hankyoreh

By Selig S. Harrison, director of the Asia Program at the Center for International Policy

Getting North Korea to suspend the operation of its Yongbyon reactor is the easy part of the nuclear negotiations with Pyongyang. Ever since the start of the six-party process in August 2003, North Korea has repeatedly offered another freeze, only to be consistently rebuffed until the Bush Administration reversed its position in the February 13 Beijing agreement.

Now comes the hard part of the negotiations. Pyongyang is not likely to take any of the further denuclearization steps envisaged in the agreement unless the United States reciprocates with step-by-step moves toward the normalization of relations, starting with the removal of North Korea from the State Department’s list of terrorist states.

Removal from the terrorist list is the essential prerequisite for moving toward North Korea’s membership in the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Asian Development Bank. This would set the stage for the large-scale economic assistance needed to modernize the North Korean economic infrastructure.

The United States is ready to take North Korea off the terrorist list, but Japan insists that the abductee issue must be settled first on Japanese terms. The Shinzo Abe government is in no hurry to see the nuclear issue resolved because demonizing North Korea helps to build support for a Japanese nuclear weapons program.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill pressed North Korea for a conciliatory approach on the abductee issue during his recent visit to Pyongyang but ran into a stone wall. In North Korean eyes, Kim Jong Il made a bold conciliatory gesture that Japan failed to appreciate when he apologized for the abductions while visiting Prime Minister Koizumi in September 2005. On my 2006 visit to Pyongyang, a high-ranking official gave me credible details of a meeting in which nationalistic generals criticized First Deputy Foreign Minister Kang Sok Ju, who sat next to Kim during his conversation with Koizumi, for “bowing down” to the Japanese leader instead of demanding that he himself apologize for Tokyo’s colonial oppression.

Kim Jong Il’s freedom of action in dealing with the abductee issue is severely limited. Hill apparently hopes that the United States can offer other inducements that will keep the denuclearization process going, even if action on the terrorist list is delayed. One such inducement would be to phase out the Korean War economic sanctions that are still in place under the Trading With The Enemy Act. Another would be to keep the flow of fuel oil shipments going after delivery of the first 50,000 tons promised under the February 13 agreement. Still another would be additional forms of energy assistance.

The agreement promises an overall total of one million tons of fuel oil, but does not specify when this will be supplied and does not link the fuel oil flow to specific steps by North Korea. The next North Korean step stipulated in the agreement is “disabling” the reactor, and a North Korean source said that Pyongyang expects disbursement of the entire one million tons to be completed “in conjunction with the disablement process.”

Hard-line critics of the agreement in Washington want the Bush Administration to focus not on disablement of the aging Yongbyon reactor but on North Korea’s commitment to provide an itemized list of all of its nuclear facilities. Former Undersecretary of State John Bolton urged the Administration in a July 3 Wall Street Journal article not to provide the one million tons of fuel oil or other energy aid until Pyongyang complies with the “central terms of the February 13 agreement, namely the full disclosure and elimination of all other nuclear activities outside of Yongbyon,” including plutonium extracted from the spent fuel rods at Yongbyon, weapons fabricated with that plutonium and the “full extent” of its alleged uranium enrichment activities.

Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice gave priority to disabling the reactor in a June 28 statement in which she urged “rapid progress” in carrying out the agreement. But North Korea, signaling that progress could well be tortuous, has suggested that the disablement process will be stretched out in stages after agreement is reached with the International Atomic Energy Agency on what will be done in each stage. Pyongyang clearly intends to use slice-by-slice “salami tactics” to keep the process going in order to maximize U.S. concessions.

Since a quick resolution of the terrorist list issue is unlikely, my view is that the best and perhaps the only way to get North Korea to go beyond disablement of the Yongbyon reactor would be to go beyond fuel oil deliveries and move steadily ahead with other large-scale energy aid. In addition to keeping the full one million tons flowing, a major additional program should be developed and financed by South Korea, China, Russia, Japan and the United States to rehabilitate and modernize North Korean coal mines and related transportation facilities.

Together with Dr. Ryu Jichul, Director of the Korea Energy Economics Institute, I served as co-chairman of an international workshop on “Fossil Fuel Options and the North Korean Nuclear Crisis.” Experts from China, Russia, Japan, South Korea and the United States attended. The recommendations of the workshop, soon to be released, focus on coal-related aid as the most realistic form of short-term energy aid to Pyongyang. Gas pipelines from eastern Siberia and Sakhalin, which I have long urged, will eventually become important in meeting the energy needs of the Korean peninsula over the next decade, the workshop concluded, but not until Russia resolves its internal disputes over pipeline policy and China and Russia bridge their wide gap over prices. North Korea sees pipelines passing through its territory as militarily risky and wants to defer action on this option until full normalization of relations with the United States is a prospect.

With its extensive reserves of both anthracite and bituminous coal, much of them yet to be developed, the DPRK now relies heavily on coal-fired power plants. The expanded use of coal would be the easiest and fastest way to address DPRK energy needs, but would presuppose foreign help for the modernization of the coal mining sector and its related transportation links, as well as the introduction of coal-fired power plants on a large scale. Bilateral and multilateral help for its coal-sector as an outgrowth of the six-party negotiations could prove to be attractive to the DPRK because it would involve less direct dependence on other powers than pipeline options or proposals for electrical transmission linkages to the ROK, Russia or China. To be sure, Pyongyang’s preference would be for light water nuclear reactors for electric power generation because it has indigenous uranium reserves and would not have to rely on external sources for low-enriched uranium (LEU) reactor fuel if it can make its own LEU. Is South Korea ready to resurrect the Korean Energy Development Organization’s light water reactor program in some form despite US opposition? If not, a coal modernization program should be given priority by the Energy Working Group envisaged under the February 13 agreement.

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]