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North Korea on Thursday poured cold water on expectations that the six-party talks on its nuclear program will get under way again. Through direct and indirect contacts at the beginning of the year, South Korea, the U.S., China and others had been setting the stage. Unification Minister Chung Dong-young had said during a Cabinet meeting Sunday that North Korea would decide its position on intra-Korean dialogue and the talks after February, and his government judged that Pyongyang would decide to take part.
There has been no immediate government response to Pyongyang¡¯s statement on Thursday. ¡°It¡¯s true that compared to previous statements demanding the U.S. abandon its hostile policies toward North Korea and claims that it possesses nuclear weapons, the latest statement used somewhat stronger expressions,¡± one official with the Unification Ministry said. ¡°We are currently analyzing the content of the statement.¡± Another official said, ¡°Rather than a non-starter, the statement appears to be part of North Korea¡¯s brinkmanship strategy demanding changes in the U.S. position ahead of restarting the six-party talks.¡± It seemed, in other words, like a negotiating strategy, but in order to find out what it meant, more careful analysis of the statement was necessary.
North Korea expert Nam Seong-uk, a professor at Korea University, said North Korea launched a sudden sneak attack at a time when South Korea, the U.S. and Japan were preparing for the talks to resume. The North effectively wrong-footed the partners in the talks by playing both its talk suspension and nuclear weapons cards - in hopes of getting more out of the negotiations. Professor Nam said by ¡°indefinite¡± Pyongyang meant the talks could reconvene as early as tomorrow: it was merely telling South Korea and the U.S. to offer security guarantees and economic compensation.
In the opinion of Dongguk University professor Go Yu-hwan, North Korea expects the coming rounds of the six-party talks to be used to put pressure on it and issued the statement to dodge that pressure and force a change in U.S. policy. The North¡¯s propaganda media has always insisted that the U.S. must abandon its hostile attitude toward Pyongyang before the talks can start again.
¡°It catches the eye that North Korea in the statement demands strategic decisions, like giving it a good reason to participate and creating conditions and an atmosphere in which it can expect results,¡± Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security researcher Prof. Kim Song-han said. ¡°To buy time, North Korea has put the put the ball back in the U.S. court.¡±
Experts also bring up the possibility that recent reports in the New York Times and Washington Post may have influenced the North Korean response. The papers reported the U.S. was ¡°90 percent certain¡± that North Korea exported nuclear materials to Libya.
One Unification Ministry official said, ¡°It¡¯s not impossible that North Korea may make a couple of even stronger statements in the days ahead.¡± He said it could try to stir things up by admitting that it did export nuclear materials or by restarting missile tests. One researcher at the Korea Institute for National Unification, offering his personal opinion, said it could not be ruled out that North Korea would ultimately conduct a nuclear test. It would be a potentially lucrative gamble with the United States, he said.
The researcher also suspects that North Korea, which had been vague about the nuclear issue, might return stronger to the negotiating table after consolidating its position as a nuclear state. If this analysis is correct, it would appear that resumption of the talks will be delayed at most a couple of months from late March to April - which is what South Korea and the U.S. initially predicted.
(Choi Byeong-muk, bmchoi@chosun.com )
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