Translated material
Not just fuel oil
Pyongyang demanded energy equipment
Yesterday in Beijing it was announced that the heads of the DPRK and US delegations at the six-party talks on the Korean nuclear issue - Deputy Foreign Minister Kim Kye-gwan and Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill - would arrive there. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao did not rule out a meeting between the two diplomats who came to confer with their Chinese counterpart Wu Dawei. The possibility of a conversation was also confirmed by State Department spokesman Sean McCormack: “Chris may take the opportunity to talk with Kim Kye Gwan.”The day before, Mr. Hill said that the United States and North Korea had already “virtually agreed” on methods for disabling North Korea’s main nuclear facilities. According to him, the United States by the end of the year “will be able to make sure that Pyongyang is not carrying out a secret program to enrich uranium for military purposes.” On the same day, at the Panmunjom negotiation point in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, the DPRK delegation announced its readiness to begin work on disabling facilities at the nuclear center in Yongbyon starting tomorrow. We are talking about a 5 megawatt reactor, a radiochemical laboratory and a plant for the production of fuel rods.
Agreements on a freeze under the control of the IAEA and the subsequent decommissioning of facilities in Yongbyon were reached in February and confirmed in October in Beijing by all participants of the Six-Party Group - representatives of the two Korean states, China, Russia, the United States and Japan. The DPRK fulfilled the first part of the agreement regarding the freeze in the summer, receiving in return from South Korea 50 thousand tons of fuel oil for power plants. Now North Korea must submit a report on all its nuclear projects and, with the assistance of the United States, disable known nuclear facilities by December 31. To this end, American nuclear experts carried out the necessary preparatory work in Yenben in September and October. According to the leading Russian negotiator, Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Losyukov, the highly controversial concept of “decommissioning” now means, in particular, “the dismantling of the reactor cooling system or the bending of the moderator rods used in it.”
After fulfilling its promises, Pyongyang has the right to expect reciprocal steps from its negotiating partners: from the United States - diplomatic recognition and exclusion of the DPRK from the list of countries sponsoring terrorism, from Japan - the normalization of bilateral relations, and from all together - the continuation of compensatory assistance equivalent to 950 thousand tons of fuel oil. Now supplies are being provided by China, and Russia and the United States are preparing to contribute. Japan refuses to help, citing the unresolved problem of its citizens abducted by the DPRK intelligence services in the 1970s and 1980s.
In Panmunjom, under the chairmanship of the Seoul delegate, experts from the economic and energy assistance group have been meeting for the last two days. During this meeting on Monday, Pyongyang representatives said that their country would like to receive 450 thousand tons directly in fuel, and the remaining half a million tons in the form of supplies of equipment for energy modernization. This proposal from the DPRK, according to the South Korean news agency Yonhap, has allegedly already been agreed upon at the expert level.
“The DPRK wants to ensure its economic sovereignty by boosting industry. There is no money for this, humanitarian aid, no matter how it is spent, is not enough, so taking compensation with equipment is a logical step,” Konstantin Asmolov, a leading researcher at the Center for Korean Studies at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told Vremya Novostey. “The catastrophic floods of recent years have made northerners more accommodating,” he said. - It looks like Pyongyang will actually dismantle its nuclear program. However, he is unlikely to easily give up an atomic bomb, which has already been made and is needed as a last resort deterrent.”