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NK Shuts Down 4 More Nuclear Facilities: ElBaradei

Wednesday, July 18th, 2007

Korea Times
7/18/2007

North Korea has ceased operations of four more nuclear facilities after closing Saturday its key nuclear reactor that produces weapons-grade plutonium, the chief of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said Wednesday.

“We have verified all the five nuclear facilities have been shut down,” Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), was quoted as saying in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, by the Associated Press.

He said some of the facilities have been sealed by IAEA inspectors who are currently staying in the North to verify the shutdown and disablement of the North’s nuclear facilities.

His remark comes as a new round of six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear disarmament is set to resume in Beijing Wednesday afternoon.

The talks involving the two Koreas, the United States, China, Japan and Russia are supposed to deal with disablement of the North Korea’s nuclear facilities and the North’s declaration of all of its nuclear programs under the second phase of a February agreement.

Posted in Energy, IAEA, Nuclear | Comments Closed

N. Korea Shutters Nuclear Facility

Sunday, July 15th, 2007

Washington Post Foreign Service
Edward Cody
7/15/2007; Page A01

Move Follows Delivery of Oil; U.N. Team to Verify Shutdown

After four years of off-and-on negotiations, North Korea said it began closing down its main nuclear reactor Saturday, shortly after receiving a first boatload of fuel oil aid.

The closure, if confirmed by U.N. inspectors, would mark the first concrete step in a carefully orchestrated denuclearization schedule that was agreed on in February, with the ultimate goal of dismantling North Korea’s nuclear weapons program in exchange for fuel and other economic aid, and increased diplomatic recognition.

More broadly, it constituted the first on-the-ground accomplishment of six-nation negotiations that have been grinding away with little progress since 2003 under Chinese sponsorship. The talks — including North and South Korea, Russia, Japan, the United States and China — are likely to resume next week in Beijing to emphasize the parties’ resolve to carry out the rest of the February agreement and eventually create a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula.

“We welcome this development and look forward to the verification and monitoring of this shutdown by the International Atomic Energy Agency team,” said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack, referring to a 10-member team of U.N. inspectors who flew into North Korea earlier Saturday.

Assistant Secretary of State Christopher R. Hill, the chief U.S. negotiator, warned reporters in Japan, where he was visiting in anticipation of the new talks, that moving forward into further denuclearization would probably prove as difficult as the previous four years of discussions. Given the track record, which includes several North Korean walkouts and long standoffs, some Asian and U.S. analysts have questioned whether North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Il, has genuinely made the strategic decision to give up nuclear weapons after so many years devoted to developing them.

The next steps, as outlined in the accord, would be for North Korea to permanently disable the reactor, a plutonium facility at Yongbyon, 60 miles northeast of Pyongyang, the capital, and to reveal the full extent of the nuclear weapons, nuclear processing plants and stored nuclear material it has accumulated. That would include an accounting of any uranium enrichment efforts, which North Korea denies it has undertaken but which the Bush administration says have been part of the country’s nuclear research.

Uranium aside, U.S. intelligence estimates have said North Korea has extracted enough plutonium from the Yongbyon facility to build as many as a dozen bombs, although it is not known how many weapons the reclusive Stalinist nation’s military has put together. Last October, while the talks were again stalled, North Korea announced it had conducted its first underground nuclear test and henceforth should be considered a nuclear-armed state.

Kim’s government has based much of its power on the military, and possession of nuclear weapons has been described in North Korean propaganda as a matter of national pride. But the thought of nuclear weapons in the hands of Kim and his aides has unsettled his Asian neighbors, including China. As a result, they have persisted in the six-party negotiations despite repeated delays and abrupt changes of position by North Korean diplomats.

North Korea’s decision to go ahead with the Yongbyon closure, for instance, came only after nearly two years of wrangling over about $25 million in North Korean accounts blocked in a Macau bank.

The funds were frozen because of U.S. Treasury Department allegations in September 2005 that they were tainted by money laundering and counterfeiting. After months of insisting the Treasury accusations were a law enforcement matter separate from the nuclear talks, the Bush administration switched positions and promised to get the money liberated, leading to February’s milestone agreement. But several months more passed while Hill struggled to find a banking system that would handle the allegedly tainted money. Ultimately, the funds were transferred out of Macau via the Federal Reserve Bank of New York into the Russian banking system and, from there, transferred into North Korean accounts in a Russian trading bank near the border with North Korea

Diplomats from the six nations have suggested that, should they be successful, the North Korean nuclear negotiations could eventually evolve into a permanent forum for East Asian security cooperation, bringing North Korea into a closer relationship with its neighbors. But as Hill did in Japan on Saturday, they acknowledge they have a long road ahead before anything like that is possible.

Saturday’s announcement, while widely applauded, essentially returned the East Asian landscape to what it was in 2002, when operations had been suspended at the Yongbyon reactor under an earlier deal put together in 1994 under the Clinton administration.

U.S. diplomats said in 2002 that North Korean representatives acknowledged a secret uranium enrichment program — something North Korea has steadfastly denied since then — and the Bush administration stopped the oil shipments that were part of the 1994 deal. In return, North Korea expelled U.N. weapons inspectors, quit the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and restarted operations at Yongbyon.

The North Korean government had made no formal announcement by early Sunday. But a diplomat at the North Korean U.N. mission, Kim Myon Gil, told the Associated Press that the reactor was shut down Saturday and its closure would soon be verified by the U.N. inspectors. The State Department said in Washington that it got official word from North Korea shortly after a South Korean ship pulled into Sonbong, a port in northeast North Korea, with a cargo of 6,200 tons of heavy fuel oil to power generators in the rickety North Korean electricity grid.”

The delivery represented a down payment on a scheduled 50,000 tons of fuel oil aid in return for shutting down the reactor. In all, the February accord promised North Korea up to 1 million tons of oil and other economic aid as it takes further denuclearization steps over the months ahead.

The accord also held out the prospect of improved relations with the United States, which has long been a goal of North Korea. In signing the accord, for instance, the Bush administration undertook to review whether it could remove North Korea from the list of countries said to sponsor terrorism and to engage in diplomatic discussions aimed at dissipating the hostility that remains more than half a century after the Korean War.

Posted in Energy, IAEA, International Aid, Nuclear | Comments Closed

N. Korea says banking row over, vows to use released funds for humanitarian purposes

Monday, June 25th, 2007

Yonhap
6/25/2007

North Korea Monday reconfirmed its pledge to denuclearize under a February agreement, saying its funds held in a Macau bank have been transferred to the North to clear away the major obstacle to the implementation of the nuclear disarmament deal.

In an interview carried by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), a spokesman for the North Korean Foreign Ministry also said the funds will be used for humanitarian purposes, as promised.

The announcement came one day before a delegation of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is scheduled to arrive in Pyongyang on Tuesday for discussions on shutting down and disabling the North’s nuclear facilities as the first step in the denuclearization program.

The spokesman confirmed that the North would soon get on with implementing the six-nation agreement signed on Feb. 13 in which the communist nation promised to shut down and seal its nuclear facilities at Yongbyon.

“As part of efforts to that end, (North Korea) is set to start negotiations on the shutdown of the nuclear facility and its verification with a working-level delegation of the IAEA in Pyongyang from June 26,” the spokesman said.

The spokesman confirmed the transfer of the funds to North Korea. “As the money frozen in Macau’s Banco Delta Asia has been transferred as we demanded, the troublesome issue of the frozen funds has been resolved.”

The released money is planned to be used to improve the livelihood of the people and other humanitarian purposes as agreed between the North and the United States, added the unidentified spokesman.

North Korea’s US$25 million in the Banco Delta Asia had been frozen since late 2005, when the U.S. blacklisted the bank as a “primary money laundering concern” because of its alleged link to the North’s alleged illicit financial activities that included counterfeiting U.S. bills and money laundering.

Washington finalized the ruling earlier this year, but agreed to the release of the North Korean funds in March on condition that the money be used for humanitarian purposes.

The transfer of the money to a North Korean account in a Russian bank was completed Saturday, according to the Russian Foreign Ministry.

This is the first time for Pyongyang to acknowledge the end of the banking dispute, which Washington had declared over in March, then again in April when the Macanese financial authorities unblocked the BDA funds for withdrawal.

North Korea refused to honor the February agreement until the money was released.

“The reason we were so serious about the (release) of the frozen funds was not because it’s a large amount but because it is the key symbol of (U.S.) hostile policy toward us,” the North Korean official said.

In a statement carried by the KCNA Saturday, an unidentified spokesman for the North Korean Foreign Ministry said the country has agreed to “start implementing the (Feb. 13) agreement” as soon as the BDA issue is settled.

The statement followed a two-day trip starting Thursday by Washington’s chief nuclear negotiator Christopher Hill to Pyongyang where he held “comprehensive and productive” discussions with his North Korean counterparts on the nuclear issue.

Posted in Energy, Finance, Nuclear | Comments Closed

North Korea needs a dose of soft power

Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

Asia Times
Andrei Lankov
6/5/2007

It is clear that the current Western approach to dealing with North Korea is not working. Some people in Washington obviously still believe that financial or other sanctions will push the North Korean regime to the corner and press Pyongyang into relinquishing its nuclear program. But this is very unlikely.

First, neither China nor Russia is willing to participate in the sanctions regime wholeheartedly. Neither country is happy about a nuclear North Korea, but they see its collapse as an even greater evil. However, without their participation, no sanctions regime can succeed. More important, South Korea, still technically an ally of the United States, is even less willing to drive Pyongyang to the corner. And finally, even if sanctions have some effect, the only palpable results will be more dead farmers. The regime survived far greater challenges a decade ago when it had no backers whatsoever.

So what can be done? In the short run, not much. Like it or not, Pyongyang will remain nuclear. There might be some compromises, such as freezing existing nuclear facilities, but in general there is no way to press North Korean leaders into abandoning their nuclear weapons.

This is not good news, since it means that the threat will remain. Earlier experience has clearly demonstrated that every time North Korean leaders run into trouble, they use blackmail tactics, and they usually work. In all probability, there will be more provocations in the future. Since Pyongyang’s leaders believe (perhaps with good reason) that Chinese-style economic reforms might bring about the collapse of their regime, they have not the slightest inclination to start reforming themselves.

This leaves them with few options other a policy aimed at extracting aid from the outside world, and regular blackmail is one of the usual tools of this approach. Thus the threat persists unless the regime or, at least, its nature is changed, but how can this goal be achieved if pressure from outside is so patently inefficient? The answer is pressure from within, by nurturing pro-democracy and pro-reform forces within North Korean society (and also pro-reform thoughts within the brains of individuals).

Of all assorted “rogue regimes”, North Korea is probably most vulnerable to this soft approach. On one hand, unlike the bosses of the assorted fundamentalist regimes, North Korea’s leaders have never claimed that their followers will be rewarded in the afterlife; they do not talk, for example, about the pleasures of otherworldly sex with 72 virgins.

Their claim to legitimacy is based on their alleged ability to deliver better lives to Koreans here and now, and Pyongyang’s rulers have failed in this regard in the most spectacular way. The existence of another Korea makes the use of nationalistic slogans somewhat problematic as well.

North Korea’s leaders cannot really say, “We have to be poor to protect our independence from those encroaching foreigners,” since the existence of the dirty-rich South vividly demonstrates that under a reasonably rational government, Koreans can be both rich and independent (and also free).

This leaves Pyongyang with no choice but to seal the borders as tight as no other communist regime has ever done before, on assumption that the common folk should not know that they live a complete lie. This self-imposed information isolation is the major condition for the regime’s survival, and breaking such a wall of ignorance should be seen as the major target for any long-term efforts directed at bringing change to North Korea.

The power of soft measures is often underestimated, not least because such policies are cheap, slow and not as spectacular as commando raids or even economic embargoes. However, their efficiency is remarkable.

In this regard, it makes sense to remember a story from the relatively recent past. In 1958, an academic-exchange agreement was signed between the Soviet Union and the United States. Back then the diehard enemies of the Soviet system were not exactly happy about this step, which, they insisted, was yet another sign of shameful appeasement.

They said this agreement would merely provide the Soviets with another opportunity to send spies to steal US secrets. Alternatively, the skeptics insisted, the Soviets would send diehard ideologues who would use their US experience as a tool in the propaganda war. And, the critics continued, this would be done on American taxpayers’ money.

The first group of exchange students was small and included, as skeptics feared, exactly the people they did not want to welcome on to US soil. There were merely four Soviet students who were selected by Moscow to enter Columbia University for one year of studies in 1958. One of them, as we know now, was a promising KGB operative whose job was indeed to spy on the Americans. He was good at his job and later made a brilliant career in Soviet foreign intelligence.

His fellow student was a young but promising veteran of the then-still-recent World War II. After studies in the US, he moved to the Communist Party central bureaucracy, where in a decade he became the first deputy head of the propaganda department – in essence, a second in command among Soviet professional ideologues.

Well, skeptics seemed to have been proved right – until the 1980s, that is. The KGB operative’s name was Oleg Kalugin, and he was to become the first KGB officer openly to challenge the organization from within. His fellow student, Alexandr Yakovlev, a Communist Party Central Committee secretary, became the closest associate of Mikhail Gorbachev and made a remarkable contribution to the collapse of the communist regime in Moscow (some people even insist that it was Yakovlev rather than Gorbachev himself who could be described as the real architect of perestroika.)

Eventually, both men said it was their experiences in the United States that changed the way they saw the world, even if they were prudent enough to keep their mouths shut and say what they were expected to say. So two of the four carefully selected Soviet students of 1958 eventually became the top leaders of perestroika.

There is no reason to believe that measures that worked in the Soviet case would be less effective in North Korea. Academic exchanges are especially important, since the policy toward North Korea should pursue two different but interconnected purposes. The first is to promote transformation of the regime or perhaps even to bring down one of the world’s most murderous dictatorships. However, it is also time to start thinking about what will happen next, after Kim Jong-il and his cohorts vanish from the scene.

The post-Kim reconstruction of North Korean will be painful, expensive and probably lengthy. Right now North Korea is some 20 times a poor as the South, and the gap in education between two countries is yawning. With the exception of a handful of military engineers, a typical North Korean technician has never used a computer.

North Korean economists learn a grossly simplified version of 1950s Soviet official economics, and North Korean doctors have never heard about even the most common drugs used elsewhere. This means that in the case of a regime collapse, the North Koreans would be merely cheap labor for the South Korean conglomerates – a situation bound to produce tensions and hostility between the two societies. A North Korean who in 20 years’ time will look for a decent job should be made employable, and the best way to ensure this is to start thinking about his or her education right now.

Academic exchanges with North Korea would have dual or even triple purposes. First, they would bring explosive information into the country, hastening domestic changes (probably, but not necessary, changes of a revolutionary nature). Second, they would assist North Korean economic development, thus beginning to bridge the gap between the two Koreas even while the North was still under Kim Jong-il’s regime. Third, they would contribute to more efficient and less painful reconstruction of post-Kim North Korea.

Of course, all these scholarship programs should be paid for by the recipient countries. North Koreans have no money for such exchanges (and to paraphrase a remark by North Korea expert Aidan Foster-Carter, North Korean leaders are people who never do anything as vulgar as paying). But all three targets are clearly in the interest of the world community, and anyway the monies involved would be quite small.

North Korea’s leaders are no fools. They understand that such exchanges are dangerous, and they do not want future Korean Yakovlevs and Kalugins to emerge. Back in 1959-60 they even decided to recall their students from the Soviet Union and other countries of the Communist Bloc and did not send their young people to study anywhere but in Mao Zedong’s China until the late 1970s. In other words, for two decades Pyongyang’s leaders believed that those countries were way too liberal as an environment for their students.

However, they also understand that without exchanges they cannot survive in the longer run. Even now, Pyongyang is doing its best to increase exchanges with China, sending numerous students there.

Another important factor is endemic corruption. There is no doubt that nearly all students who will go overseas will be scions of the Pyongyang aristocrats, the hereditary elite that has been ruling the country for decades. A high-level official might understand that sending a young North Korean overseas is potentially dangerous. But if the person in question is likely to be his nephew, he will probably choose to forget about the ideological threats.

Of course, no sane North Korean leader would ever agree to send students to the US or to South Korea. However, there are many countries that are far more acceptable for them. The Australian National University a few years ago had a course for North Korean postgraduate students who studied modern economics and financial management. Australia or Canada or New Zealand might be good places for such programs.

While English-language education is preferable, since English is the language of international communication in East Asia, there is a place for European countries as well, especially smaller ones, whose names do not sound too offensive to the Pyongyang bureaucrats – such as Switzerland or Hungary or Austria.

Such programs should be sponsored by those countries whose stakes are the highest, such as the US, Japan and South Korea, but smaller and more distant countries also should consider sponsoring such an undertaking. This is not a waste of money, nor even a good-looking humanitarian gesture for its own sake. As history has shown many times, former students tend to be sympathetic to the country where they once studied, and they normally keep some connections there.

North Korea has great potential, and when things start moving, those graduates are likely to be catapulted to high places, since people with modern education are so few in North Korea. This means countries that consider small investments in scholarships for North Koreans will eventually get large benefits through important connections and sympathies that their business people, engineers and scholars will find in some important offices of post-Kim North Korea.

Scholarships for North Korean students are not the only form of academic exchanges. North Korean scientists and scholars should be invited to Western universities, and books and digital materials should be donated to major North Korean libraries in large numbers. Of course, only selected people with special clearances are allowed to read non-technical Western publications in North Korea, but they are exactly the people who will matter when things start moving.

It is well known that students and academics who come back from longtime overseas trips are routinely submitted to rigorous ideological retraining upon their return to North Korea. But does it help? Unlikely. If anything, heavy doses of obviously nonsensical propaganda make a great contrast with what they have learned and seen, thus putting North Korean society in an even less favorable light.

Of course, they will not say anything improper when they come back home, but they will see that there are other ways of life, they will see how impoverished, bleak and hyper-controlled their lives are, and they will think how to change this. Sooner or later, these people will become a catalyst for transformation – and their skills will help to ease the pains of the post-Kim revival of North Korea.

Posted in China, Civil society, Economic reform, Education, Energy, International trade, Nuclear, Political economy, Russia | Comments Closed

North Korea Uncovered (Google Earth)

Sunday, April 22nd, 2007

DOWNLOAD IT HERE (to your own Google Earth)

Using numerous maps, articles, and interviews I have mapped out North Korea by “industry” (or topic) on Google Earth. This is the most authoritative map of North Korea that exists publicly today.

Agriculture, aviation, cultural, manufacturing, railroad, energy, politics, sports, military, religion, leisure, national parks…they are all here, and will captivate anyone interested in North Korea for hours.

Naturally, I cannot vouch for the authenticity of many locations since I have not seen or been to them, but great efforts have been made to check for authenticity. In many cases, I have posted sources, though not for all. This is a thorough compilation of lots of material, but I will leave it up to the reader to make up their own minds on the more “controversial” locations. In time, I hope to expand this further by adding canal and road networks.

I hope this post will launch a new interest in North Korea. There is still plenty more to learn, and I look forward to hearing about improvements that can be made.

Posted in Agriculture, Coal, Communications, Dams/hydro, DPRK organizations, Education, Electricity, Energy, Football (soccer), Forestry, Gambling, Golf, Google Earth, Health care, Hoteling, Manufacturing, Mass games, Military, Mining/Minerals, Nuclear, Railways, Religion, Restaurants, Sports, Tourism, Transportation, Worker's Party | 5 Comments »

N. Korea plant to be shut down dilapidated

Friday, March 30th, 2007

The Washington Tmes (hat tip DPRK studies)
Richard Halloran
3/30/2007

The nuclear power plant that North Korea has agreed to shut down in return for oil and other concessions is in such poor operating condition that Pyongyang may not be unhappy to give it up, according to informants who have been in North Korea or who have access to intelligence reports.

The informants said the plant’s thick walls are crumbling, its machinery is rusting, and maintenance of the electric power plant, roads, and warehouses that sustain the nuclear facility has been neglected. North Korea’s impoverished economy, they surmised, just cannot support the operation.

Moreover, the North Korean plant’s technology is 50 years old and obsolete. It was acquired, possibly by Russian spies, by the Soviet Union from the British in the 1950s, then passed to North Korea in the 1980s.

No U.S. or U.N. official has visited the plant at Yongbyon since International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors were barred from the site 60 miles north of Pyongyang in 2002, although the facility presumably is monitored by spy satellites.

The last Americans known to have visited the site were members of a civilian team that was shown evidence in January 2004 that used nuclear fuel had been removed from a cooling pond — presumably for reprocessing into weapons-grade plutonium.

Most experts think North Korea has extracted enough fuel from the site to produce up to a dozen nuclear devices, and that the material was used to conduct a partially successful nuclear weapons test in October last year.

“The reactor, storage pond and reprocessing facility were all functional” at that time, Jack Pritchard, a special envoy for negotiations with North Korea until September 2003 and a member of that team, said this week.

“They reminded [Siegfried Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and another member of the team] of 1950s Soviet stuff, but still operational.”

Mr. Pritchard said a separate 50-megawatt reactor under construction nearby “looked dilapidated, and I have my non-technical doubts about the North Koreans’ ability to restart construction.”

North Korea agreed in a landmark Feb. 13 agreement with the United States and four other countries to shut down and eventually dismantle the Yongbyon reactor in exchange for deliveries of heavy fuel oil or the equivalent, and other inducements.

The deal, which reproduced some elements of an earlier agreement negotiated by the Clinton administration, angered some past and present members of the Bush administration including former U.N. Ambassador John R. Bolton, who had served earlier as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.

Some of those U.S. officials, who declined to be identified while criticizing the administration, have cited assessments of the Yongbyon plant’s condition to argue that North Korea has given up very little in exchange for substantial benefits, which also include talks on diplomatic normalization with the United States.

A State Department official familiar with the negotiations with North Korea rejected that argument, saying in Washington that the Yongbyon plant remained dangerous regardless of its condition.

“The North Koreans are not rolling in money. It is true that the plant was built some time ago with not very modern technology. It is not pretty, but they do seem to be able to use it to do some very dangerous things,” said the official, who asked not to be identified.

The official said the U.S. intelligence community thinks North Korea has reprocessed fuel from the facility into weapons-grade plutonium, which was used in the October weapons test.

“So the idea that this facility doesn’t seem to pose a real threat has been implicitly disputed” by those intelligence assessments, the official said.

Posted in Energy, Nuclear | Comments Closed

Top N.K. nuclear negotiator in New York for normalization talks

Saturday, March 3rd, 2007

Yonhap
3/3/2007

North Korea’s top nuclear negotiator arrived in New York Friday to attend his country’s first working group session with the United States on normalizing their diplomatic ties.

Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye-gwan, leading a seven-member entourage, avoided reporters at the airport and is believed to have headed directly to a hotel.

He was expected to stay in a hotel near the U.N. headquarters, a location which is easy to reach from the North Korean mission to the global body.

The senior official is scheduled to begin the two-day working group session here Monday with his U.S. counterpart, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, at the U.S. mission to the U.N. in Manhattan.

Kim is the highest-ranking North Korean official to come to the United States since Vice Marshal Jo Myung-rok went to Washington as his country’s special envoy in October 2000.

The vice foreign minister represents North Korea in the six-party talks over Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions, which also involve South Korea, the U.S., China, Russia and Japan. The envoys struck a deal on Feb. 13 under which Pyongyang would shut down its nuclear facilities and eventually disable them in phases. In return, the North would receive political and economic incentives provided by the other participating countries.

The agreement also established five working groups, including one on diplomatic normalization talks between the U.S. and North Korea.

Kim’s schedule has not been made public, but he is expected to attend a closed-door seminar hosted by the Korea Society, a New York-based nonprofit organization working for the promotion of friendship between the U.S. and South Korea, before the working group session begins.

The working group meeting is expected to focus on setting the agenda and schedules for future normalization talks and discussing a possible visit by Hill to North Korea.

The two sides are also expected to open discussions on removing North Korea from the U.S. list of terrorism-supporting nations, lifting sanctions and unfreezing North Korean assets in the U.S.

Kim began his week-long visit to the U.S. when he arrived in San Francisco early Thursday. He is known to have attended a closed-door seminar at Stanford University sponsored by various groups that have dialogue channels with Pyongyang. But the rest of Kim’s schedule in San Francisco was unavailable.

Meanwhile, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) announced that it had no choice but to suspend its operations in North Korea as of March 1 as the necessary conditions set out by the UNDP Executive Board on Jan. 25 have not been met.

“These conditions included adjusting the content of the current Country Program (2005-2006) and the proposed Country Program (2007-2009) for the DPRK to support sustainable human development objectives; ending all payments in hard currency to government, national partners, local staff and local vendors and discontinuing sub-contracting of national staff via government recruitment as of 1 March 2007,” said the U.N. agency on its web site.

But the UNDP noted that its position on operations in North Korea could be reconsidered if these circumstances change..

Posted in Energy, International Aid, Nuclear, South Korea, USA | Comments Closed

U.S. intelligence shows N. Korea progress

Wednesday, February 28th, 2007

Korea Herald
3/1/2007

North Korea appears to have started complying with a recent nuclear disarmament agreement, but U.S. intelligence officials are telling skeptical lawmakers they will continue to watch the country’s actions closely.

Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said Tuesday that officials had seen North Korea begin inspections of its main nuclear reactor, which the North pledged to shut down and seal in return for an initial load of fuel oil. More aid would follow once North Korean technicians had disabled its nuclear programs.

“There are parts of this nuclear program that we have to pay a lot of attention to, to see if we have the kind of disclosure and the inspection capabilities that we’re looking for,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

He also said North Korea is technically capable of building a long-range missile that can hit the United States despite a test failure last year.

He said North Korea has probably learned from the failure of its Taepodong-2 missile during a test in July, and made changes to its other missiles.

“I believe they have the technical capability, as we saw by the Taepodong, but they have not successfully tested it yet,” he said.

Asked how long before North Korea would have a missile capable of reaching the United States, he said, “I would probably estimate it’s not a matter of years.”

The Bush administration was likely to face more tough questions on Wednesday, when the chief U.S. negotiator at North Korean disarmament talks, Christopher Hill, was to appear at a House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee hearing.

Many in Washington are deeply skeptical of the Feb. 13 agreement. Conservatives say it rewards North Korea for bad behavior.

In Seoul, a senior U.S. security official expressed “cautious optimism” that Pyongyang will take steps to disable its nuclear facilities and is coordinating with Seoul for progress.

“I think we have a good first start, and I think we are approaching with energy and with cautious optimism,” White House Deputy National Security Adviser Jack Crouch told Yonhap News Agency.

Amid lingering doubt that Pyongyang may backtrack, he said there are now “big differences – we have a coordinated policy with the five members of the six-party talks.”

Crouch was here to meet Seoul’s chief nuclear negotiator Chun Young-woo to coordinate on North Korea’s nuclear disarmament after a stop in Tokyo.

Foreign Minister Song Min-soon also met him before heading to the United States to meet with his U.S. counterpart, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, on Thursday.

A flurry of diplomatic efforts are underway to start carrying out the six-party agreement reached in Beijing on Feb. 13, in which North Korea pledged to shut down and eventually dismantle its nuclear facilities.

Japan said yesterday it will hold talks with North Korea next week in Hanoi, hoping for progress in a row over abductions that has led Tokyo to shun a six-nation nuclear deal with Pyongyang.

“After coordinating with North Korea, the first working-level talks for the normalisation of the Japan-North Korea ties will be held on March 7 and 8 in Hanoi,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki told a press conference.

A prepatory meeting will be held in the Vietnamese capital on March 6, he added.

Japan is expected to use the forum to push for answers on the abduction of its citizens by North Korea, which says the issue is closed.

North Korea’s top nuclear negotiator Kim Kye-gwan is expected to arrive in the U.S. this week to meet his U.S. counterpart Christopher Hill in New York and discuss normalizing diplomatic relations. Their meeting may discuss removing the North from the U.S. list of terrorism-sponsoring nations, according to Crouch.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte is also set to visit the region next week, stopping in Japan, South Korea and China.

Posted in Nuclear, Political economy, USA | Comments Closed

North Korea Enacts Law Against Money Laundering

Tuesday, February 20th, 2007

Korea Times
Park Song-wu
2/20/2007

The National Intelligence Service (NIS) on Tuesday confirmed that North Korea recently enacted a law that prohibits money laundering.

The standing committee of the North’s Supreme People’s Assembly adopted the legislation last October to ban financial transactions involving illegal earnings, the agency said in a press release.

The enactment apparently aimed at settling the U.S. financial sanctions on a bank in Macau that was blacklisted by Washington in September 2005 for its suspicious role in helping the North conduct illicit financial activities, it said.

Under the latest six-party agreement, reached on Feb. 13, the United States is to resolve financial sanctions within 30 days on North Korean assets worth $24 million that have been frozen in the Macau bank.

The NIS also confirmed that the North has a highly enriched uranium (HEU) program.

NIS officials made the confirmation during a closed-door National Assembly session as the Beijing deal on initial actions to implement the denuclearization of North Korea came under criticism for not mentioning the HEU program.

After ending the session, a lawmaker said on condition of anonymity that the NIS officials confirmed the existence of the HEU program in the North.

When North Korea’s uranium enrichment program came to the fore in 2002, Washington and Pyongyang accused each other of violating the 1994 agreed framework that eventually collapsed.

Seoul and Washington are reportedly sharing the view that Pyongyang has an HEU program, for which the North began purchasing large quantities of centrifuge-related equipment in 2001.

But what is not yet clear is whether the North has begun to produce weapons-grade uranium.

In a separate Assembly session, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Song Min-soon also faced the same question from lawmakers on why the Beijing agreement did not mention the HEU program.

He avoided speaking specifically on the sensitive issue that triggered the second nuclear crisis in October 2002. But he said it will be addressed as the latest agreement invoked section one of the joint statement adopted in September 2005.

“The Beijing deal is about initial steps, and it’s not a complete roadmap toward the denuclearization,” Song said. “But the recent agreement requires the North to declare all of its nuclear programs.”

In section one of the September statement, the North committed to abandoning “all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs” and returning at an early date to the treaty on the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons treaty (NPT) and to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards.

The main opposition Grand National Party (GNP) also expressed doubts over Pyongyang’s willingness to abide by its pledges to implement initial measures for the denuclearization of North Korea.

Rep. Kim Yong-kap of the conservative party found problems with the deal reached in Beijing on Feb. 13 since key components of it, especially on the disablement of the North’s nuclear facilities, are overly “abstract.”

“Despite the North’s agreement to disable its 5 megawatt reactor in Yongbyon, it later changed the wording into a temporary stoppage of operations,” Kim said.

The North’s media promptly reported the result of latest six-party talks, but did not use the term “disablement.” Seoul officials interpreted it as an attempt to mislead North Koreans so they do not lose their pride.

“In addition, there is no deadline on the disablement. I am simply doubtful of the deal’s practicality,” he said.

According to a Chosun Ilbo-Gallup Korea poll, conducted on Feb. 19, 77.9 percent of respondents predicted that the North would not keep its pledges, while 15.8 percent of the 1,006 respondents trusted the North.

But Song said the Beijing deal was a good chance to reaffirm Pyongyang’s willingness for an early denuclearization.

He also dismissed the GNP’s claim that Seoul is determined to share the largest financial burden of aiding the North to achieve a second inter-Korean summit in the run-up to the December presidential election.

“We will not bear all the burden because all five parties have agreed to provide economic aid on the principle of equality and equity,” he said. “And the provision of assistance will be made in line with the principle of action for action.”

As a first step toward denuclearization, North Korea is to shut down its nuclear-related facilities at Yongbyon while allowing United Nations nuclear inspectors back to the nuclear complex to seal them off.

Seoul’s top nuclear negotiator, Chun Yung-woo, said in Beijing on Feb. 13 that the deal is working under an “incentive system.”

For shutting down the Yongbyon complex, the North would receive the equivalent of 50,000 tons of heavy fuel oil in emergency relief aid. An additional 950,000 tons of heavy oil or equivalent aid will be provided to the country upon its completion of disabling other nuclear-related facilities.

Posted in Banking, Black markets, Economic reform, Energy, Finance, Illicit activities, Nuclear, Supreme Peoples Assembly | Comments Closed

Outside Pressures Broke Korean Deadlock

Wednesday, February 14th, 2007

NY Times
David E. Sanger

It is hard to imagine that either George W. Bush or Kim Jong-il would have agreed even a year ago to the kind of deal they have now approved. The pact, announced Tuesday, would stop, seal and ultimately disable North Korea’s nuclear facilities, as part of a grand bargain that the administration has previously shunned as overly generous to a repressive country — especially one that has not yet said when or if it will give up its nuclear arsenal.

But in the past few months, the world has changed for both Mr. Bush and Mr. Kim, two men who have made clear how deeply they detest each other. Both are beset by huge problems, and both needed some kind of breakthrough.

For Mr. Bush, bogged down in Iraq, his authority undercut by the November elections, any chance to show progress in peacefully disarming a country that detonated a nuclear test just four months ago could no longer be passed up. As one senior administration official said over the weekend, the prospect that Mr. Bush might leave Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and North Korea more dangerous places than he found them “can’t be very appealing.”

Still, the accord came under fast criticism from right and left that it was both too little and too late.

For years, Mr. Bush’s administration has been paralyzed by an ideological war, between those who wanted to bring down North Korea and those who thought it was worth one more try to lure the country out of isolation. In embracing this deal, Mr. Bush sided with those who have counseled engagement, notably his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, and her chief negotiator, Christopher R. Hill. Mr. Bush took the leap in the hope that in a few months, he will be able to declare that North Korea can no longer produce fuel for new nuclear weapons, even if it has not yet turned over its old ones.

For Mr. Kim, the nuclear explosion — more of a fizzle — that he set off in the mountains not far from the Chinese border in October turned out to be a strategic mistake. The Chinese, who spent six decades protecting the Kim family dynasty, responded by cutting off his military aid, and helping Washington crack down on the banks that financed the Cognac-and-Mercedes lifestyle of the North Korean leadership.

“As a political statement, their test was a red flare for everyone,” said Robert Gallucci, who under President Clinton was the chief negotiator of the 1994 agreement with North Korea, which collapsed four years ago. “It gave President Bush and the Chinese some leverage.”

Mr. Gallucci and other nuclear experts agree that the hardest bargaining with world’s most reclusive, often paranoid, government remains ahead.

Over the next year, under the pact, the North must not only disable its nuclear reactors and reprocessing facilities, it must lead inspectors to its weapons and a suspected second nuclear weapons program. And to get to the next phase of the agreement, the one that gives “disarmament” meaning, North Korea will have to be persuaded to give away the country’s crown jewels: the weapons that make the world pay attention to it.

But before the administration faces off against Mr. Kim in Pyongyang, it will have to confront the many critics of the deal here at home. As the White House took credit on Tuesday for what it called a “first step,” it found itself pilloried by conservatives who attacked the administration for folding in negotiations with a charter member of what Mr. Bush called the “axis of evil,” and for replicating key elements of Mr. Clinton’s agreement with North Korea.

At the same time, Mr. Bush’s advisers were being confronted by barbs from veterans of the Clinton administration, who argued that the same deal struck Tuesday had been within reach several years and a half-dozen weapons ago, had only Mr. Bush chosen to negotiate with the North rather than fixate on upending its government.

In fact, elements of the new decision closely resemble the Clinton deal, called the Agreed Framework. As it did in that accord, the North agrees to “freeze” its operations at Yongbyon, its main nuclear facility, and to allow inspections there. And like that agreement, the new one envisions the North’s ultimately giving up all of its nuclear material.

In two respects, however, the new accord is different: North Korea does not receive the incentives the West has offered — in this case, about a year’s supply of heavy fuel oil and other aid — until it “disables” its equipment at Yongbyon and declares where it has hidden its bombs, nuclear fuel and other nuclear facilities. And the deal is not only with Washington, but with Beijing, Moscow, Seoul and Tokyo.

“We’re building a set of relationships,” Ms. Rice argued Tuesday, saying that the deal would not have been possible if she and President Bush had not been able to swing the Chinese over to their side. Mr. Bush has told colleagues that he believes the turning point came in his own blunt conversations with President Hu Jintao of China, in which, the American president has said, he explained in stark terms that a nuclear North Korea was more China’s problem than America’s.

But the administration was clearly taken aback on Tuesday by the harshness of the critique from the right, led by its recently departed United Nations ambassador, John R. Bolton, who charged that the deal “undercuts the sanctions resolution” against the North that he pushed through the Security Council four months ago.

Democrats, in contrast, were caught between enjoying watching Mr. Bush change course and declaring that the agreement amounted to disarmament-lite. “It gives the illusion of moving more rapidly to disarmament, but it doesn’t really require anything to happen in the second phase,” said Joel Wit, who was the coordinator of the 1994 agreement.

The Bush administration is counting on the lure of future benefits to the North — fuel oil, the peace treaty ending the Korean War it has long craved, an end to other sanctions — to force Mr. Kim to disclose where his nuclear weapons and fuel are stored.

Mr. Bush’s big worry now is that Mr. Kim is playing the administration for time. Many experts think he is betting that by the time the first big deliveries of oil and aid are depleted, America will be distracted by a presidential election.

But Mr. Bush could also end up with a diplomatic triumph, one he needs desperately. To get there, he appears to have changed course. Asked in 2004 about North Korea, he said, “I don’t think you give timelines to dictators and tyrants.”

Now he appears to have concluded that sometimes the United States has to negotiate with dictators and odious rulers, because the other options — military force, sanctions or watching an unpredictable nation gain a nuclear arsenal — seem even worse.

Posted in Energy, Nuclear, Oil, Political economy, USA | Comments Closed

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