuscitate its economy;

Only negotiations explicitly ending hostility and the threat behind it will likely move Pyongyang to relinquish its newly dangerous challenge.

Economic pressure from neighbors may further devastate the North Korean economy, deepen famine, and even lead to collapse of North Korea's economy, but would not resolve the basic problem in Pyongyang.

During the 1998 crisis, North Korean Ambassador to the United Nations, Li Hyong Chol, emphasized to me that Pyongyang did not react well to ultimatums or to tit for tat proposals. Pyongyang, he told me, would be much more responsive to proposals for moving forward in tandem to deal with the issues at hand.

North Koreans repeatedly told me in 1998 that the U.S. had "nullified" the Agreed Framework, but the accusation led to nothing.

Despite North Korea's violation of the Agreed Framework, we should not have lightly discarded a mechanism that imposed crucial restraints on Pyongyang.

Under pressure, President Clinton named former defense Secretary William Perry to review North Korea policy. Over the next year (1999) , Secretary Perry convinced DPRK leadership that Washington was genuinely prepared to end American hostility and to normalize relations with the DPRK.

Read HERE Comparison between Clinton and GW Bush's policies on North Korea

Pyongyang accepted the "Perry approach." Subsequently, the United States and DPRK also made major progress on ending the other North Korean threat B long range ballistic missiles. The DPRK was required to honor its commitments, as it took advantage of the opportunities that were available for improved relations

The engagement through the Agreed Framework, KEDO, the Perry process, the North & South Korea Summit in June 2000, US- DPRK dialogue and missile talks, raised the hope of ending the fifty-year threat to peace in Northeast Asia, where two of our closest allies, Japan and South Korea, are located.

This was the first time where all efforts appeared to turn the DPRK from a dangerous wildcard into a less menacing and perhaps more constructive member of the community of Northeast Asia.

But by 2000, President Bush abruptly jettisoned the Clinton administration's and Secretary Perry's achievement. In a stunning press conference, President Bush publicly called North Korea untrustworthy and Kim Jong Il a dictator, seriously embarrassing and undermining President Kim Dae Jung.

The President, in effect, abrogated Perry's achievement by including North Korea in the "Axis of Evil."

Pyongyang also concluded that the threat of "pre-emptive nuclear attack," outlined in the U.S. 2002 National Security Strategy of September 2002, was aimed at North Korea.

As a result, Pyongyang feared and fears that North Korea is the next target after Iraq.

As a result, the crisis immediately began to deepen: At U.S. urging, the heavy fuel oil commitments were suspended by KEDO . Inevitably, Pyongyang reacted negatively and in a succession of dangerous moves has now renounced all the elements of the Agreed Framework.

Pyongyang announced that it would restart the five megawatt reactor that can produce enough plutonium each month to build a nuclear weapon. They threw out the IAEA inspectors and removed the seals on nuclear facilities.

North Korea regained control of 8000 spent fuel rods, stored under the Agreed Framework, enough to fuel five/six more nuclear weapons by this summer(2003). Although they have apparently not yet crossed the red line President Clinton drew, warning against any reprocessing. North Korea ended its missile moratorium, test firing two short range missiles into the Sea of Japan. Four MIG jets recklessly tracked a U.S. reconnaissance plane for twenty minutes two weeks ago.

Against this backdrop, over the past year(2002), Pyongyang initiated more serious economic reforms and improved relations with all its neighbors -- Russia, China, South Korea, and Japan -- to hedge against possible U.S. attack and to encourage the United States to resume dialogue.

Despite claiming for over a year to be "prepared to talk anytime, anywhere, without conditions" , the U.S. had spurned talks for 22 months until U.S. State Department Assistant Secretary James Kelly's visit last October 2002, to Pyongyang.

In fact, Kelly refused to talk, and only demanded that North Korea end its new nuclear activities.

My best guess is that the development of the uranium enrichment facility began in 1997-98 when the Agreed Framework almost collapsed. I assume that North Korea, in the context of the tenuous commitments of the United States; with its own growing weakness, Pakistan's proposal to pay for missile technology from North Korea with nuclear technology, decided to develop a new nuclear option.

This nuclear project apparently accelerated after President Bush included Pyongyang in the "Axis of Evil."

Kim Jong Il decided to manage U.S. allegations by instructing his Vice Foreign Minister to acknowledge the suspected uranium enrichment facilities. He raised the stakes in an already high stakes negotiation, but he hoped to induce the United States to undertake negotiations of a comprehensive settlement, as the United States itself had raised rhetorically. This was a risky strategy.

He probably surmised that the United States was too preoccupied with Al Qaeda and Iraq to attack North Korea at the moment, and that South Korea, Japan, Europe, China, and Russia would, in any case, all urge negotiations, not war.

The Bush Administration downplayed the North Korean threat, but the administration, in reality, fell into a dangerous self-imposed trap.

President Bush declared that the U.S. would pursue diplomatic channels to resolve this problem, but, instead, the administration began pushing Japan, South Korea, China, and Russia to exert economic pressures on North Korea.

Based on my experience, Pyongyang will not respond constructively to efforts by the Bush administration to impose sanctions or economic hardships on North Korea.

Moreover, refusal to talk infuriates a Korean since it implies profound disrespect and denial of the existence of the other person.

Despite these ominous moves, Pyongyang has repeatedly announced that North Korea was prepared to negotiate resolution of all the issues of concern to the U.S., including explicitly nuclear issues.

Pyongyang has also shifted from insistence on a US-DPRK Peace Treaty, which the U.S. has rejected, and is now calling for a non-aggression pact between Washington and Pyongyang.

Kim Jong Il has demonstrated repeatedly that his nuclear and missile activities are cards to exchange for elimination of threat he perceives from the U.S.

But I deeply fear that we are rapidly moving beyond the point at which North Korea might be willing to negotiate away its nuclear facilities and may well have decided, in light of the Bush administration's continuing hostility and unwillingness to even talk, that its best protection from the Bush administration is to become a nuclear-armed state.

The administration should overcome its puerile distaste for dealing with Kim Jong Il, and urgently engage the North in serious discussions to end North Korea's nuclear programs and deal with the root cause of North Korea's insecurity B the hostility and threat it perceives from the United States.

North Korea has emphatically rejected any multilateral approach to deal with its nuclear facilities, and insists on dealing only with the United States to manage the threat from the U.S. It is counter-productive to pursue an approach that has repeatedly been rejected and goads North Korea to ratchet up the pressure recklessly.

Others are advocating sanctions or military strikes against the facilities at Yongbyon. Others mention darkly "regime change." Pyongyang has declared that sanctions or any military strike would result in all-out war.

Almost the only hope would be to send Colin Powell, perhaps accompanied by the first President Bush, urgently to Pyongyang with full powers to negotiate a comprehensive resolution of the key issues, ending North Korea's nuclear and missile threats under intrusive inspections, ending U.S. hostility, security assurances to North Korea, and commitment to move rapidly to normal economic and political relations.
- Desaix Anderson

Read Here Paul Eckert's article "North Korea Says US Oil Cutoff Ends Nuclear Pact (November 21, 2002)"

Excerpts:

On November 14, Washington and its allies decided to stop vital fuel oil aid to penalize North Korea for breaking a series of nuclear non-proliferation pledges, including the 1994 Agreed Framework, with a covert uranium enrichment program which Pyongyang confessed last month to operating.

The isolated communist state's first response to the decision said the oil cutoff meant " it is high time to decide upon who is to blame for the collapse of the Framework. It is well known to the world that the U.S. has violated the Framework and boycotted the implementation of its commitments," a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman said in a statement carried on the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).

Under the 1994 Agreed Framework, the North promised to freeze its nuclear weapons program in return for fuel oil, paid for by Washington, and two light water reactors that cannot easily be converted to produce atomic weapons material.

The statement called the oil cutoff -- which takes effect as North Korea's sub-zero winter sets in next month -- a "wanton violation" of the pledges of allied energy aid for North Korea. The cuts will hit North Korea just ahead of winter, adding to the woes of a population of 22 million suffering from severe economic hardship and food shortages that relief groups said have killed as many as several million people.

The North Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) complained bitterly on 15 November:
"We cannot keep the nuclear programme frozen any longer only to get heavy oil - the shipments of which may be suspended any time, with no importance given to when light-water reactors will be provided. ...

The Framework Agreement, which was concluded by sincere efforts of the DPRK [Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea] and the United States two years ago, marking an epoch-making occasion in ensuring peace in the Peninsular...is...now at stake... If the US is interested in the implementation of the bilateral agreement even a little bit, it must take a reasonable view of the present situation and have a responsible position. ...

Now we do not feel it necessary to continue wasting time since the US has unilaterally delayed the implementation of the agreement, breaking its promise..."
It asserted that the United States had broken the pact because the light-water reactor construction is behind schedule and because Washington had threatened Pyongyang by branding North Korea part of an "axis of evil" with Iran and Iraq.

North Korea took the United States perilously close to war a decade ago over its previous attempt to build nuclear arms with the plutonium-based program frozen by the Agreed Framework.

North Korean representatives in Asia have issued warnings that if oil shipments were halted, Pyongyang would reactivate an its plutonium program or end a self-imposed moratorium on test flights of ballistic missiles.

The spokesman reiterated a demand Pyongyang first made on October 25 that the United States sign a non-aggression treaty.

Bush issued a statement demanding that the North dismantle its nuclear program while restating that the United States had no intention of invading the impoverished country. But the North demanded "legal assurances of non-aggression."

"The (North Korean) proposal for concluding a non-aggression treaty is, in essence, the only realistic solution to the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula," the statement said.
-- Paul Eckert

Read HERE essay by Leon V. Sigal "N. Korea: Fibs versus Facts" August,5, 2003

Excerpts:

The Bush administration has been 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 2003, 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.

(I) One inexactitude 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. It will not give them away for nothing, however.

It wants a written pledge from the United States not to attack it, impede its economic development or attempt to overthrow its government. It insists on dealing directly with the United States, whether or not China, South Korea, Japan and Russia are at the negotiating table, because none of them can give security assurances on behalf of the United States. North Korea will let U.S. inspectors monitor its nuclear sites, but it won't submit to international inspections until Washington ends what Pyongyang calls its "hostile policy."

North Korea will keep reprocessing plutonium and generating more spent nuclear fuel in its Yongbyon reactor. It will also continue to build gas centrifuges to enrich uranium. It wants an agreement in principle committing America to satisfy its security and economic concerns before it will stop.

This is intended to underscore North Korea's basic stance that if the United States remains its foe, it feels threatened and will seek nuclear arms and missiles to counter that threat, but if the United States ends enmity, it says it will not.

Does North Korea mean what it says?

History does suggest the North is willing to deal. Under the Agreed Framework of October 1994, it froze work at facilities that by now could have been generating at least 30 bombs' worth of plutonium a year. That is a real nuclear weapons program. Its enrichment effort, by contrast, won't be ready to produce much weapons-grade uranium until mid-decade at the earliest, according to U.S. intelligence.

(II) The 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 (Bush) .

The fact is, Washington got what it most wanted up front, but it did NOT live up to its end of the bargain. When Republicans captured control of Congress in elections just days after the Agreed Framework was signed, they denounced the deal as appeasement.

Afraid of taking them on, the Clinton administration backpedaled on implementation.It did little easing of sanctions until 2000.

Reactor construction was slow to get under way. Although we pledged to provide the two reactors "by a target date of 2003," we did NOT pour the concrete for the first foundation until August 2002.

We did NOT always deliver heavy fuel oil on schedule.

Above all, we did NOT live up to our promise, in Article II of the Agreed Framework, to "move toward full normalization of political and economic relations" - to end enmity and economic sanctions.

When Washington was slow to fulfill the terms of the accord, Pyongyang in 1997 threatened to break it.

Its acquisition of technology to enrich uranium from Pakistan began soon thereafter. That was a pilot program, not the operational capability that the North moved to acquire in 2001 - after the Bush administration refused to negotiate and instead put it on a target list for nuclear attack.

(II) 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.
-Leon V. Sigal