Collapse of ’94 pact weighs on agreement; next steps are critical
BEIJING—Washington’s new willingness to compromise with North Korea, shown in the multiparty agreement reached yesterday, opens the door to improved relations, but any gains could be undone by the same problems that ruined past deals.
The deal—in which North Korea agreed to start dismantling its nuclear-weapons program in return for one million tons of oil—raises the possibility that Washington and Tokyo could restore diplomatic relations with Pyongyang and that an armistice may be reached to formally end the Korean War.
By offering energy as an incentive to give up its nuclear program, the new agreement resembles to a degree the 1994 Agreed Framework, when the U.S. agreed to provide North Korea with light-water reactors and fuel oil.
That agreement collapsed after the North declared it had a nuclear weapons program—about one and a half years after U.S. President George W. Bush included the North in what he referred to as the “axis of evil.” Last year, Pyongyang tested a nuclear device. The moves raised the possibility that the North could develop an offensive nuclear capability or export nuclear technology to terrorists.
The gradual collapse of the Agreed Framework showed the difficulties involved in dealing with North Korea—and the ways in which the latest agreement could founder. Relations between Washington and Pyongyang are shaped by a half-century of Cold War distrust. The five countries working with North Korea—the U.S., China, South Korea, Japan and Russia— will be trying to implement a complex, multipart deal. What’s more, they will operate in an atmosphere of suspicion among each other and political infighting in their respective capitals.
If it seems any of the countries aren’t holding up their end of the deal, North Korea could find reason to complain and slow the process. The impoverished, isolated country has signaled it is open to some changes, particularly those that will improve its decayed economy, but it also will prevent any action that threatens the power of its dictator, Kim Jong Il. Pyongyang’s footdragging had hampered the six party talks since 2003 and colored the 1994 agreement. For instance, U.S. efforts to clean a cooling pond at North Korea’s nuclear plant following the 1994 deal took years longer than expected in part because of restrictions the North imposed on workers.
Christopher Hill, the U.S. envoy to the talks, said the first measure of success for the new agreement will be whether the participants meet their targets for initial steps.
“We don’t want to lose momentum,” he said in Beijing last night. “We don’t want anyone to think that these initial actions were ends in themselves. The best way we can prove they’re initial is to get on to the next set of actions.”
Under the deal, North Korea will shut down within two months its lone nuclear reactor, which is chiefly used to provide fuel for nuclear weapons. In return, it will receive 50,000 tons of heavy fuel oil.
If the 60-day deadline is met, the six countries will begin the next phase of the process. In it, North Korea will have to take steps to irreversibly disable and seal the reactor—a step beyond the 1994 deal.
In a sign of Pyongyang’s unpredictability, North Korean state media reported that the agreement requires only a temporary suspension of the nuclear facilities.
But if North Korea follows through with steps to prevent the reactor from working again, it will receive another 950,000 tons of oil, an amount that’s about equal to what the country now consumes in a year and, at today’s prices, worth about $250 million.
The six countries will later negotiate the disposal of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and weapons materiel. They also aim to keep working toward a bigger goal of ending the antagonism that has lingered on the Korean peninsula since the Korean War of the 1950s. They created five working groups to negotiate details for such things as allowing North Korea to open diplomatic relations with the U.S. and Japan.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday she would meet her North Korean counterpart after the deal’s initial 60-day implementation period as part of a meeting of all six countries’ top diplomats, assuming all of the parties hold up their ends of the agreement.
Many of the broader goals of the new accord were first set out by the Agreed Framework, which the U.S. negotiated in the years after North Korea first started to produce weapons fuel from the plant. But implementation was hampered by logistical difficulties in North Korea and politics in both countries. The U.S. promised to build two light-water nuclear plants for North Korea, chiefly using workers and equipment brought in from South Korea. In the early years of the project, work stopped for a week after one of the foreigners crumpled a newspaper picture of Kim Il Sung, the father of Kim Jong Il who ruled the country for four decades.
In the U.S., meanwhile, the Republican-led Congress didn’t fully fund the work. In 2000, the completion date for one of the plants had slipped to 2009 from 2003.
The nuclear plant’s construction was scrapped after Mr. Bush took office. He canceled the 1994 agreement and accused North Korea of violating it by starting a new program to build nuclear weapons with highly enriched uranium.
North Korea re-opened the nuclear plant in 2002. In turn, the U.S. asked North Korea’s neighbors to assist it in trying to persuade Pyongyang to give up its nuclear ambitions, leading to the formation of the six-party talks.
North Korea wouldn’t budge for the first two years of off-and-on meetings. It walked away from a broad agreement in September 2005, angry at the U.S. for censuring a bank the North allegedly used for money laundering, and refused further talks until after testing its first nuclear device last October.
Even when Pyongyang returned to the table in December, delegates told the other participants they couldn’t discuss anything more than the U.S.-led banking restrictions. On the night that round of talks ended, Mr. Hill, the U.S. envoy, sent one of the Korean-speaking members of his delegation to visit the North Korean embassy with a message: He would meet the North Korean envoy in another city at a time of his choosing.
A few days later, North Korea notified the U.S. that its envoy, Kim Kye Gwan, would like to meet in Berlin in January. Mr. Hill checked with Ms. Rice, who agreed to the meeting. Over three days, the two men wrote the “clear outlines of an agreement” to bring to the six party talks, according to a senior administration official.
The arrangement raised the confidence of the U.S. delegation heading into the latest round of discussions, which began Thursday. At the start of the talks, North Korea sought specific figures for the amount of fuel oil it would receive. The original agreement left specific terms to be set at later meetings, and Pyongyang’s new insistence put the deal in jeopardy.
On Monday, Mr. Hill told the North’s Mr. Kim about a Korean ceramic cup that he has on his desk in Washington that is specially designed to empty out when it gets too full. “You have to be careful what you’re asking for here because this deal might not be able to go through,” he told Mr. Kim, according to someone who was present. But over the next few hours, the six parties decided to rewrite the agreement to attach specific terms to the amount of fuel oil.
The resulting deal is a major success for Mr. Hill, a veteran negotiator who played a key role in the Dayton accords that brought peace to the Balkans in the mid-1990s. He later served as U.S. ambassador in Poland and South Korea, where he is a popular figure despite spending less than a year in the post.
While in Seoul, he occasionally posted notes in online forums watched by the country’s tech-savvy college students. Last month, he wrote an ode to his favorite Korean food, a spicy tofu soup called sun du bu. Just after he left the country in 2005 to take his current job as assistant secretary of state for East Asia, an Internet contest sprang up to give Mr. Hill a Korean name. One of the submissions was Han Pyeonghwa, which means “Korea peace.”
But Mr. Hill is already facing criticism from hawks in and out of the Bush administration who advocated keeping North Korea diplomatically isolated and militarily nervous. John Bolton, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations for about a year, called it “a terrible deal” in a CNN interview. Before leaving the job in the face of unlikely Senate confirmation, Mr. Bolton led the fight in the U.N. Security Council to impose economic sanctions on the North following its nuclear-device test.