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The forth round of the six-party talks will focus on North Korea¡¯s nuclear program. Yet with only a week to go till the talks are scheduled to restart in Beijing, other issues are raising their head. The U.S. now takes an interest in North Korean human rights, and Japan is concerned with Pyongyang¡¯s abduction of its citizens. Both North and South Korea oppose putting these thorny issues on the negotiating table. The question whether North Korea has a highly enriched uranium program, as the U.S. insists in the face of consistent denials, is another knotty problem.
¡ß North Korean human rights
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Monday the talks are focused ¡°on the proposal that we outlined last June.¡± The June proposal is a deal to resolve the nuclear issue; it takes no account of the human rights question.
However, the U.S. Congress put pressure on the Bush administration in a resolution on July 11 to make the North Korean human rights and kidnapping issues part and parcel of the six-party agenda. President George W. Bush, too, has presented himself as a champion of human rights in the North, suggesting a possibility that the issue will be raised in one form or another, if not at the round table then in bilateral talks between Washington and Pyongyang.
The problem is if the U.S. makes heavy weather of the issue. North Korea does not want rights brought up at all because it says the only purpose would be to bring down the regime. South Korea, China and Russia believe the nuclear talks are the wrong place to talk about human rights. The U.S. knows all this well; if it still strongly brings up human rights at the talks, many believe, that would be the signal that it has no interest in resolving the nuclear dispute diplomatically.
¡ß Uranium Enrichment
The U.S. claims North Korea admitted its uranium enrichment program during U.S.-North Korea talks in Pyongyang in 2002, prompting Washington to suspend heavy oil shipments to the North, which denies such a program exists. It was in response to that suspension that North Korea restarted its nuclear reprocessing and so started a second nuclear standoff.
The issue could be a fundamental to the six-party talks. But North Korea denies the program and the U.S. has produced no proof, so essentially it is Washington¡¯s word against Pyongyang¡¯s.
South Korean government officials say it would be difficult to achieve progress in the talks if the argument continues in that vein. They say a solution should be worked out slowly once North Korea agrees to an immediate freeze of its acknowledged nuclear program.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has reiterated North Korea must give up both its plutonium and uranium programs. It may sound like fighting words but is in fact a fraction milder than what Washington used to say, which is that North Korea must admit its uranium program. It could be read as a hint that even if Pyongyang makes no public admission, the issue could be resolved if it commits itself to abandoning ¡°all its nuclear programs¡± ? whatever that may include.
But if the U.S. makes a separate issue of the uranium enrichment program and insists that the North both admits and scraps it, the talks will likely run into trouble, even to the point of deteriorating into the accusation-and-denial seesaw of 2002.
¡ß Abductions of Japanese
Tokyo is looking for clarification whether Japanese people kidnapped by North Korea during the 1970s are still alive and for more information about those who died. Public opinion in the island country is that neither improved relations nor negotiations with North Korea are possible until the matter is resolved. Nor does the government see any reason to skirt around the issue. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi brought up the question when he met North Korean leader Kim Jong-il in the past and recently sent a special envoy to South Korea to demand that the kidnappings are put on the agenda.
That has annoyed Seoul. A high-ranking official on Monday said Japan¡¯s ¡°less-than-enthusiastic attitude¡± was not helpful for the success of the six-party talks, a remark another official in turn interpreted as a warning to Japan to stop trying to push the issue on the six-party talk agenda. North Korea¡¯s state-run media have also warned Tokyo off bringing the matter into the negotiating room.
However, Japan is an important financial source of aid for North Korea, and the key incentive for Pyongyang to scrap its nuclear programs will ultimately be large-scale economic aid. So far South Korea, the U.S. and China have assumed that a fair amount of the aid would come from Japan. But if Japan says it can¡¯t pay unless the abductions are dealt with properly, things could get difficult. Seoul and Washington have both tried to persuade Japan to leave the matter for bilateral contacts with North Korea. Pyongyang, however, is not planning to meet separately with the Japanese, so no solution is in easy reach. It remains to be seen what Tokyo will do.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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