Left Flank

Andreas Persbo finds something both the North Koreans and the Bush administration can agree on. Both states hate the IAEA. Is this the seed of a rapprochement?

I remember wanting «conditions on the ground» in the original draft, which was edited out. The main conclusion comes through, however. The DPRK cannot be in total control over which sites to declare, discuss, and visit. But it also cannot be expected to fall over on its back. Finding the right balance, the right buy-in, in the verification process will be very difficult.

I've heard that the Japanese are unhappy with the outcome of the text. Presumably, they would have wanted more Agency involvement. We shall see.

This also seems to be another sign of Pyongyang's growing confidence.

After thinking about it, I think a student might have said it best, although at the time I thought the notion was daffy: the North sent a political message. Whatever that message might be is beyond me, or even those students today. Chosun Daily exhausts its wits.

This is stubbornness goes beyond the realms of reason. Heated rhetoric is nothing new from North Korea, but this tops everything we have seen before. The incident involves a North Korean soldier killing an unarmed South Korean woman by shooting her in the back. And she was dressed in civilian clothes as well. According to a formal agreement the two Koreas signed involving entry to and sojourn within the resort, North Korea is responsible for the safety of South Korean tourists. Even if a South Korean tourist violates regulations, North Korean authorities are required to stop the tourist first and then begin investigation. Yet before it took any other measures, North Korea simply pulled the trigger.

The North said a sentry fired warning shots before shooting the tourist, a 53-year-old Seoul housewife named Park Wang-ja. But a witness said only two shots were heard, and Park had two gunshot wounds. There is a strong possibility that no warning shots were fired at all. North Korea said Park left her hotel at 4:30 a.m. and walked 1.1 km to a fence enclosing the tourist beach. North Korea said Park then climbed over the fence and walked another 1.2 km until she came in front of a military guard post. After hearing a sentry tell her to stop, Park then ran back 1 km the way she came, until she was shot at 4:50 a.m. Thus the North Korean account.

If North Korea’s explanation is true, then in a span of just 20 minutes, Park would have traversed a distance of 3.3 km on ankle-deep sand. That means she traveled at a speed of 9.9 km/h. A healthy person in their 20s jogging briskly on level ground achieves no more than 8-9 km/h. So North Korea’s account makes no sense. It is hard not to be suspicious that the North is hiding the truth to cover up responsibility. The only way to get to the truth is for a South Korean fact-finding team to go Mt. Kumgang and investigate the scene. But North Korea is refusing to allow this.

Another college student on the tour has offered his account of the incident.

“Before dawn in the morning of July 11, I saw a 50-something woman in black walking toward the north and there was a fence, ” said Lee In-bok, 23, a sophomore at Kyungpook National University majoring in history, in a telephone interview with the Dong-A Ilbo. He said, “About 5-10 minutes afterwards, I heard two shootings with 10 seconds apart from the North and a scream.”

Lee, who was participating in the 2008 Mount Geumgang Life and Peace Camp for College Students, was sitting on the beach to see sunrise at the moment.

Lee said, “When she walked toward the fence, I did not take it seriously because I did not know whether the area was off-limits or there was a military watch house.”

He added, “Having heard of the shooting, I went up to a sand dune along the beach next to the fence and looked at where the gun shot came from. I found a person lying down. Three soldiers came out from bushes that were 300 meters away and touched the person with their feet to see whether she was dead or not.”

“When I first saw the scene, I thought it was a military drill or an internal problem and came back to the hotel. When I came back to the South, I heard that it was an accident,” he said. “Before the shooting, I heard some speaker sound from a village in the North, but I was not able to understand it clearly.”

Obviously, South Koreans take their «Southern» liberties far too lightly. In DPRK, a bullet is the price for making mistakes. There's also something so «Korean» about returning an accusation with a counter-accusation, as if considering the others' viewpoint is a diplomatic nuisance. And here, perhaps, that student today was right. Although it would seem, that with the Six-Party Talks continuing, Pyongyang receiving heavy fuel from Russia, and ROK President Lee MYung-bak considering inter-Korean relations and the shooting separate issues, Pyongyang can afford to be contrite. Or, contrariwise, it can now afford to be as confident and candid as it wants to be.

It might be wishful thinking, but when Pyongyang is involved, that luxury can turn to disappointment.

The two-pronged approach grew out of an agreement reached by Pyongyang and Washington in Singapore on April 8. Unlike the North’s production of plutonium, whose existence is acknowledged by both the North and the United States, the two countries differ on the existence of highly-enriched uranium being produced by the North and the North’s proliferation activities.

The establishment of a system for monitoring the North’s activities, in particular, seems to be a strategic attempt to ease tensions via diplomatic compromise and block nuclear activity by North Korea in the future, rather than a resolution of the nuclear issue that continues to focus on past activities.

ACW's James Acton acknowledges this, and is not taking sides. Which, BTW,is what the members of the Six-Party process should remember.

Here's a decidedly minority opinion about the consequences of Pyongyang's latest Six-Party reactions (via Observing Japan's «Bush tries to reassure Japan»:).

...it can be argued that the Six Party process, whatever its outcome, is helping to 'socialise' the Pyongyang regime, bringing it closer to the international community and making it slightly less likely that North Korea would ever use its weapons.

I have one problem with this intriguing notion. It works if Pyongyang has truly decided to change its ways. Yet, if consensus within the Six-Party process breaks down, then Pyongyang could reassert itself by resuming a divide-and-conquer strategy, with at least Beijing and Moscow in its corner. And, also, if the US is not sincere about the Six-Party process (which is different from what Roggeveen argues contra OFK), then, again, consensus and pressure on Pyongyang might fracture.

The problem I see with the DPRK nuclear issue is, that it is rarely a front-burner issue. A.Q, Khan's «Pakistani Pipeline» might have supplied enriched uranium technology. Beijing's diplomatic and economic influence on Pyongyang trumps American and South Korean efforts. Unification is politically more immediate in most South Koreans' minds. Japanese conservatives want the abductions issue resolved.

Pyongyang survives because its opponents don't.

On The Charlie Rose Show, David Sanger provides an excellent introduction to a wide range of subjects related to nuclear proliferation, including the recent destruction of DPRK's Yongbyon cooling tower, Iran, A.Q. Khan, and Syria. Phillip Carter has a slightly different read on how the Afghanistan and Iraq wars affected the negotiations with Pyongyang.

What I'm hearing through the grapevine is that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan required so much attention from senior decision makers that it allowed career diplomats and junior political appointees to do their work in East Asia. In essence, the six-party talks needed less attention to work well, so that diplomats and national leaders could get down to business without all of the posturing that goes along with highly public diplomacy. This may or may not be true, but it's an interesting view of how diplomacy can work. I look forward to learning the full story.

Or, in other words, our bench saved our áššëš! This must be the hardliners' sop to what Sanger heard from the diplomats.

Total Wonkerr's Paul advises patience, as Pyongyang delivers its mandated nuclear declaration:

will North Korea really agree to verification for anything beyond Yongbyon, at least in the near future? I suspect we will either be looking at more than the three phases envisioned, or a “phase three” with quite a few sub-phases to get to that point.

Yet, Leslie Gelb and Winston Lord also caution against being too soft on Pyongyang, and I agree. Tobe fair, this is the anti-Nork and ROK expat line, too. (only with extra fury and scorn added). DPRK Studies obliges with customary rant and links. The hardliners are so apoplectic they would even feature the testimony of a traitor, Charles Jenkins. Robert Koehler calls the outcome a «...steaming load of çráp.»

It is one thing to compromise in order to craft an agreement, keep difficult negotiations going and not let the best be the enemy of the good. It is another thing to let the other side breach compromises already reached.

President Bush’s remarks at his meeting with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak last weekend suggest that he still may stiffen his stance. We hope so. Our fear, however, is that Bush, feeling the glow of a rare foreign policy accomplishment, may proceed to cement a legacy. He should consider the criticism he would heap upon his successor if he or she were to ink such a deal.

The two of us can hardly be counted as conservative die-hards opposing deals with Pyongyang. We believe that Washington and its allies are rightly committed to exploring even the remotest chance that Pyongyang might give up its nuclear weapons. While reaching for that larger goal, our negotiators can seek to cap North Korea’s nuclear inventory and head off proliferation.

We oppose both abandoning the September 2005 agreement and allowing Pyongyang to eviscerate it. Better to let the talks continue than to make one-sided concessions. Better to sharpen North Korean compliance or—failing that—to string out our own.

Bush can sustain international unity by making clear that his goal is to hold Pyongyang to its 2005 commitments. This is the only way to preserve American credibility and bargaining leverage. It is also the only way to maintain political support in Washington for these difficult negotiations.

This is the legacy Bush should bequeath to his successor.

Westhawk trumps all with canny geopolitical insight. After flirting with the notion, that the Bush administration is pursuing vainly its historical legacy, Westhawk highlights the PRC-US relationship that's more important than Washington's with Pyongyang (but, as I have argued, the nuclear non-proliferation regime):

The North Korean regime has been a troublemaker for decades, and continues to be, if the allegations concerning the now-destroyed Syrian plutonium reactor are correct. We should expect North Korea to continue to be a troublemaker in the future; extortion and noxious weapon sales are the only sources of hard currency for the regime.

Yet by making this deal with North Korea, the Bush administration has taken pressure off the regime and extended its life. By extending its life, the U.S. has extended the period during which the North Koreans will be able to cause trouble for the U.S. and its allies.

If this is the case, why did the Bush administration make this deal?

End-of-term vanity might be one explanation. A more substantive reason might have to do with China. A collapse of the North Korean regime would immediately bring trouble to China. China does not like it when North Korea causes trouble. But neither does China want North Korea to collapse. For China, the best outcome for now is maintenance of the status quo. Which is what today’s deal extends.

So is Secretary Rice’s deal a favor to the Chinese, a deal-within-a-deal? By helping the Chinese avoid a problem with North Korea, will the Chinese now help the U.S. somewhere else, perhaps with Iran?

Is today’s deal clever grand strategy by President Bush and Secretary Rice? Or just petty vanity displayed by an administration soon to leave office? We should know the answer soon enough.

October 1949? June 25, 1950? Does time ever move forward in this neck of the woods? Is the US forever fated to stand athwart the shadow of Beijing's colossus, with nary a well-conceived strategy about what to do about it? Beijing's 58 year old Pyongyang gambit is still dragging on.

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With the recent disclosures about DPRK-Syria cooperation at al-Kibar, context is a rare commodity, and The Economist delivers.

Judging by its past behaviour, North Korea would do pretty much anything for cash; there are suspicions that it helped the Khan network supply nuclear material to Libya. That said, providing engineers and designs for Syria's reactor may chiefly have been meant to tweak America's nose, says Michael Green, a former Bush administration official now at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank in Washington, DC.

The Bush administration and North Korea fell out badly in 2002 over charges that Kim Jong Il's regime had secretly been trying to enrich uranium (also a potential bomb ingredient) while plutonium production was frozen by a previous agreement. The following year North Korea privately threatened to expand its “deterrent”, test it (which it later did) and even sell it. With little to export beyond counterfeit currency, drugs and crises, says Mr Green, North Korea used Syria to up the ante—and the expected compensation for later agreeing to desist.

Now America and Mr Kim are negotiating again as part of a six-party deal (also including South Korea, Japan, China and Russia) to tempt him to give up his bombs. Senior American officials last week acknowledged that they had debated whether to try a combination of diplomacy and threats to end the Syrian project. For Israel, however, the Syrian reactor was an existential threat-in-the-making. There was no green light from the United States, the officials said: “none was asked for, none was given.”

Hoping to avoid retaliation, and to head off the risk of a wider Middle East war, Israel wanted the intelligence that led to the bombing kept secret. Worried that wider disclosure would sink the six-party effort too, America briefed only a score of senior members of Congress at the time.

But now the administration needs Congress's support for a controversial deal that could fall significantly short of the prize that the six-party negotiations were supposed to deliver: that, in return for oodles of energy aid and a lifting of some key sanctions, North Korea would first provide a full and accurate accounting of its nuclear past and later dismantle all its nuclear programmes. Instead it has merely declared a rather modest stockpile of plutonium and dug its heels in. Trying to move talks forward, American diplomats have struck a tentative deal that would allow North Korea to “acknowledge” American “concerns” about uranium and proliferation activities, in return for better verification of Yongbyon's plutonium haul. But the backtracking led Congress to demand the facts on Syria first.

George Bush said this week that by going public, America wanted to press North Korea's (notoriously impervious) Kim Jong Il into fuller disclosure, and send a message to proliferators everywhere. But the Syrian pictures may just as easily lead Congress to demand that America adopt a tougher stance in the six-party talks.

Another casualty could be the NPT itself. The IAEA's boss, Mohamed ElBaradei, says inspectors should have been given information about the Syrian reactor sooner by America and Israel. Yet Syria, had it not chosen to deny all, could have claimed that technically it was doing nothing wrong. Building a nuclear reactor is not against NPT rules, unless done with weapons intent—and that is hard, if not impossible, for inspectors to prove, says Henry Sokolski of the Non-proliferation Policy Education Centre in Washington. However, under a 1992 rule accepted by Syria, it should have alerted the IAEA to its reactor plans before construction started. North Korea, Iran and now Syria. The NPT seems there for the breaking.

Firstly, comes NPT reform and a proper way to share intelligence. And then, the US can deal with its armistice with the DPRK. In that order!

I'm still decelerating from a guest lecture by Johan Galtung, "Peace in the Global Era and Perspectives of the Unification on the Korean Peninsula", I attended this afternoon at Dong-A University. As usual I forgot my camera, because I honestly thought the panel discussion would be an examination of Galtung's work by South Korean professors applied to the North Korean problem, not a guest lecture. OK, he's not Beckham, but now I can but a face to articles I have read in IR grad classes. And, his treatment of the North Korean problem was inspiring.

Galtung deviated from the script immediately. Kudos to the Dong-A professor who suddenly was forced into the role of translator. The younger South Korean and Galtung exchanged some tense words, and Galtung often had to repeat for him, but the man did an admirable job. Well, his boss, the dean, who is "friends" with Galtung, was sitting right there at the table, too. But, that was nothing compared to the fireworks later, when another professor lit into Galtung for his arguments. The dean had to wave him off! More later...

After a late start (15 minutes), and the dean's fulsome praise (which bordered on lavish), Galtung quickly laid out his five-point lecture. He began with his distinction between negative and positive peace, and applied it the Korean peninsula. The goal of resolving the Korean armistice precedes political unification. After characterizing the North Korean state as "fundamentalist Confucian", Galtung then argued that unification only necessitated the free flow of people, goods and services, and information and ideas between the two Korean states, not the dissolution of ROK and DPRK into a single Korean state. Galtung buttressed this point by that of three other scenarios, conquest, collapse, or peaceful dissolution, the first two were violent, and the last has never occurred in human history. Galtung termed this "national reconciliation without the unification of two states". Galtung subsequently considered confederation as a starting political point, but unnecessary.

Topically, Galtung predicted that DPRK, following Hu Jintao's lead in this 17th Party Congress address would adopt Chinese economic reforms, and experience double-digit economic growth in the next ten years. The stumbling point before now was the Chinese emphasis on "jungle capitalism" and the Juche emphasis on distribution. But with Hu's embrace of distribution, Kim Jong-il can now embrace the PRC model. So, let's put a marker on that prediction.

Also, Galtung examined the Six-Party dynamics, as the historical result of a century's worth of diplomacy beginning with the Taft-Katsura Agreement of 1905. With DPRK and PRC on one side, and Japan and US on the other, ROK has vacillated between the two sides. Under Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, Seoul favored the DPRK-PRC axis, but Lee Myung-bak looks fit to swing back to the Japan-US side. Galtung predicted this latest swing would fail, and ROK would swing back again in the future. But, as an honest broker between the US and DPRK, ROK can take a step toward positive peace. Galtung criticized the decision not to award both Kim Jong-il and Kim Dae-jung the Nobel Peace Prize for the June, 2000 Summit. For Galtung, ROK has to act a third-party mediator, or escrow account, as he used for an example, between DPRK and US.

The US wants denuclearization; DPRK wants normalization. Both states should give the instruments of both processes to Seoul, after which Seoul can decide to verify both simultaneously. Or, another organization, such as the UN Security Council (minus the US), the IAEA, or the remaining four parties in the Six-Party process can also be alternative mediators. Galtung emphasized, though, that ROK's role was insignificant in the regional and global contest between DPRK and US, if it did not operate even-handedly between DPRK and US. Galtung remained hopeful, that, if ROK and DPRK can become diplomatic equals, the human rights situation will improve, but that the US, and those still desiring collapse or conquest, are "arrogant". "Peace is a relation," Galtung stated.

It was during the Q&A, that Professor X launched into an emotional tirade (in English) about North Korean human rights abuses. He also correctly lectured about the persecution of religious denominations in the DPRK, including the Confucian religion Galtung had argued typified the North Korean state. Although I agreed, this man was rude. The dean prompted him to repeat his comments in Korean for the audience, but then had to quiet the man repeatedly afterwards. Galtung repeated his argument and agreed with the professor, that the North Korean regime is "terrible". At this point, he emphasized again, that peace is relational.

I asked about the South African and Libyan cases as models for denuclearization, which Galtung acknowledged as examples of successes. I also argued that political unification is impossible geopolitically on a peninsula. Here Galtung emphasized, that "unification is not important", but the free flow of people and goods is. He also advocated an "East Asian Community", to integrate the Korean peninsula into a regional and global framework.

Galtung's emphasis on reconciliation without unification is a thousand times more agreeable to me than an internecine conflict over how to unifiy the peninsula into one state. The tension in the auditorium, full of students, who honestly were more concerned with verifying their attendance than listening, rose and hit newer levels every time Galtung slighted ROK, or dissed unification. I don't believe these students knew who the man was, or respected his career. I think the only South Korean who admired him was the dean. Unfortunately, whatever Galtung argued was binned as another foreigners' lack of appreciation for the present situation, not as an application of Galtung's peace studies to a current crisis. As the one professor demonstrated, engaging with arguments dispassionately might be utopian in an emotionally-charged political situation where even students feel Koreans own the debate.