Text Fwd: [Ariel Ky] Reaching Out to North Korea [아리엘 기] 북한에 접근하기

* Sent by Ariel Ky on Oct. 20, 2010

UB POST
Reaching Out to North Korea
Written by Ariel Ky
Tuesday, August 04, 2009.

North Korea has suggested that it is willing to enter bilateral talks with the United States to resolve tensions over its atomic weapons program, now that it’s bolstered its negotiating power with nuclear and missile tests, according to a July 27 article by Jae Soon-chang in the Associated Press. However, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said earlier in the day that a multilateral framework is “the appropriate way to engage with North Korea.”

State Department spokesperson Ian Kelly also said that negotiations could only happen on the sidelines of a new round of six-nation multilateral talks, which would include the two nations, as well as Russia, China, and Japan.

The U.S. has called for international support in strictly enforcing the U.N. sanctions resolution against North Korea as a way to pressure them to return to talks, after the country’s May 25 nuclear test.

North Korea has “ratcheted up tensions at a rapid pace”, according to Jae’s article.
“It conducted a long-range rocket launch in April, quit the six-nation nuclear talks, restarted its nuclear facilities, conducted its second-ever nuclear test, and test-launched a barrage of banned ballistic missiles,” the article said.

North Korea’s July 27 statement said that the country refuses to engage in six-party talks again, because “it became all the more clear that other parties are taking advantage of these six-party talks to seek their ulterior aims to disarm and incapacitate the (North) so that it can only subsist on the bread crumbs thrown away by them.”

Despite this, there were no written threats in the statement, and the suggestion for talks – even if limited to bilateral arrangements with the U.S. – is rare, said Jae.

Decades of sanctions have made little impact on North Korea’s weapons program and strident militarism. The failure of sanctions to steer policy has led to new approaches in reaching out to North Korea in an attempt to find feasible ways to end the country’s isolation so that they may have a stake in global peacekeeping.

In the New York Times article, “Will Sanctions Ever Work on North Korea”, Martin Fackler and Choe Sang-Hun said that the North will need motivation.

“In the end what is needed … is a ‘grand bargain’ of sweeping incentives that could include large-scale economic aid, normalization of relations with the United States and pledges that Washington will not attack or topple the North Korean government,” it said.

Yun Duk-min, a North Korea specialist at the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security based in South Korea agrees that it is the only hope for breaking the cycle.

“We need big enough carrots to go along with a stronger stick,” he said.

Dr. Chris Williams of the University of Birmingham’s Centre for International Education and Research suggested another option for disarmament: A road. Williams said that a connecting passageway would act as a better deterrent than a nuclear bomb.

The 2005 UN East Asian Highway Agreement encourages 32 Asian countries to extend existing roads towards and across borders, creating a 141,000-kilometer long trans-Asia network of roads. An agreement for a parallel railway network dubbed the “Iron Silk Road” was signed in Busan in 2006.

Politically, this idea is probably one of the most exciting moves towards peace and security since the United Nations was founded, said Williams. He argues that once people have the freedom to travel from country to country on a network of roads such as happened in Europe in the 20th century, losing that freedom due to war would be unthinkable.

Financial assistance may also be more readily available to North Korea once an agreement for a structured foreign reserve currency for Asian countries is finalized. Ongoing negotiations on the proposal have taken place between the ASEAN countries, plus China, Japan and Korea, in Chiang Rai, Bali, and most recently Yekatarinburg.

In a July 29 article in the Korea Herald titled “Creating a Good Bank for North Korea”, Bernard Seliger argues that a Northeast Asian Development Bank (NADB) should be formed and it should produce a strong offer to North Korea to participate from the beginning.

He suggests that funding could be regional – with the majority likely coming from South Korea and China, but also from Japan and non-Asian states such as the European Union.

Seliger went on to say that the North American Development Bank (NADB) would also be helpful in addressing an issue that has plagued many socialist and developing countries – North Korea defaulted on its external debt in the 1980s. This problem has to be resolved as a precondition for the re-integration of North Korea in the world economy.

“This does not mean North Korea has to pay back all of that debt - principal plus interest - which is not possible in the foreseeable future. Looking at the experience of debt rescheduling of Soviet and Russian debt with the London Club [of private lenders] and Paris Club [of state lenders], it can be said that the process was helpful beyond solving the original problem,” said Seliger.

“A new generation of debt and trade finance specialists emerged [as] more understanding, for international trade followed, and economic reform was forwarded by negotiations. Creating macroeconomic specialist, debt and trade finance specialists would be as well a precondition as an outcome of negotiations. In both, the NADB could play a pivotal role.”

In a second step, the NADB could also assume the debt – where the possibility of repayment is currently zero – after large write-offs, and for concessions in terms of reform in North Korea. A strong linkage of capacity building, aid and trade would result.

Seliger further states that resolving current problems goes hand-in-hand with developing solutions for North Korea.

“Extending an olive branch to North Korea, particularly in the form of a regional initiative that includes China, would put pressure on North Korea to react positively,” Seliger said. “It would also show the population of North Korea, which by now has at least limited access to information from abroad, that the international community is not hostile vis-à-vis North Korea, but offering help.”

He goes on to say that that this would open other various possibilities with the country.
“The most benign, but currently least probable, would be that North Korea itself becomes interested in capacity-building and economic integration. A more probable outcome would be that growing Chinese frustration with its ally would lead to stronger Chinese efforts to convince North Korea to open up,” he said.

“There is no guarantee that the NADB will succeed with regard to North Korea. However, a lot of money has been spent on much more dubious inter-Korean cooperation projects to no avail. This approach might well be worth trying out.”

Mongolia could also play an active role because of the long friendship it has shared with North Korea.

In a June 12 article in the UB Post titled “Looking Beyond North Korea”, Stephen Noerper stated that Mongolia has “offered itself as a venue for talks on easing tensions on the Korean peninsula, notable given its good relations with both North and South Korea.”
Hopefully, the U.S. will take up Mongolia’s offer.