Translated material
Unique deal
US wants to send North Korean signal to Iran
Today, contacts between the two Koreas are being resumed to prepare for the 20th ministerial meeting. The restoration of communication between Pyongyang and Seoul was helped by the success of the six-party talks on the DPRK nuclear issue, which was noted yesterday by South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun. He called the Beijing agreements “well-developed” and expressed hope that “they will be implemented honestly.”Meetings between the ministers of the two Koreas (they discuss issues of unification, transport, education, etc.) and Seoul’s humanitarian assistance to Pyongyang were interrupted after North Korean missile tests in July 2006. Relations deteriorated further after North Korea announced on October 9 last year that it would carry out a nuclear explosion. However, Pyongyang's promise to curtail its nuclear program helped break the ice. Yesterday the South expressed its readiness to provide the North with 50 thousand tons of fuel oil in exchange for the first steps to stop the nuclear program. A detailed conversation about this exchange will take place in the near future in Seoul at the first meeting of the multilateral working group on providing economic and energy assistance to the DPRK. It was created within the framework of the six-party process and is led by South Korea.
North Korea has pledged to shut down and seal the Yongbyon reactor, the main facility for the production of weapons-grade plutonium, within 60 days under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). IAEA Director General Muhammad ElBaradei welcomed his organization's upcoming return to North Korea "to ensure that its nuclear activities are peaceful." With all nuclear facilities rendered “inoperative”, fuel compensation for Pyongyang will increase by another 950 thousand tons of fuel oil. The total “economic, humanitarian and energy assistance” will be equivalent to 1 million tons of fuel per year.
However, already yesterday the contradictions between Pyongyang and its negotiating partners made themselves felt. The DPRK Foreign Ministry criticized Tokyo's refusal to participate in the energy assistance program, made under the pretext of the unresolved issue of the Japanese abducted by the DPRK intelligence services in the 70s and 80s. One North Korean diplomat said the priority of the working group to normalize relations between Pyongyang and Tokyo should be to resolve issues related to Japanese colonial rule on the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945. But in general, Pyongyang demonstrates its commitment to the Beijing agreement: the North Korean news agency KCNA believes that the joint statement of the DPRK, China, Russia, the United States, the Republic of Korea and Japan “is based on the principle: commitment to commitment, action to action,” while the six-party negotiations themselves “took place in sincere atmosphere."
The Beijing agreements “are by no means the end of the road, not the golden key that will allow us to solve all problems,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov noted yesterday. Clarifying that the agreement concerns only the reactor in Yongbyon, the minister recalled that the sanctions against the DPRK imposed by last year's UN Security Council Resolution 1718 can be lifted only when issues with its remaining nuclear facilities are resolved at the next stages of negotiations. “The financial sanctions unilaterally imposed by Washington against North Korea have really driven the six-party process to a dead end for more than a year,” Sergei Lavrov emphasized. The seizure, at Washington's request, of North Korean accounts in a Chinese bank in Macau (Macao) in September 2005 provoked a conflict and delayed negotiations until December 2006.
US President George W. Bush, who in 2002 classified North Korea as an “axis of evil,” called the agreements “the best way to use diplomacy in relation to North Korea’s nuclear programs.” According to the president, we are talking about a “unique deal” that united all the neighbors of North Korea and the United States and was supported by UN Security Council Resolution 1718. "While much work remains to make the agreement's commitments a reality, I believe it is an important step in the right direction," Bush concluded. According to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the agreement is “a good start towards achieving a complete, verifiable and irreversible nuclear-free status of the Korean Peninsula,” which “could be a signal to Iran.”
The Democratic majority in the US Congress has its own view of the problem. Senator Joe Biden said: “The good news is that the deal freezes the North Korean nuclear program. The bad thing is that this program has become much more dangerous than in 2002, when the president rejected essentially the same agreement that he has now achieved.” According to Senator John Kerry, due to missed opportunities, it will be difficult to force Pyongyang to abandon its military nuclear program: “Until the Bush administration focuses on diplomatically searching for long-term solutions, it looks like we will have to face this problem again in 12 months.” Former permanent representative to the UN John Bolton spoke out sharply against the agreements. He said that "there is no way to reward fuel for the partial dismantling of nuclear programs," adding that he would be "the saddest man in Washington if President Bush follows through with an agreement that is fundamentally flawed."
“The DPRK will fulfill the agreements unless those who want to keep the “bad guy” in Northeast Asia prevail again in the United States in order to place missile defense components in Europe, closer to Russia,” the head of the Center for Korean Studies told Vremya Novostey. Institute of Far Eastern Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences Alexander Zhebin. According to him, “the success of the last round of six-party talks is associated with the concessions of the Americans, who were forced to agree to the step-by-step principle of solving the problem “action by action.”
The expert recalled that “the result of the US attempts to speak to the DPRK in the language of threats was the loss of the last six years - in 2001, when Bush came to the White House, Yongbyon was also frozen, the reactor was monitored by the IAEA, and fuel was supplied to the DPRK.” The breakdown of the agreement led to the explosion of a North Korean nuclear device last year. “Further progress in the negotiations and in the implementation of the agreements reached in Beijing will decisively depend on the readiness of the United States to attend primarily to the interests of the nuclear non-proliferation regime. If Washington again sets its sights on changing the North Korean regime, then a reversal is inevitable,” Mr. Zhebin is sure.