Appeasing North is mug's game

The Daily Yomiuri Asia News Network Tokyo

At the conclusion of the three-day inter-Korean ministerial meeting in Pyongyang, North and South Korean negotiators agreed to seek a peaceful resolution to the nuclear crisis, a focal issue in the talks, after much wrangling. But the language in the joint statement issued Wednesday is very similar to that used in communiques released after previous ministerial-level talks. In other words, no progress was made.

The negotiations stalled because Pyongyang claimed at its meeting last week in Beijing with the U.S. and China that it possesses nuclear weapons.

At the Pyongyang meeting, the South insisted that if the North did indeed possess nuclear arms, then it must scrap them, pointing out that the North's possession of such weapons would put it in violation of the 1991 South-North Joint Declaration on Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, a bilateral pledge not to test, produce, store, deploy or use nuclear weapons. But the joint statement failed to incorporate a clause stipulating the two sides would abide by the denuclearization accord, although the South wanted to reflect the spirit of the agreement in the statement.

For its part, North Korea clung to its conventional position that its negotiating partner over the nuclear issue is the U.S., not South Korea. Pyongyang maintained that its discussions with Seoul would only cover the continuation of aid programs, such as the provision of rice and fertilizer, and economic cooperation.

The North played the South like a violin. The latest meeting showed that Seoul's appeasement policy will not make Pyongyang abandon its nuclear development program.

Previously, North Korea repeatedly insisted it had no intention of possessing nuclear weapons. Even when it declared it would withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and restarted one of its nuclear reactors, it insisted it had no choice but to resume operations of the nuclear facility to generate electricity because the U.S. had stopped providing it with fuel oil.

We regret to say that the "sunshine policy" advocated by former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung and policies taken by current President Roh Moo-hyun, who followed Kim's line, have revealed their limitations.

North Korea has been secretly developing nuclear weapons using enriched uranium and recently declared it would start reprocessing used nuclear fuel to obtain plutonium, in violation of the joint pact on denuclearization and the 1994 U.S.-North Korean Agreed Framework, under which the North froze its development of materials for making nuclear weapons. Not only has it refused to give up its nuclear development program, it has gone as far as to promote a plan to arm itself with nuclear weapons.

North Korea said it made a "new bold proposal" to the U.S. in the three-way meeting in Beijing last week. According to the proposal, Pyongyang is ready to abandon its nuclear weapons and suspend missile exports, but only if Washington makes a "bold switchover" in its "hostile" policy toward the North and starts negotiations to normalize diplomatic ties with the country.

But details of the proposal remain unclear, so it will have to be closely examined.

We regret to say that Pyongyang is again resorting to its time-honored tactic of unilaterally precipitating a crisis and then seeking rewards in exchange for backing down. The country should know by now that this trick will not work any longer. The first thing it should do is to abandon its nuclear development program.

The Roh administration must firmly adhere to the basic principle of making the denuclearization of the North the precondition for its extending financial aid to the North and not acquiesce in the North's nuclear armament. South Korea has only one choice -- to press the North to abandon the nuclear program in close coordination with the U.S. and Japan.

Roh's determination to resolve the nuclear dispute will be tested at the upcoming meeting among Japan, the U.S. and South Korea, and at the U.S.-South Korea summit meeting to take place later this month.