Author: gboothe
Forum: F*cked News
Posted: Sun Jul 10, 2005 12:04 pm (GMT 9)
Topic Replies: 0
Does anyone hear a "you gotta gimme this, and gimme that coming?"
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July 10, 2005
North Koreans Agree to Resume Nuclear Talks
By JOEL BRINKLEY and DAVID E. SANGER
BEIJING, July 9 - After more than a year of stalemate, North Korea agreed Saturday evening to return to disarmament talks late this month and pledged to discuss eliminating its nuclear-weapons program, according to senior Bush administration officials.
The agreement was reached during a dinner meeting, with the Chinese as the hosts, that included Christopher Hill, a former American ambassador to South Korea who has recently become the lead United States negotiator to the talks, and Kim Kye Gwan, North Korea's deputy foreign minister, according to a senior administration official traveling here with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
The official Korean Central News Agency also issued a statement from Pyongyang announcing the talks would resume.
While the North Koreans have pledged many times before to return to the six-party talks - the United States, Japan, South Korea, China and Russia also sit at the table - this is the first time they have actually set a date: the week of July 25.
The Chinese have offered to be the hosts of the discussions, and "all the parties have agreed," said a senior administration official traveling with Ms. Rice, who did not want to be identified because Ms. Rice had not yet made a formal announcement. Ms. Rice, who is beginning a four-nation tour of Asia, and Li Zhaoxing, the Chinese foreign minister, plan to announce the agreement on Sunday morning.
American officials were clearly trying to lower expectations. "Frankly," one of the administration officials said, "we just don't know" what will come of the talks, if they do take place as promised.
The long-awaited return to negotiations carries considerable diplomatic perils on all sides, and would take place just as three European nations are scheduled to conduct talks with Iran about giving up critical elements of its nuclear program.
American officials say North Korea's economic situation has continued to deteriorate, and they hope to use that as leverage in the coming talks. To increase the pressure, the Bush administration has put in place plans for a series of coercive actions - crackdowns on North Korean shipments of drugs, counterfeit currency and arms - that would probably be accelerated if the negotiations made no progress.
"We've made it clear they can't just come back and lecture us, like the last sessions," a senior administration official in Washington said. "Either they get on the path to disarmament, or we move to Plan B."
But President Bush's options are also limited, officials acknowledge. China has been unwilling to participate in any economic embargos. Military action to halt North Korea's declared efforts to build its nuclear arsenal has been ruled out as too risky, and virtually impossible while American forces are tied up in Iraq.
Meanwhile, Mr. Bush has been resisting pressure from China and South Korea to improve an offer to the North Koreans he made in June 2004. To avoid failure at the talks, he may have to decide whether to make explicit concessions, including the promise of eventual normalization of relations with a nation that just two months ago he said was run by a "tyrant" who puts dissidents in "concentration camps."
In interviews in Washington in recent days, officials have said they fear three major stumbling blocks to an agreement. The first is the question of whether North Korea is willing to negotiate away all elements of its nuclear program. The Bush administration is still sharply divided over whether North Korea would fully cooperate. True disarmament would include turning over any existing nuclear weapons, dismantling the plutonium-manufacturing facilities it has acknowledged - centered at a huge nuclear complex at Yongbyon, north of the capital - and leading inspectors to what the United States charges is a second, secret nuclear program.
That second program, American officials have charged, uses uranium technology provided by A. Q. Khan, the Pakistani scientist who set up an illicit nuclear network and made more than a dozen trips to North Korea.
"He's said a lot about what he sold them," a former intelligence official said recently, "and the president isn't going to reach any agreement that doesn't involve turning over all of that, too." But North Korea, after initially seeming to acknowledge its uranium program when presented with the charges in 2002, has now denied its existence.
The second probable stumbling block is timing, American officials say. North Korea does not trust the United States to deliver on its promises if it gives up its nuclear program first. Mr. Bush has said publicly that he does not trust Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader.
The third potential problem is verification. North Korea has never allowed inspectors to move freely, and threw out the International Atomic Energy Agency on New Year's Day 2003. A result is that American officials are uncertain where the North may be hiding elements of its program.
But South Korea has been pressing to make a deal, and its unification minister, Chung Dong Young, met last month with Kim Jong Il and offered him a package of new aid, including much-needed energy assistance, if North Korea returned to the talks and agreed to disarm, American officials have said.
The senior administration official in Beijing said Saturday that he believed that offer was important and helped bring about the agreement to resume talks. He added that the United States did not agree to any incentives beyond the offer made at the last six-party talks, in June 2004, though he called South Korea's offer "compatible with ours." That fits a previous American strategy of allowing its allies and China to offer more incentives, even while Mr. Bush refuses to budge with American concessions.
Over the last several months, North Korea set numerous conditions for returning to the talks, including turning them into regional disarmament negotiations. North Korea made that demand after it, on Feb. 10, declared for the first time that it was in possession of nuclear weapons, a statement American intelligence officials say they cannot confirm - but assume to be true.
The senior administration official said the North Koreans made no such demand on Saturday in return for restarting the negotiations.
Discussions on setting a date began last week when another North Korean official, Li Gun, held a meeting with Joseph E. DeTrani, a State Department official, and diplomats from Japan and South Korea, on the sidelines of an academic conference in New York. The United States had given Mr. Li a visa, clearly to encourage such a discussion.
There, the senior administration official said, Mr. Li told Mr. DeTrani that North Korea was ready to return to the negotiating table and wanted to set up a meeting to discuss the date and the scope of the talks. After that, Mr. Hill, who is assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific affairs, flew to Beijing for Saturday's dinner just before Ms. Rice's arrival.
The North, American officials said, was looking for face-saving ways to resume talks. So South Korea urged Mr. Bush and his aides to stop characterizing the North Korean leader as a "tyrant" or repeating Ms. Rice's phrase that the country was an "outpost of tyranny."
The enforced silence may have helped. The Korean Central News Agency, which speaks with the government's voice, said Saturday, "The U.S. side clarified its official stand to recognize" North Korea "as a sovereign state, not to invade it and hold bilateral talks within the framework of the six-party talks."
At the dinner in Beijing, the senior administration official said Mr. Hill, a veteran of the Balkans negotiations, promised that "everyone is equal; we will respect each other." On the plane to Beijing on Friday and Saturday, Ms. Rice reiterated a statement she has been making for months that she recognized North Korea as "a sovereign state." She did not repeat her "outpost of tyranny" characterization.
On Saturday, a senior South Korean official, speaking in Seoul, said, "The North Koreans said that they regard the United States' recognition of their sovereignty and reassurances that it won't invade or attack them as a withdrawal of the previous 'outpost of tyranny' remark."
The official added: "They recently received humanitarian assistance from South Korea, which was supplemented by the United States with 50,000 tons of food. It's not a big amount, but it was significant. These factors gave North Korea a certain amount of room to come forward."
At the same time as Washington offered tokens of respect, the senior Bush official said the administration also expected the North Koreans to dismantle all of their nuclear energy programs, even though they say some are intended to provide nuclear energy, not weapons. Allowing any nuclear development programs in place would leave a danger of proliferation, the official said.
The United States has ended its support of a program to build two nuclear power plants, designed to be unusable to produce weapons fuel, in North Korea that was part of a failed 1994 agreement between the North and the Clinton administration. The construction was halted two years ago, and the United States may suggest conventional power reactors instead. Mr. Bush has been criticized by Democrats and even some members of his own party who have said he has wasted time in the North Korea negotiations by refusing to negotiate directly, as the North Koreans had demanded. Mr. Hill's dinner meeting was the closest approximation of a direct negotiation to date, though former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell had a brief discussion on the sides of a meeting with a North Korean official several years ago.
While Secretary Rice knew as she flew to Beijing that the dinner between Mr. Hill and Mr. Kim was planned, she was not at all certain that an agreement would be reached, the administration official said. Speaking to reporters on the flight, Ms. Rice said she was "prepared to hear what the Chinese are prepared to do" to persuade the North Koreans to return.
Joel Brinkley reported from Beijing for this article, and David E. Sanger from Vermont. Norimitsu Onishi contributed reporting from Tokyo.
The New York Times Company
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