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On February 13, the parties to the Six Party Talks on North Korea's nuclear programme announced that they had reached agreement on a Denuclearization Action Plan, under which Pyongyang will take steps towards closing its Yongbyon nuclear facility and allow International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors back, in return for supplies of heavy fuel oil. The Plan also established working groups to work towards normalisation of relations between the Democratic People's Republic of [North] Korea (DPRK) and the United States and Japan.
The agreement has been widely hailed as a step in the right direction, though no-one should underestimate the challenges that remain. In subsequent weeks, North Korea has already prevaricated over the closure of Yongbyon, whilst a further round of Six Party Talks held in March was forced to suspend as North Korea halted its participation until it had received $25 million held by the Macau-based Banco Delta Asia (BDA) that the United States had promised to unfreeze.
Other difficult issues that will need to be tackled include the question of whether the regime was pursuing a uranium enrichment programme, how to ensure that suspected existing stocks of nuclear warheads and materials are fully decommissioned, and the status of North Korea with regard to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
The Denuclearization Action Plan, agreed at the fifth round of Six Party Talks in Beijing, [1] is intended to begin implementation of the September 2005 Joint Statement, which set the goal of early denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. This agreement follows a year of stalemate, culminating North Korea's small, but provocative nuclear test in October 2006. (Experts remain divided over whether this was a 'fizzle' - a failure to produce a much larger explosion - or a demonstration that North Korea has the ability to miniaturise a nuclear explosion - technology essential for delivering a nuclear warhead by missile.[2])
Under the Denuclearization Action Plan North Korea has agreed to take first steps towards disarmament by shutting down and sealing its Yongbyon nuclear plant and to allow IAEA inspectors back in to the site to verify these steps within 60 days (in accordance with an April 11, 2007 deadline), in return for an initial transfer of 50,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil. A further 950,000 tonnes of oil is in the offing if North Korea continues to make progress towards dismantling its nuclear weapon-related infrastructure, including irreversibly disabling the Yongbyon reactor and making a full declaration of all nuclear programmes. Oil and aid are to be provided by China, Russia, South Korea and the United States, but not Japan.
Five working groups are to meet during the first 30 days covering:
The United States is also to begin the process of removing North Korea from its designation as a state sponsor of terrorism - a step that is expected to face some opposition in Congress.
In a significant concession, the US agreed to resolve within 30 days the dispute over money laundering at the BDA which had led to North Korean assets being frozen. This represents something of a U-turn by Washington, which has previously insisted that the banking dispute be handled separately, as a law-enforcement matter.
US Treasury officials report that they had uncovered "systemic failures by Banco Delta Asia to apply appropriate standards and due diligence" and a "gamut of illicit activities that the bank facilitated on behalf of North Korean-related clients." [3] The Bush administration, despite the reservations of some treasury officials, seems to have decided that it was undesirable for a dispute over a relatively small amount of money to continue to damage prospects for a nuclear agreement with North Korea.
However, the problem reared its head again at the further talks in Beijing in March, when the transfer to funds was apparently held up. The North Korean delegation refused to continue until the funds had been received, forcing China to suspend the latest round of six party talks on March 21, pending resolution of the BDA issue.[4]
The question of what to do about any existing North Korean nuclear weapons and the plutonium fuel already produced at Yongbyon is also to be left for later in the process. Similarly US allegations about a clandestine uranium enrichment programme - an issue that has proved to be a stumbling block in the past as North Korea denies that is has any such programme - are not specifically addressed in the current agreement, but remain to be tackled in the future. The Action Plan does not refer to the alleged uranium enrichment programme specifically, but requires North Korea to discuss "a list of all its nuclear programmes" - a phrase that the US has made clear includes uranium enrichment.
Since the agreement of the Denuclearization Action Plan, however, US officials have revealed that there is now uncertainty concerning intelligence on North Korean uranium enrichment activities. At a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee in March, the North Korea mission manager for the national intelligence director, Joseph DeTrani told Senators that the US had gone from "high confidence" in its assessment that North Korea was pursuing a large scale enrichment facility to "mid-confidence level" now.[5]
This disclosure raises questions once again about the reliability of US intelligence on WMD and the Bush administration's judgement in confronting the North Korean regime with this accusation in 2002, particularly since this was the allegation that precipitated the collapse of the Agreed Framework and North Korea's expulsion of IAEA inspectors and withdrawal from the NPT. As renouncing the NPT effectively left North Korea free to reprocess plutonium fuel rods that had been previously been monitored by the IAEA, the importance of the uranium enrichment question faded. Some of this plutonium is believed to have been used in the October 2006 nuclear test.
Inevitably, North Korea, which has always denied having a uranium enrichment programme, was quick to exploit the uncertainty, calling on the United States to submit their evidence for scrutiny. As North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye-Gwan stated, "If they present evidence, we will explain it to them."[6] The chief negotiator for the United States, Christopher Hill, responded robustly that if the materials North Korea bought "did not go into a highly enriched uranium programme, maybe they went somewhere else... Fine. We can have a discussion about where they are and where they've gone."[7]
The fifth round of Six Party Talks got off to an inauspicious start in December 2006.[8] In addition to sharp exchanges between North Korea and the United States over what North Korea describes as the US's "hostile" policy towards the Kim Jong-Il regime, there were disagreements over energy supplies, North Korea's demand for a nuclear reactor, and the freeze on financial assets at the BDA. However, whilst the talks apparently broke up for a Christmas recess in acrimony, post November 2006 election shifts in the United States made behind-the-scenes negotiations more productive than in the past. As a consequence, with Chinese mediation, a private bilateral meeting was set up outside Beijing.[9]
According to the Washington Post, these bilateral talks were "personally approved" by President George W. Bush,[10] despite four years of insisting that he would not allow direct talks with Pyongyang. Meeting in Berlin in January, Hill and Kim Kye-gwan were able to thrash out much of the framework for the Six Party agreement.
According to background briefings in the US media, Hill and Kim were able to agree that North Korea would receive oil shipments in return for action to close Yongbyon, but they disagreed over timing. "Mr. Hill said oil could be shipped as long as the North Koreans agreed to close and seal their Yongbyon nuclear reactor and processing centre within 45 days. Mr. Kim countered with 90 days. They settled on 60."[11]
The precise amount of oil to be transferred was left open for discussion in Six Party working groups. However, once the talks got underway in Beijing, North Korea made clear that it was not happy to leave this issue to the working groups and that it wanted a large degree of energy assistance (two million tonnes of fuel oil and two million kilowatts of electricity a year) and that it wanted the quantity of oil it was to receive to be made public to prevent any reneging on the agreement.
Whilst the US negotiating team was initially sceptical about providing North Korea with such large supplies of oil, South Korean negotiator Chun Yung-woo was able to reassure its ally by proposing that more oil be offered in exchange for "deeper denuclearization", a link designed to garner US support. Eventually the six parties agreed on one million tonnes of oil, roughly one year's supply for North Korea. However, only 50,000 tonnes of oil are to be transferred in the first instance, with further supplies contingent on North Korea making progress on disabling its nuclear arsenal, step by step.
The new deal with North Korea was made possible by shifts within the Bush administration fuelled by the failures of their past policies and the Democrat gains in the Senate and House of representatives, which encouraged knowledgeable officials to face down or bypass conservatives inside and outside the administration. The Denuclearization Action Plan therefore represents a turning point in Bush policy away from the failed neocon strategy of isolating the North Korean regime in the hope that it might one day collapse under pressure.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice played a useful role, stopping in Berlin to be briefed by Hill, and relaying information directly to the President and National Security Adviser Stephen J Hadley, who "walked it through with concerned people" within the administration.[12] This is in stark contrast with the first four years of the Bush Presidency, when Secretary of State Colin Powell had much less access to the President's ear than Rice (then National Security Adviser) and the influential 'deciders' in the administration like then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
The ink on the agreement with North Korea was barely dry before it came in for swingeing criticism from the hawks. Former US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton led the criticism, saying that he was "very disturbed" by the deal,[13] and that he hoped it would fall apart before being carried out.[14] "I'm very sad about the president's change in policy," he said in an interview. "The policy as originally articulated and implemented in the first term was exactly right. There's no need to change it."[15] Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and Disarmament Robert Joseph appeared to share Bolton's dismay, and in an unexpected response to the hawks' loss of influence, announced last month that he will shortly resign. Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams reportedly circulated emails within the administration demanding to know why North Korea would not have to prove first that it had stopped sponsoring terrorism before being rewarded with removal from the list of states sponsoring terrorism. Abrams' objection is that in the deal with Libya on abandoning weapons of mass destruction, the US required Libya first to end support for terrorism before it would being the delisting process, and that with Libya the process on terrorism was kept separate from that on weapons of mass destruction.[16]
Vice President Dick Cheney has not directly criticised the Six Party deal, but he put the onus for behaviour modification on Pyongyang, noting on a recent trip to Australia: "In light of North Korea's missile test last July, its nuclear test in October and its record of proliferation and human rights abuses, the regime in Pyongyang has much to prove". Whilst Condoleezza Rice went out of her way to thank China for its "active" role in the talks,[17] Cheney took the opportunity to lambast China's military buildup as "less constructive" and "not consistent with China's stated goal of a 'peaceful rise'."
Some conservatives appear to regard the Action Plan as little better than the Agreed Framework negotiated by the Clinton Administration in 1994, which the neocons have long despised, arguing that it "rewarded" North Korea's bad behaviour. It remains to be seen whether the Bush administration will face conservative opposition when it seeks congressional backing for its plans to provide oil and aid to North Korea.[18] Administration officials have been quick to try to differentiate the latest agreement from the Agreed Framework, emphasising that it will not "front-load" benefits to North Korea. On the contrary, the bulk of the promised fuel will not be delivered until North Korea "disables" Yongbyon. President Bush has also emphasised that the Denuclearization Action Plan involves the four other parties, most importantly China.[19]
Democrats might welcome the Denuclearization Agreement, but they have criticised the Bush administration for creating more serious security threats as a consequence of jettisoning the 1994 framework and pursuing years of wrong-headed strategy based on disengagement and coercion, which have demonstrably backfired. Senator Joseph Biden (Delaware), the Democratic Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, recently commented that the deal "takes us back to the future... The good news is that it freezes in place North Korea's nuclear programme... The bad news is that North Korea's programme is more dangerous to us now than it was in 2002, when President Bush rejected virtually the same deal he is now embracing."[20]
The North Korean nuclear test appears to have helped bring about the agreement, though whether this was by intention or strategic misjudgement is unclear. Some consider that the test helped to put President Bush under pressure to engage more constructively, as it clearly demonstrated the failure of Bush administration policies to curtail North Korea's nuclear ambitions. On the other hand, China's response has been much heavier than the Kim Jong-Il regime might have been anticipated from its previous missile tests, and the test may therefore mark a turning point in North Korea's relations with its major ally.
The United States has sought for years to get China to play a more publicly active role; following the nuclear test, China has played a much larger role. including negotiating and agreeing UN Security Council Resolution 1718, and in bringing North Korea back to the Six Party negotiating table after over a year of stalemate. China has cut its military aid to North Korea and backed US efforts to crack down on the regime's money laundering through the BDA - action that appears to have hit home, as this was reputedly an important source of hard currency used to fund the lifestyle of the North Korean elite.
Recent reports suggest that the North Korean economy is once again in a dire state, which may also have affected the country's willingness to return to the negotiating table. The World Food Programme reported in March that the country faces further famine following a poor harvest and a sharp drop in aid, particularly from its largest donors, South Korea (which suspended aid following the North Korean missile tests in July 2006) and China, which has also dramatically reduced aid during the last year. According to the World Food Programme, millions of people face going hungry. The Kim Jong-Il regime, which bases its policies on the Juche ideology (often translated as independence or self-reliance), has take the unusual step of requesting an expansion in international food assistance. [21]
At the same time, the UN Development Agency announced that it would be suspending work in North Korea, after the regime failed to meet conditions set up in response to American complaints that UN money was being diverted for the benefit of the regime's leadership rather than the people in most need. The suspension will affect programmes in North Korea with a total budget of $4.4 million.
The Denuclearization Action Plan now clears the way for South Korea, in particular, to resume economic and diplomatic engagement with the North. The following day the South Korean government invited the DPRK to resume bilateral talks, which had been suspended after the nuclear test. "What is very important about the agreement is that it not only resolves the North Korea nuclear issue itself," South Korea's president, Roh Moo-hyun, said, "but, in a further step, it includes a clause for discussions, negotiations on establishing a permanent peace regime on the Korean Peninsula."[22]
Nonetheless there is still the risk that North Korea will return to its previous pattern of prolonging, prevaricating and procrastinating over the dismantling of its nuclear programme. An ominous sign of this was North Korea's state news agency's description of the closure of Yongbyon as a "temporary suspension". Ambassador Hill was quick to respond: "The North Koreans agreed to shut down their reactors and seal them for the purpose of abandoning them," he said. "Any action to restart the reactors would be a violation of the agreement."[23]
Following the success of the negotiations leading to the Denuclearization Action Plan, the sixth round of Six Party Talks got off to a bad start on March 20. With the release of funds from the BDA still unresolved, North Korea's chief envoy Kim Kye-Gwan went into the talks arguing that the US had not done what it had said it would concerning the release of funds from BDA. He told the media, "We will not stop our nuclear activity until our funds frozen in the BDA are fully released... We will not stop the Yongbyon nuclear facility until the United States fully releases our funds frozen in the BDA."[24]
The DPRK's complaint appeared to be echoed by Russian negotiator Aleksandr Losyukov, who told Interfax that, "The American side promised to resolve the financial question, and this promise was not fulfilled."[25] In response, Ambassador Hill told reporters, "The real issue ... is to get to the next stage of disablement and declaration."[26] South Korea's envoy Chun Yung Woo underlined this point: "What is important is whether North Korea shuts down its Yongbyong nuclear facility and allows the return of the IAEA (inspectors) to meet the April 14 deadline... That is the important factor that will determine the future of the February 13 agreement."[27] But Chun warned, "unless we know when the nuclear facilities will be shut down, unless we know when the IAEA will be back to the site, there's no way we can shift the heavy fuel oil."[28]
A long running dispute between Japan and North Korea concerning the abduction of Japanese citizens in the 1970s also came to the fore at the beginning of the sixth round of talks, with the Japanese government declining to provide oil or aid to North Korea until the DPRK accounts for all the abducted Japanese. North Korea acknowledges that it kidnapped a dozen Japanese citizens at that time; it allowed five survivors to return four years ago, saying that the rest had died. This is a highly-charged political issue in Japan, and Tokyo is not prepared to accept that there are no further survivors without proof. As one Japanese official in Beijing commented, "At this juncture, we are not ready to extend energy or economic assistance to North Korea, when the abduction issue or the normalization" of relations between Japan and North Korea "do not show progress".
For its part, North Korea retains grievances against Japan dating back to the second world war and Japan's brutal colonial rule. Hence, though the championing of the abduction issue by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is popular with some domestic constituencies, members of the opposition and Mr Abe's own party have criticised this diplomatic prioritisation as too narrowly focussed, raising concerns that it comes at the expense of regional stability and could leave the country isolated.
The policies of coercion and isolation pushed North Korea to accelerate its nuclear programme, culminating in the nuclear test of October 9. The North Korean Denuclearization Action Plan is a step back from the brink. The question is whether the six parties will be able to keep the process on track in future and achieve full implementation, including North Korea's readmittance to the NPT.
On February 13, the parties to the Six Party Talks on North Korea's nuclear programme announced that they had reached agreement on a Denuclearization Action Plan, under which Pyongyang will take steps towards closing its Yongbyon nuclear facility and allow International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors back, in return for supplies of heavy fuel oil. The Plan also established working groups to work towards normalisation of relations between the Democratic People's Republic of [North] Korea (DPRK) and the United States and Japan.
The agreement has been widely hailed as a step in the right direction, though no-one should underestimate the challenges that remain. In subsequent weeks, North Korea has already prevaricated over the closure of Yongbyon, whilst a further round of Six Party Talks held in March was forced to suspend as North Korea halted its participation until it had received $25 million held by the Macau-based Banco Delta Asia (BDA) that the United States had promised to unfreeze.
Other difficult issues that will need to be tackled include the question of whether the regime was pursuing a uranium enrichment programme, how to ensure that suspected existing stocks of nuclear warheads and materials are fully decommissioned, and the status of North Korea with regard to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
The Denuclearization Action Plan, agreed at the fifth round of Six Party Talks in Beijing, [1] is intended to begin implementation of the September 2005 Joint Statement, which set the goal of early denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. This agreement follows a year of stalemate, culminating North Korea's small, but provocative nuclear test in October 2006. (Experts remain divided over whether this was a 'fizzle' - a failure to produce a much larger explosion - or a demonstration that North Korea has the ability to miniaturise a nuclear explosion - technology essential for delivering a nuclear warhead by missile.[2])
Under the Denuclearization Action Plan North Korea has agreed to take first steps towards disarmament by shutting down and sealing its Yongbyon nuclear plant and to allow IAEA inspectors back in to the site to verify these steps within 60 days (in accordance with an April 11, 2007 deadline), in return for an initial transfer of 50,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil. A further 950,000 tonnes of oil is in the offing if North Korea continues to make progress towards dismantling its nuclear weapon-related infrastructure, including irreversibly disabling the Yongbyon reactor and making a full declaration of all nuclear programmes. Oil and aid are to be provided by China, Russia, South Korea and the United States, but not Japan.
Five working groups are to meet during the first 30 days covering:
The United States is also to begin the process of removing North Korea from its designation as a state sponsor of terrorism - a step that is expected to face some opposition in Congress.
In a significant concession, the US agreed to resolve within 30 days the dispute over money laundering at the BDA which had led to North Korean assets being frozen. This represents something of a U-turn by Washington, which has previously insisted that the banking dispute be handled separately, as a law-enforcement matter.
US Treasury officials report that they had uncovered "systemic failures by Banco Delta Asia to apply appropriate standards and due diligence" and a "gamut of illicit activities that the bank facilitated on behalf of North Korean-related clients." [3] The Bush administration, despite the reservations of some treasury officials, seems to have decided that it was undesirable for a dispute over a relatively small amount of money to continue to damage prospects for a nuclear agreement with North Korea.
However, the problem reared its head again at the further talks in Beijing in March, when the transfer to funds was apparently held up. The North Korean delegation refused to continue until the funds had been received, forcing China to suspend the latest round of six party talks on March 21, pending resolution of the BDA issue.[4]
The question of what to do about any existing North Korean nuclear weapons and the plutonium fuel already produced at Yongbyon is also to be left for later in the process. Similarly US allegations about a clandestine uranium enrichment programme - an issue that has proved to be a stumbling block in the past as North Korea denies that is has any such programme - are not specifically addressed in the current agreement, but remain to be tackled in the future. The Action Plan does not refer to the alleged uranium enrichment programme specifically, but requires North Korea to discuss "a list of all its nuclear programmes" - a phrase that the US has made clear includes uranium enrichment.
Since the agreement of the Denuclearization Action Plan, however, US officials have revealed that there is now uncertainty concerning intelligence on North Korean uranium enrichment activities. At a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee in March, the North Korea mission manager for the national intelligence director, Joseph DeTrani told Senators that the US had gone from "high confidence" in its assessment that North Korea was pursuing a large scale enrichment facility to "mid-confidence level" now.[5]
This disclosure raises questions once again about the reliability of US intelligence on WMD and the Bush administration's judgement in confronting the North Korean regime with this accusation in 2002, particularly since this was the allegation that precipitated the collapse of the Agreed Framework and North Korea's expulsion of IAEA inspectors and withdrawal from the NPT. As renouncing the NPT effectively left North Korea free to reprocess plutonium fuel rods that had been previously been monitored by the IAEA, the importance of the uranium enrichment question faded. Some of this plutonium is believed to have been used in the October 2006 nuclear test.
Inevitably, North Korea, which has always denied having a uranium enrichment programme, was quick to exploit the uncertainty, calling on the United States to submit their evidence for scrutiny. As North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye-Gwan stated, "If they present evidence, we will explain it to them."[6] The chief negotiator for the United States, Christopher Hill, responded robustly that if the materials North Korea bought "did not go into a highly enriched uranium programme, maybe they went somewhere else... Fine. We can have a discussion about where they are and where they've gone."[7]
The fifth round of Six Party Talks got off to an inauspicious start in December 2006.[8] In addition to sharp exchanges between North Korea and the United States over what North Korea describes as the US's "hostile" policy towards the Kim Jong-Il regime, there were disagreements over energy supplies, North Korea's demand for a nuclear reactor, and the freeze on financial assets at the BDA. However, whilst the talks apparently broke up for a Christmas recess in acrimony, post November 2006 election shifts in the United States made behind-the-scenes negotiations more productive than in the past. As a consequence, with Chinese mediation, a private bilateral meeting was set up outside Beijing.[9]
According to the Washington Post, these bilateral talks were "personally approved" by President George W. Bush,[10] despite four years of insisting that he would not allow direct talks with Pyongyang. Meeting in Berlin in January, Hill and Kim Kye-gwan were able to thrash out much of the framework for the Six Party agreement.
According to background briefings in the US media, Hill and Kim were able to agree that North Korea would receive oil shipments in return for action to close Yongbyon, but they disagreed over timing. "Mr. Hill said oil could be shipped as long as the North Koreans agreed to close and seal their Yongbyon nuclear reactor and processing centre within 45 days. Mr. Kim countered with 90 days. They settled on 60."[11]
The precise amount of oil to be transferred was left open for discussion in Six Party working groups. However, once the talks got underway in Beijing, North Korea made clear that it was not happy to leave this issue to the working groups and that it wanted a large degree of energy assistance (two million tonnes of fuel oil and two million kilowatts of electricity a year) and that it wanted the quantity of oil it was to receive to be made public to prevent any reneging on the agreement.
Whilst the US negotiating team was initially sceptical about providing North Korea with such large supplies of oil, South Korean negotiator Chun Yung-woo was able to reassure its ally by proposing that more oil be offered in exchange for "deeper denuclearization", a link designed to garner US support. Eventually the six parties agreed on one million tonnes of oil, roughly one year's supply for North Korea. However, only 50,000 tonnes of oil are to be transferred in the first instance, with further supplies contingent on North Korea making progress on disabling its nuclear arsenal, step by step.
The new deal with North Korea was made possible by shifts within the Bush administration fuelled by the failures of their past policies and the Democrat gains in the Senate and House of representatives, which encouraged knowledgeable officials to face down or bypass conservatives inside and outside the administration. The Denuclearization Action Plan therefore represents a turning point in Bush policy away from the failed neocon strategy of isolating the North Korean regime in the hope that it might one day collapse under pressure.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice played a useful role, stopping in Berlin to be briefed by Hill, and relaying information directly to the President and National Security Adviser Stephen J Hadley, who "walked it through with concerned people" within the administration.[12] This is in stark contrast with the first four years of the Bush Presidency, when Secretary of State Colin Powell had much less access to the President's ear than Rice (then National Security Adviser) and the influential 'deciders' in the administration like then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
The ink on the agreement with North Korea was barely dry before it came in for swingeing criticism from the hawks. Former US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton led the criticism, saying that he was "very disturbed" by the deal,[13] and that he hoped it would fall apart before being carried out.[14] "I'm very sad about the president's change in policy," he said in an interview. "The policy as originally articulated and implemented in the first term was exactly right. There's no need to change it."[15] Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and Disarmament Robert Joseph appeared to share Bolton's dismay, and in an unexpected response to the hawks' loss of influence, announced last month that he will shortly resign. Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams reportedly circulated emails within the administration demanding to know why North Korea would not have to prove first that it had stopped sponsoring terrorism before being rewarded with removal from the list of states sponsoring terrorism. Abrams' objection is that in the deal with Libya on abandoning weapons of mass destruction, the US required Libya first to end support for terrorism before it would being the delisting process, and that with Libya the process on terrorism was kept separate from that on weapons of mass destruction.[16]
Vice President Dick Cheney has not directly criticised the Six Party deal, but he put the onus for behaviour modification on Pyongyang, noting on a recent trip to Australia: "In light of North Korea's missile test last July, its nuclear test in October and its record of proliferation and human rights abuses, the regime in Pyongyang has much to prove". Whilst Condoleezza Rice went out of her way to thank China for its "active" role in the talks,[17] Cheney took the opportunity to lambast China's military buildup as "less constructive" and "not consistent with China's stated goal of a 'peaceful rise'."
Some conservatives appear to regard the Action Plan as little better than the Agreed Framework negotiated by the Clinton Administration in 1994, which the neocons have long despised, arguing that it "rewarded" North Korea's bad behaviour. It remains to be seen whether the Bush administration will face conservative opposition when it seeks congressional backing for its plans to provide oil and aid to North Korea.[18] Administration officials have been quick to try to differentiate the latest agreement from the Agreed Framework, emphasising that it will not "front-load" benefits to North Korea. On the contrary, the bulk of the promised fuel will not be delivered until North Korea "disables" Yongbyon. President Bush has also emphasised that the Denuclearization Action Plan involves the four other parties, most importantly China.[19]
Democrats might welcome the Denuclearization Agreement, but they have criticised the Bush administration for creating more serious security threats as a consequence of jettisoning the 1994 framework and pursuing years of wrong-headed strategy based on disengagement and coercion, which have demonstrably backfired. Senator Joseph Biden (Delaware), the Democratic Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, recently commented that the deal "takes us back to the future... The good news is that it freezes in place North Korea's nuclear programme... The bad news is that North Korea's programme is more dangerous to us now than it was in 2002, when President Bush rejected virtually the same deal he is now embracing."[20]
The North Korean nuclear test appears to have helped bring about the agreement, though whether this was by intention or strategic misjudgement is unclear. Some consider that the test helped to put President Bush under pressure to engage more constructively, as it clearly demonstrated the failure of Bush administration policies to curtail North Korea's nuclear ambitions. On the other hand, China's response has been much heavier than the Kim Jong-Il regime might have been anticipated from its previous missile tests, and the test may therefore mark a turning point in North Korea's relations with its major ally.
The United States has sought for years to get China to play a more publicly active role; following the nuclear test, China has played a much larger role. including negotiating and agreeing UN Security Council Resolution 1718, and in bringing North Korea back to the Six Party negotiating table after over a year of stalemate. China has cut its military aid to North Korea and backed US efforts to crack down on the regime's money laundering through the BDA - action that appears to have hit home, as this was reputedly an important source of hard currency used to fund the lifestyle of the North Korean elite.
Recent reports suggest that the North Korean economy is once again in a dire state, which may also have affected the country's willingness to return to the negotiating table. The World Food Programme reported in March that the country faces further famine following a poor harvest and a sharp drop in aid, particularly from its largest donors, South Korea (which suspended aid following the North Korean missile tests in July 2006) and China, which has also dramatically reduced aid during the last year. According to the World Food Programme, millions of people face going hungry. The Kim Jong-Il regime, which bases its policies on the Juche ideology (often translated as independence or self-reliance), has take the unusual step of requesting an expansion in international food assistance. [21]
At the same time, the UN Development Agency announced that it would be suspending work in North Korea, after the regime failed to meet conditions set up in response to American complaints that UN money was being diverted for the benefit of the regime's leadership rather than the people in most need. The suspension will affect programmes in North Korea with a total budget of $4.4 million.
The Denuclearization Action Plan now clears the way for South Korea, in particular, to resume economic and diplomatic engagement with the North. The following day the South Korean government invited the DPRK to resume bilateral talks, which had been suspended after the nuclear test. "What is very important about the agreement is that it not only resolves the North Korea nuclear issue itself," South Korea's president, Roh Moo-hyun, said, "but, in a further step, it includes a clause for discussions, negotiations on establishing a permanent peace regime on the Korean Peninsula."[22]
Nonetheless there is still the risk that North Korea will return to its previous pattern of prolonging, prevaricating and procrastinating over the dismantling of its nuclear programme. An ominous sign of this was North Korea's state news agency's description of the closure of Yongbyon as a "temporary suspension". Ambassador Hill was quick to respond: "The North Koreans agreed to shut down their reactors and seal them for the purpose of abandoning them," he said. "Any action to restart the reactors would be a violation of the agreement."[23]
Following the success of the negotiations leading to the Denuclearization Action Plan, the sixth round of Six Party Talks got off to a bad start on March 20. With the release of funds from the BDA still unresolved, North Korea's chief envoy Kim Kye-Gwan went into the talks arguing that the US had not done what it had said it would concerning the release of funds from BDA. He told the media, "We will not stop our nuclear activity until our funds frozen in the BDA are fully released... We will not stop the Yongbyon nuclear facility until the United States fully releases our funds frozen in the BDA."[24]
The DPRK's complaint appeared to be echoed by Russian negotiator Aleksandr Losyukov, who told Interfax that, "The American side promised to resolve the financial question, and this promise was not fulfilled."[25] In response, Ambassador Hill told reporters, "The real issue ... is to get to the next stage of disablement and declaration."[26] South Korea's envoy Chun Yung Woo underlined this point: "What is important is whether North Korea shuts down its Yongbyong nuclear facility and allows the return of the IAEA (inspectors) to meet the April 14 deadline... That is the important factor that will determine the future of the February 13 agreement."[27] But Chun warned, "unless we know when the nuclear facilities will be shut down, unless we know when the IAEA will be back to the site, there's no way we can shift the heavy fuel oil."[28]
A long running dispute between Japan and North Korea concerning the abduction of Japanese citizens in the 1970s also came to the fore at the beginning of the sixth round of talks, with the Japanese government declining to provide oil or aid to North Korea until the DPRK accounts for all the abducted Japanese. North Korea acknowledges that it kidnapped a dozen Japanese citizens at that time; it allowed five survivors to return four years ago, saying that the rest had died. This is a highly-charged political issue in Japan, and Tokyo is not prepared to accept that there are no further survivors without proof. As one Japanese official in Beijing commented, "At this juncture, we are not ready to extend energy or economic assistance to North Korea, when the abduction issue or the normalization" of relations between Japan and North Korea "do not show progress".
For its part, North Korea retains grievances against Japan dating back to the second world war and Japan's brutal colonial rule. Hence, though the championing of the abduction issue by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is popular with some domestic constituencies, members of the opposition and Mr Abe's own party have criticised this diplomatic prioritisation as too narrowly focussed, raising concerns that it comes at the expense of regional stability and could leave the country isolated.
The policies of coercion and isolation pushed North Korea to accelerate its nuclear programme, culminating in the nuclear test of October 9. The North Korean Denuclearization Action Plan is a step back from the brink. The question is whether the six parties will be able to keep the process on track in future and achieve full implementation, including North Korea's readmittance to the NPT.
© 2007 The Acronym Institute.