Thread: Pyongyang gets a piece of US's mind

Pyongyang gets a piece of US's mind


By Donald Kirk
Asia Times
Jan 13, 2010


NEW YORK - It was as though the voices of the North Korean Foreign Ministry and the United States State Department were reverberating in an echo chamber with no real awareness of the messages that each side was conveying.

The anonymous North Korean "spokesman" was again sounding off about a Korean War peace treaty while a US envoy talked tough about the North's human-rights record.

No sooner had North Korea come out with a deceptively conciliatory plea calling for talks for a treaty to replace the armistice that ended the Korean War in 1953 than the US human-rights envoy, Robert King, said that US relations with North Korea depended on the North's improving its "appalling" human-rights record.

The question after both sides had done making statements was whether the timing was deliberate, whether King, visiting Seoul, came out with his denunciation of North Korean human-rights abuses after having read the North Korean statement. Or did North Korea time the issuance of its call for negotiations on a peace treaty to coincide with King's mission to Seoul - and that of the United Nations rapporteur on North Korean human rights, Vitit Muntarbhorn?

Regardless of the sequence, the US State Department lost no time denouncing the North Korean proposal as essentially nothing new, a longstanding element of North Korean policy that had to be swatted away like an annoying insect that persisted in returning to sting again. It was in that vein that the top State Department spokesman, Philip Crowley, brushed off the North Korean proposal, making it clear nothing would happen without action by the North on its "dreadful human-rights record".

Over at the White House, President Barack Obama's spokesman, Robert Gibbs, appeared just as unrelenting, saying that the "North Koreans are well aware of what they need to do, to come back to six-party talks" on giving up their nuclear weapons, and "give up the idea of a nuclear state on the peninsula".

The sharpness of the rebuff from Washington gave the impression that US policy is reverting somehow to the supposed "hard line" of the early years of the presidency of Obama's predecessor, George W Bush. At the least, said Gibbs, North Korea had to honor agreements reached in the later Bush years when the North in 2005 signed off in principle on abandoning its nuclear weapons in exchange for aid and recognition - and then in 2007 when the North assented to specific details on getting rid of its nukes.

"If they're willing to live up to those obligations, then we will make progress in those talks," said Gibbs."

The exchange of statements from both sides left the clear impression that neither was about to budge despite what the US envoy on North Korea, Stephen Bosworth, has often characterized as "useful" and "candid" talks with North Korean diplomats during his trip to Pyongyang last month.

One had to wonder, however, if Bosworth had bothered to discuss his mission to Pyongyang with King, before King flew to Seoul to meet with South Korean officials - and also with the United Nations rapporteur, Muntarbhorn.

Were the two American envoys working at cross-purposes, or coordinating in a one-two punch, a good-guy, bad-guy combo in which Bosworth held high the candle of hope while King snuffed out the flame in language calculated to infuriate the North Koreans? In the face of North Korea's routine, angry denial of charges of public executions, torture and imprisonment of thousands of its citizens in a vast gulag system, King said that "improved relations" between the US and North Korea would "have to involve greater respect for human rights by North Korea".

North Korea by now, however, holds another ace - that is, the American Christian missionary, Robert Park, son of Korean parents, who crossed the frozen Tumen River border with China into North Korea on Christmas Eve bearing a message of "peace and goodwill" for North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-il. King acknowledged that the US had yet to learn, while calling for his release, where Park is being held or how he's being treated.

North Korean strategists for their part had to have known full well that only the gullible foreign media, not the US State Department, would be easily taken in by talk of a peace treaty that Washington has spurned for years.

Thus it was no doubt with an eye for maximum propaganda impact that Pyongyang's Korean Central News Agency quoted a Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying a peace treaty would "help terminate the hostile relation" between North Korea and the US and "and positively promote the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula at a rapid tempo". The North Korean statement said it was "essential to conclude a peace treaty for terminating the state of war" if "confidence is to be built" with the US.

The statement left no doubt that North Korea places higher priority on negotiating a peace treaty formally ending the Korean War than on returning to six-party talks, last held in Beijing in December 2008. The North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman, always anonymous, said the signatories of the Korean War armistice should negotiate a treaty either in a separate set of talks or during six-party talks.

Either way, China, North Korea's staunch ally during the Korean War, would play a leading role as host to six-party talks. Japan and Russia, as non-participants in the Korean War armistice but participants on six-party talks, would remain on the sidelines.

The reference to "signatories", however, left open the question of whether North Korea's call for a peace treaty is part of an elaborate long-term effort to bypass South Korea The US, China and North Korea signed the Korean War armistice in July 1953, but South Korea's Korean War president, Rhee Syngman, refused. He believed the armistice would mean permanent division of the Korean Peninsula between North and South.

North Korea's Foreign Ministry spokesman, as quoted by the North's Korean Central News Agency, also came out with another demand that is sure to complicate talks on its nuclear program. The statement said the UN must do away with sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council after the North's missile test on April 5 and then strengthened in June after its nuclear test on May 25.

Six-party talks "remain blocked by the barrier of distrust called sanctions", said the North Korean statement.

Considering that sanctions appear to have been crucial to persuading North Korea to soften its statements in recent weeks, no one sees any chance of the UN Security Council lifting them in the near future. Certainly the US, pressing for the sanctions' enforcement by all UN members, is not about to decide they have already served their purpose.

The US rejection of talks on a Korean War peace treaty was definitely good news for South Korean officials, so much so that the two appeared to have been coordinating on a response. Or, as a South Korean Foreign Ministry official told Yonhap, the South Korean news agency, "What they proposed is somewhat different from our position on such talks."

South Korean Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan, talking to Yonhap, viewed the proposal for a peace treaty as unrealistic. "That's like saying it will never give up its nuclear programs," he said, "or it is a delaying tactic?"

Donald Kirk, a long-time journalist in Asia, is author of the newly published Korea Betrayed: Kim Dae Jung and Sunshine.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/LA13Dg01.html

Moving to other topic's