Six-nation discussions set for next week on North Korea's nuclear program are likely to be "tough," top U.S. negotiator Christopher Hill said today (see GSN, Dec. 1).
(Dec. 2) -
U.S. nuclear envoy Christopher Hill today said Washington would push for a written agreement on veritying North Korea's nuclear activities (Peter Parks/Getty Images).
Pyongyang last year agreed to eliminate its nuclear infrastructure in exchange for economic, diplomatic and security benefits from China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States. The regime has moved to disable key facilities at its Yongbyon nuclear complex, which theoretically would be followed by full dismantlement of the plants and the nation's nuclear arsenal.
The process, though, has experienced a number of obstacles. Most recently, North Korea has said it would not allow collection of nuclear samples as one component of a program to verify the scope of its atomic activities. Pyongyang has also opposed preparation of a written document laying out details of the verification plan.
Diplomats from the six nations are expected to address the verification issue at the session scheduled to begin Monday in Beijing.
"Obviously, there are some really tough issues we're going to take up in Beijing," Hill, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, said following his meeting in Tokyo with Japanese envoy Akitaka Saiki."As we consider these difficult issues, verification and things like that, we want to make sure that the U.S. and Japan are very close together."
Saiki concurred regarding the difficulty of the upcoming negotiations, Agence France-Presse reported.
"It is extremely important to form a six-nation agreement in writing which gives no room for misunderstandings and distorted interpretations as to the methods of verification as well as facilities and programs to be verified," he said.
The two negotiators are scheduled to meet tomorrow with their South Korean counterpart, Kim Sook. Hill confirmed that he would also meet this week in Singapore with North Korean nuclear envoy Kim Kye Gwan (Agence France-Presse I/Spacewar.com, Dec. 2).
Hill reaffirmed the U.S. insistence on a written agreement addressing verification, the Associated Press reported.
"Whether that takes one document, two documents, three documents, we don't know. The important point is to make it clear, so there are no misunderstandings," he said today before meeting with Saiki (Mari Yamaguchi, Associated Press I/Washington Post, Dec. 2).
The Bush administration has only a matter of weeks before its term ends and U.S. President-elect Barack Obama takes over diplomacy with North Korea. Obama has indicated his willingness to conduct direct talks with Pyongyang, but one expert cautioned that the success of such an effort is not assured, the Korea Herald reported.
"A success of Obama's North Korea policy hinges on whether the North's regime would make a strategic decision to accept the initiative," South Korean analyst Park Hyeong-jung said during an event in Seoul.
"For the North to correspond with Obama's initiative, it will also have to abandon nuclear programs, improve human rights condition and adopt a reformative internal policy and open the country to the outside world," Park said.
"However, it would not be easy for the North to make such decisions. As of late 2008, the North currently shows conservative and retrogressive internal policies mainly due to the health problems of its leader Kim Jong Il and the deepening economic woes," he added (Jin Dae-woong, Korea Herald, Dec. 3).
North Korea today announced that leader Kim had visited the zoo in Pyongyang, AP reported. The state media report was the latest in a series of declarations intended to prove that Kim was not in poor health, following reports that he had suffered at least one stroke and undergone brain surgery in recent months (Kwang-Tae Kim, Associated Press II/Washington Post, Dec. 2).
The government in Pyongyang would not immediately implode upon Kim's death, one expert said during the discussion in Seoul.
"The fate of Kim would have no inevitable correlation with the North's collapse," said Cho Min who, like Park, is a researcher at the Korea Institute for National Unification. "Namely, the probability of a rapid implosion of the North is not high, and in case of Kim's death, the North is likely to stabilize itself soon with its own crisis management mechanism" (Jin, Korea Herald).