Stroky, stroky: On the Six Party Talks

Watching the TV pictures of the Six Party negotiators just now, I was struck by something that I hadn't noticed yesterday.

At the end of their past meetings, if they had anything remotely like an agreement to celebrate, the six chief delegates would stand before the cameras in the strange pose illustrated above (this picture is from a few years ago, not yesterday). Not quite a handshake, not quite a clasp. Each Six Party Talker thrusts forward his hand and sort of it bunches it in with all the others. It looks uncomfortable in every sense.

So yesterday, nice, patient, quietly spoken Christopher Hill, the US assistant secretary of state (third from the right in the picture above - apparently he's become something of a sex symbol for middle-aged Chinese ladies) reached in for the ritual patting of the palms. Standing to his right was his North Korean delegate, Kim Kye Gwan (second from the right above). Mr Kim had just signed what everyone has been calling a "landmark" agreement. And he has always done this claspy-touchy thing before.

But this time, he refused to play along. He beamed warmly and nodded encouragingly, but his hands remained at his side. Since he was in the middle, the two plenipotentiaries to his right couldn't clasp either. This produced an awkward situation in which half the delegates stroked one another's hands, and half didn't.

Mr Kim didn't hold hands.

Why didn't he want to hold hands?

Below is my op-ed piece from this morning's paper. For a much more positive view of the US government see this morning's leader.

If anyone finds a web image of the group photograph from yesterday, could they send me the link? Thanks.

Early on in his presidency, George W. Bush dropped a few broad hints that the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, was not quite his cup of tea. There was the time he described him as a “pygmy”, for example, and compared him to “a spoiled child”. There was the famous occasion when he lumped North Korea in with Iraq and Iran as the “axis of evil”. Or there was the moment when he put it most simply of all. “I loathe Kim Jong Il,” he told the journalist Bob Woodward, who describes the president “waving his finger in the air”.

So George Bush doesn’t like Kim Jong Il – but Kim Jong Il doesn’t care. And wherever he is lurking now, in the isolated, impenetrable dictatorship which he rules, Kim Jong Il must be laughing at the humiliation which he has heaped on the world’s most powerful man. For that is what yesterday’s Six Party Agreement in Beijing represents – a just humiliation for the United States administration, the collapse of four years of arrogance and misjudgement in a chaos of U-turns and compromises.

That is not how it will be spun, of course. In the version propagated in Washington, it is North Korea which is stepping down, by agreeing to freeze its biggest nuclear reactor, and allow in international inspectors, four months after carrying out its first nuclear test. Even this result is far from guaranteed – the Beijing agreement is no more than an outline, and many months of arduous haggling lie ahead. But even if were honoured in full, yesterday’s document should be a cause of shame rather than satisfaction to the present US administration.

It will do no more than restore the relationship with Kim Jong Il which the US and its allies had six years ago. Back then, in the last days of under Bill Clinton, there were international inspectors at the Yongbyon nuclear reactor, as there may soon be again. Back then the US and its partners supplied fuel and aid to North Korea – as they promised to do again in Beijing yesterday. Back then North Korea was a frightening totalitarian dictatorship in which free speech was a crime and people starved for lack of good government. None of that has changed. One thing is different in North Korea now – in contrast to 2001, when Bill Clinton left office, Kim Jong Il has built and tested nuclear weapons. This is the sum achievement of two terms of Bush policy on North Korea: to allow the world’s most brittle and unpredictable state to acquire the Bomb.

A quick rewind may be necessary - from Europe and the United States, Korea is a distant concern, and this has allowed the diplomatic absurdities of the past few years to slip by largely unremarked. By the mid-1990s, North Korea was an orphan of history – the last totalitarian Stalinist enclave in the world. Its former patrons, Russia and China, were hurrying to attract international capital. Kim Jong Il had a large, but steadily rusting army. But then it emerged that he had something else – a nuclear reactor capable of generating weapons-grade plutonium.

President Clinton took this seriously – at one point, as we now know, he was within hours of ordering an air attack on the Yongbyon reactor. But at the last minute, a deal was brokered – fuel oil and “safe” light-water reactors in exchange for freezing the reactor. Over the next few years, both sides breached parts of the agreement, but the seals stayed on Yongbyon. Even Kim Jong Il seemed to come out of his shell, holding a summit with the South Korean president and entertaining Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright. Then along came George W. Bush.

President Bush doesn’t like Kim Jong Il. But to dislike an oppressive dictator is no mark of moral or intellectual distinction. The clever thing is to come up with ideas for dealing with him. And George Bush had none.

Singled out as an evildoer, by a president who publicly espoused a policy of pre-emptive attack, Kim Jong Il not unpredictably became defensive. And, lacking adequate fuel for his tanks or spare parts for his planes, he took his nuclear programme out of mothballs. The international inspectors were expelled, the processing of the plutonium began. But beyond pronouncing him loathsome, Mr Bush had little more to say.

His policy expressed itself in negatives. Even before the Iraq debacle, a military attack on a out of the question – North Korea could not win a fight with the US, but in losing it could devastate South Korea. The US vowed it would never negotiate with the North Koreans one-to-one – hence the Six Party Talks with China, Russia, South Korea and Japan. There the US demanded something known by the acronym CVID – Complete, Verifiable and Irreversible Denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula. Until that happened, North Korea would be a pariah – in a much repeated phrase, there would be “no reward for bad behaviour”.

What inducement was there in such circumstances for Kim Jong Il to give up his nuclear programme – like an outlaw urged by the sheriff to put down his gun so that he could be more safely shot? North Korea ignored the US demands, and continued to process its plutonium and test its rockets. Sanctions have had little effect on a country whose economy has already collapsed – the Chinese government, which controls the cross border oil pipeline into North Korea, could have brought Mr Kim to his knees if it chose. But the risk of a civil war and an outpouring of refugees into their own territory were a price the Chinese were not prepared to pay.

The came the nuclear test last October – the final proof that merely loathing Kim Jong Il did nothing to make the world a safer place. In Berlin in January, US officials quietly began doing what they had said they would never do – negotiating bilaterally with their North Korean counterparts. Yesterday, they agreed to a package of about 330 million dollars of fuel and aid in return for the refreezing of the Yongbyon reactor – the reward which the US swore never to give. As for CVID – the condition with the irritating acronym has been quietly dropped.

Yesterday’s agreement is good sense, in fact. It is painful to engage with a government as repressive as North Korea, but as the US government has demonstrated there is no alternative. One should be experiencing relief that reason has returned to US diplomacy. But, it is difficult not to feel a deep sense of waste, lost opportunity and anger.

Comments

[john gregory Flinn]

Events, dear boy events!
Harold Macmillan's words seem appropiate here.

The players' hands have been exposed and NK's ace-nuke was trumped by the Chinese - according to all reports.
Now they are prepared to negotiate so that they might circumvent Chinese fuel oil for American; but the South will surely want to play that role, and get more access into NK's cheap industrial labour.

These tests, including the missiles will have surely debilitated NK's ability to refuse once China declared its hand. It's quite probable now that NK no longer knows for sure if China would cut off the oil and risk a NK civil war.(Any refugees would flee south like before).
That's oriental politics, being uncertain about an outcome can secure compliance.

For sure George Bush has not emerged well from all this, but US diplomacy can afford to covertly watch NK deplete itself of its resources. It had the effect of calling China's hand; and at least they did'nt give them (NK) Clinton's LWRs - that would have been a catastrophe!

[Firozali A. Mulla MBA PhD]

Stroky, stroky: On the Six Party Talks
Richard Lloyd Parry
Watching the TV pictures of the Six Party negotiators just now, I was struck by something that I hadn't noticed yesterday. (This picture is from a few years ago, not yesterday). Mr Kim didn't hold hands.
Why didn't he want to hold hands?
I see the drama now. I am sorry I had not understood yours story or call this breaking news then. There are reasons. No1: You are giving a photograph from the file that is in the museum. No2 : Kim Kye Gwan (second from the right above), was not there. This is his younger brother, he has twin brother but no one knows. You as a report in Asia missed this? I am shocked and ashamed. Look at the picture again with the stethoscope, you will hear the breathing a lit bit slower. He is the younger brother.
No3: Even after reading this I was struck by my wife reading the paper eating the paradigm that she had imported from India. I missed the point. Now I see. He is the shortest of the all six players. The short guys have short hand. He is very good at making speeches. His short hand helped him in school. Now of course he has the BIG brother and many stenos, I don’t know where he keeps them but I report this to you today after I read the “Lady Chatterley Lover”. Penguin's first run of the DH Lawrence's sexually explicit novel banned for more than 30 years sells out… Listen to Chapter 19 of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" HERE. Donate to Project Gutenberg ... Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence - Chapter 17. Scandal. ...
My wife just apologised to me. Thank you