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North Korea Tries America’s Patience
// North Korea sets out new demands for scrapping its nuclear arms
Friendship of Nations
Six-party talks over North Korea’s nuke program resumed after a year-long hiatus in Beijing on Monday. During the past 12 months, Pyongyang has held nuclear tests and declared itself a nuclear state. Although other parties will not recognize this status, North Korea has come up with a tough line at the negotiations. Pyongyang has set out sweeping demands, including an end to all sanctions and the grant of a nuclear reactor for civilian energy needs in return for giving up its nuclear program. The United States warned that its patience was running out.
As the start of the talks was approaching, anxiety of its participants was mounting. On Friday, South Korea’s Defense Minister Kim Jang-soo ordered the country’s troops to be ready for any provocations from North Korea, including new nuclear tests. The worries proved to be unnecessary. North Korea confined itself to a harsh statement about Japan. The KCNA North Korean official news agency reported on Sunday that Japanese spies had kidnapped a North Korean linguist from Russia’s Far Eastern city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk in December 1991. North Korean authorities claim that Kim Thae Yong was taken to Hokkaido and used for training Japanese spies in the Korean language. Pyongyang urged Japan to give away the 70-something immediately.
Tokyo dismissed the accusation out of hand yesterday. Apparently, North Korea was trying to use this information to preempt a strike from Japan which was going to raise at the six-party talks the issue of the abduction of Japanese citizens by North Korean intelligence in the late 1970s-1980s. Anticipating this, Pyongyang demanded last week that Japan pull of the talks, though with little hope that this would happen.
In any case, the talks promised to be tough long before the start. North Korea’s chief negotiator Kim Kye Gwan reiterated his Pyongyang statement in Beijing, , saying that he “is not optimistic about the outlook of the six-party talks since the United States persists with its ‘hostile policy’ towards North Korea.”
Chief U.S. envoy Christopher Hill kicked it off with threats: “If they [North Korea] are not serious about the denuclearization, nothing is going to get right. We can either go forward on a diplomatic track or you have to go to a much more difficult track and that is a track that involves sanctions and I think ultimately will really be very harmful to the North Korean economy.”
Pyongyang lashed back. Monday morning, North Korea turned down the American delegation’s offer to meet one-to-one. The situation was the reverse compared to all previous talks when Pyongyang would press for a one-to-one meeting with the United States, while the Americans would shrink from it. Washington has recently shown that it is ready to meet the communist regime halfway, but Pyongyang has presented an “exhausted list” of all its demands.
America’s Christopher Hill said that Washington was willing to give Pyongyang written guarantees of security and restore normal relations. Still, the White House wants North Korea to scrap its nuclear arms. Earlier, the Americans insisted that North Korea halt even civilian nuke programs, saying that it is difficult to draw a line between civilian and military programs. The North Koreans have found this trade-off not good enough, though. Kim Kye Gwan said his country would rein in the military program only after the United States gives up its “hostile policy” and scrap financial curbs imposed last October against a number of North Korean companies. The sanctions saw North Korean accounts in China’s Delta Asia bank in Macao frozen. As another condition for North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions Kim Kye Gwan cited lifting sanctions that the UN Security Council leveled November 14 after Pyongyang’s nuclear test on November 9. In return for scrapping the nuclear program, the North Korean diplomat also demanded that his country be provided with a light-water nuclear reaction to meet civilian energy needs and energy supplies until the reactor is built. Kim Kye Gwan threatened that North Korea would keep on “building up forces of nuclear containment” if these demands were not met.
The Americans got indignant at the statements. “The supply of our patience may have exceeded the international demand for that patience,” envoy Christopher Hill said. “We should be a little less patient and pick up the pace and work faster.”
Recognizing a growing rift between the United States and North Korea Nonetheless, Chinese diplomats have nonetheless urged the both sides to be self-restrained and not anticipate easy and rapid progress.
Andrey Ivanov
All the Article in Russian as of Dec. 19, 2006
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