Pushing the boundaries
The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)
North Korea's world is contracting, but the pressure might yet prove explosive, writes Hamish McDonald.
A QUARTER of a century ago, Hun Sen led a pariah regime isolated by the US and its allies, including Australia under Malcolm Fraser's Coalition government.
Installed by the Vietnamese Army as the leader of Cambodia, Hun Sen was seen as a rigid Stalinist and proxy of Soviet expansionism, so dangerous the US and China kept the ousted Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge going as a counter-force.
On Wednesday this week, the flags of Cambodia were flying along Canberra's avenues as the Prime Minister, John Howard, a senior minister under Fraser, gave Hun Sen a state welcome, including a 21-gun salute. The transformation might have given pause to the leaders and commentators piling abuse and criticism on the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, over his country's claimed nuclear test.
Asia's dictators are extraordinarily enduring, sometimes through democratic exercises such as Cambodia's. Yesterday's bogyman can be transformed into today's regional partner.
In Kim's case, he has seen out the Clinton administration, and is nearly three-quarters of the way to seeing out the next, that of George Bush. That's not bad for a man routinely described as mad and ridiculed for his small vanities of a bouffant hairstyle and Cuban heels as well as a history of sybaritic living with French wine and brandy, Italian and Japanese chefs, and attractive female attendants on tap.
In fact, Kim has shown himself as a man of sharp logic and professional cardsharp's nerve, working extremely hard and constantly attending to loyalty and morale in the key institutions of power, notably the military.
Only the Orwellian grotesqueries of North Korea and the brazenness of Kim's nuclear gambit helped soften a stunning setback for Bush this week.
It was the first nuclear breakout on his watch, and by a country he had singled out in his famous 2002 "Axis of Evil" speech linking North Korea, Iran and Iraq as rogue nations developing weapons of mass destruction.
While the US has been bogged in a war in the only one of the three that turned out not to have a weapons program, the other two have used the distraction to acquire nuclear bargaining chips, and perhaps weapons.
In North Korea's case, the perception of being a US target came with widespread talk by Bush and allies such as Howard of a new doctrine of pre-emption in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.
Bush singled out Kim, saying he had a "visceral" hatred of the North Korean leader for living well while his people starved. In 2002, Bush sent a tough-talking envoy, James Kelly, to Pyongyang to confront the North Koreans with paper trails showing they had a uranium enrichment program.
Above all, the new Bush team were contemptuous of the "Agreed Framework" reached by Bill Clinton with Pyongyang in 1994, just as the regime's founder, Kim Il-sung, was dying and passing his mantle to his son.
This was "appeasement" - the worst word in the neoconservative lexicon. But as Clinton left office, the 1994 agreement may have been tattered, but still exerted some control on the younger Kim, who was emerging from his first shaky years in power, which coincided with a famine in which as many as 2 million North Koreans died.
The Americans had delayed the promised transfer of two civilian nuclear power reactors of a relatively safe light-water design to the North, over recurring misgivings that Kim might be hiding a stockpile of plutonium for bomb-making.
But the North Koreans had kept their side of the bargain, shutting their small reactor at Yongbyon, and placing its spent fuel rods under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards.
While Clinton worked into the dying days of his administration to salvage the Oslo peace process in the Middle East, another effort was going on in East Asia to end another of the world's intractables, the Korean divide.
Clinton's secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, went to Pyongyang, and Kim turned on the charm, as he did when the South Korean president, Kim Dae-jung, arrived in a burst of "sunshine diplomacy".
Certainly there was some cheating in the background. In the late 1990s, the "father" of Pakistan's nuclear weapons, scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, began trading Islamabad's know-how in uranium enrichment centrifuges, and a few used models, for Pyongyang's ballistic missile expertise.
Potentially, centrifuges capable of producing highly enriched uranium would have allowed North Korea to go nuclear in a spectacular way. It has ample reserves of natural uranium in its north-east. The mechanics of a Hiroshima-type uranium fission bomb are relatively simple, compared to the ultra-precision machining required of a plutonium core and the shielded, concentric, high-explosive casing it requires to trigger a chain reaction.
But producing highly enriched uranium is the hard part; witness Iran's efforts to build the "cascades" of centrifuges. And according to information extracted from Pakistan in 2004, the exchange was in its early stages when stopped by its authorities. An attempt by Pyongyang to import metal tubes suitable for centrifuges from Germany was blocked in 2003. This week's test was almost certainly a plutonium one.
Bush's intense pressure in 2002, based on exaggerated fears about the extent of this cheating, caused Kim to walk away from the 1994 agreement that had verifiably put a lid on the operational plutonium-based fuel cycle. In early 2003, Pyongyang gave formal notice of withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, expelled inspectors and moved to reprocess spent fuel with the declared purpose of making a nuclear "deterrent".
At all times since, Pyongyang has declared its aim to be either a convincing deterrent against US attack or a framework of security and economic aid.
Every time North Korea has crossed a red line, the US has been led to conclude negotiations on the latter option are the only realistic way forward.
No US military intervention could stop the estimated 13,000 People's Army artillery pieces dug into granite tunnels along the border raining death on the South Korean capital, Seoul. Conceivably, North Korea could seize the Seoul-Incheon region, which generates 60 per cent of South Korea's gross domestic product, before being halted.
No sanctions are going to cripple the regime as long as China keeps open its land border, across which it supplies 70 per cent of North Korea's fuel and grain. But for three years, the Bush Administration has been engaged in "Clayton's" negotiations. Set against talking directly to Pyongyang ("We don't negotiate with evil, we destroy it," Vice-President Dick Cheney is said to have growled at one National Security Council session), the US entered a dialogue under multilateral cover in Beijing, with the Chinese, Russians, South Koreans and Japanese making noise while hoping the other two got on with the dirty business.
Any progress in Beijing was immediately disrupted by US neocons like John Bolton, now Bush's UN ambassador, either via personal insults to Kim or threatened sanctions.
On September 19 last year, the six-party talks nevertheless reached what seemed to be promising heads of agreement. North Korea said it would "abandon all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs", while the US agreed the two countries would "respect each other's sovereignty, exist peacefully together and take steps to normalise their relations".
Christopher Hill, the US chief negotiator, was opposed by hardliners in his own team as he worked to hammer out details, says Selig Harrison, one of the few US analysts with good North Korean access. "In their eyes, bilateral talks amount to implicit diplomatic recognition, and the 'steps to normalise relations' envisaged in the agreement would legitimise a rogue regime," Harrison wrote this week.
Two hardline US delegates, Security Council Asian affairs director Victor Cha and assistant secretary of defence Richard Lawless, snubbed a private dinner with the North Koreans and held up final agreement for three days while they tried to appeal against the final draft to the White House.
Four days after the agreement, the US Treasury Department started a broad crackdown on North Korea's access to the international financial system, branding it a "criminal state" because of officially sponsored counterfeiting, drug running, weapons trafficking and money laundering. These activities were known about for years, if not decades, yet Washington insists the action was a routine matter of law enforcement, a statement blandly repeated this week by the Foreign Affairs Minister, Alexander Downer.
It had the predictable effect of causing the North Koreans to declare the September 19 agreement nullified unless the financial sanctions were ended.
In July they stepped up pressure with their first ballistic missile tests in eight years. This week's blast was the next stage. If the explosion was only partially successful, an incomplete fission, as the low 550-tonne estimated yield suggests, then we can expect a second test soon to achieve a Nagasaki-sized blast. From early estimates given by Russian and Chinese defence authorities, before the seismic data emerged, the North Koreans may have advised that this was what they intended.
The UN Security Council is moving to apply some sanctions, but senior Russian diplomatic sources predict veto-wielding China will agree only to "symbolic" measures. "I don't see how China is going to sign up sanctions which undermine the security and stability of its own borders," said a Russian official, adding that even the mild ones could be counterproductive. "If the purpose is to change the North Korean behaviour the effect will be contrary."
It would meet every sanction with a "symmetrical reaction". If, for example, a naval blockade was imposed, Pyongyang might try to seize a Japanese ship on some pretext. "The last few years have proved that the campaign of pressure has decreased security, not increased it," the official said.
"Just pressure and no talk doesn't produce any results. We still think the only way is the diplomatic way, resuming the six-party talks. The faster the US realises it the better."
A QUARTER of a century ago, Hun Sen led a pariah regime isolated by the US and its allies, including Australia under Malcolm Fraser's Coalition government.
Installed by the Vietnamese Army as the leader of Cambodia, Hun Sen was seen as a rigid Stalinist and proxy of Soviet expansionism, so dangerous the US and China kept the ousted Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge going as a counter-force.
On Wednesday this week, the flags of Cambodia were flying along Canberra's avenues as the Prime Minister, John Howard, a senior minister under Fraser, gave Hun Sen a state welcome, including a 21-gun salute. The transformation might have given pause to the leaders and commentators piling abuse and criticism on the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, over his country's claimed nuclear test.
Asia's dictators are extraordinarily enduring, sometimes through democratic exercises such as Cambodia's. Yesterday's bogyman can be transformed into today's regional partner.
In Kim's case, he has seen out the Clinton administration, and is nearly three-quarters of the way to seeing out the next, that of George Bush. That's not bad for a man routinely described as mad and ridiculed for his small vanities of a bouffant hairstyle and Cuban heels as well as a history of sybaritic living with French wine and brandy, Italian and Japanese chefs, and attractive female attendants on tap.
In fact, Kim has shown himself as a man of sharp logic and professional cardsharp's nerve, working extremely hard and constantly attending to loyalty and morale in the key institutions of power, notably the military.
Only the Orwellian grotesqueries of North Korea and the brazenness of Kim's nuclear gambit helped soften a stunning setback for Bush this week.
It was the first nuclear breakout on his watch, and by a country he had singled out in his famous 2002 "Axis of Evil" speech linking North Korea, Iran and Iraq as rogue nations developing weapons of mass destruction.
While the US has been bogged in a war in the only one of the three that turned out not to have a weapons program, the other two have used the distraction to acquire nuclear bargaining chips, and perhaps weapons.
In North Korea's case, the perception of being a US target came with widespread talk by Bush and allies such as Howard of a new doctrine of pre-emption in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.
Bush singled out Kim, saying he had a "visceral" hatred of the North Korean leader for living well while his people starved. In 2002, Bush sent a tough-talking envoy, James Kelly, to Pyongyang to confront the North Koreans with paper trails showing they had a uranium enrichment program.
Above all, the new Bush team were contemptuous of the "Agreed Framework" reached by Bill Clinton with Pyongyang in 1994, just as the regime's founder, Kim Il-sung, was dying and passing his mantle to his son.
This was "appeasement" - the worst word in the neoconservative lexicon. But as Clinton left office, the 1994 agreement may have been tattered, but still exerted some control on the younger Kim, who was emerging from his first shaky years in power, which coincided with a famine in which as many as 2 million North Koreans died.
The Americans had delayed the promised transfer of two civilian nuclear power reactors of a relatively safe light-water design to the North, over recurring misgivings that Kim might be hiding a stockpile of plutonium for bomb-making.
But the North Koreans had kept their side of the bargain, shutting their small reactor at Yongbyon, and placing its spent fuel rods under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards.
While Clinton worked into the dying days of his administration to salvage the Oslo peace process in the Middle East, another effort was going on in East Asia to end another of the world's intractables, the Korean divide.
Clinton's secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, went to Pyongyang, and Kim turned on the charm, as he did when the South Korean president, Kim Dae-jung, arrived in a burst of "sunshine diplomacy".
Certainly there was some cheating in the background. In the late 1990s, the "father" of Pakistan's nuclear weapons, scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, began trading Islamabad's know-how in uranium enrichment centrifuges, and a few used models, for Pyongyang's ballistic missile expertise.
Potentially, centrifuges capable of producing highly enriched uranium would have allowed North Korea to go nuclear in a spectacular way. It has ample reserves of natural uranium in its north-east. The mechanics of a Hiroshima-type uranium fission bomb are relatively simple, compared to the ultra-precision machining required of a plutonium core and the shielded, concentric, high-explosive casing it requires to trigger a chain reaction.
But producing highly enriched uranium is the hard part; witness Iran's efforts to build the "cascades" of centrifuges. And according to information extracted from Pakistan in 2004, the exchange was in its early stages when stopped by its authorities. An attempt by Pyongyang to import metal tubes suitable for centrifuges from Germany was blocked in 2003. This week's test was almost certainly a plutonium one.
Bush's intense pressure in 2002, based on exaggerated fears about the extent of this cheating, caused Kim to walk away from the 1994 agreement that had verifiably put a lid on the operational plutonium-based fuel cycle. In early 2003, Pyongyang gave formal notice of withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, expelled inspectors and moved to reprocess spent fuel with the declared purpose of making a nuclear "deterrent".
At all times since, Pyongyang has declared its aim to be either a convincing deterrent against US attack or a framework of security and economic aid.
Every time North Korea has crossed a red line, the US has been led to conclude negotiations on the latter option are the only realistic way forward.
No US military intervention could stop the estimated 13,000 People's Army artillery pieces dug into granite tunnels along the border raining death on the South Korean capital, Seoul. Conceivably, North Korea could seize the Seoul-Incheon region, which generates 60 per cent of South Korea's gross domestic product, before being halted.
No sanctions are going to cripple the regime as long as China keeps open its land border, across which it supplies 70 per cent of North Korea's fuel and grain. But for three years, the Bush Administration has been engaged in "Clayton's" negotiations. Set against talking directly to Pyongyang ("We don't negotiate with evil, we destroy it," Vice-President Dick Cheney is said to have growled at one National Security Council session), the US entered a dialogue under multilateral cover in Beijing, with the Chinese, Russians, South Koreans and Japanese making noise while hoping the other two got on with the dirty business.
Any progress in Beijing was immediately disrupted by US neocons like John Bolton, now Bush's UN ambassador, either via personal insults to Kim or threatened sanctions.
On September 19 last year, the six-party talks nevertheless reached what seemed to be promising heads of agreement. North Korea said it would "abandon all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs", while the US agreed the two countries would "respect each other's sovereignty, exist peacefully together and take steps to normalise their relations".
Christopher Hill, the US chief negotiator, was opposed by hardliners in his own team as he worked to hammer out details, says Selig Harrison, one of the few US analysts with good North Korean access. "In their eyes, bilateral talks amount to implicit diplomatic recognition, and the 'steps to normalise relations' envisaged in the agreement would legitimise a rogue regime," Harrison wrote this week.
Two hardline US delegates, Security Council Asian affairs director Victor Cha and assistant secretary of defence Richard Lawless, snubbed a private dinner with the North Koreans and held up final agreement for three days while they tried to appeal against the final draft to the White House.
Four days after the agreement, the US Treasury Department started a broad crackdown on North Korea's access to the international financial system, branding it a "criminal state" because of officially sponsored counterfeiting, drug running, weapons trafficking and money laundering. These activities were known about for years, if not decades, yet Washington insists the action was a routine matter of law enforcement, a statement blandly repeated this week by the Foreign Affairs Minister, Alexander Downer.
It had the predictable effect of causing the North Koreans to declare the September 19 agreement nullified unless the financial sanctions were ended.
In July they stepped up pressure with their first ballistic missile tests in eight years. This week's blast was the next stage. If the explosion was only partially successful, an incomplete fission, as the low 550-tonne estimated yield suggests, then we can expect a second test soon to achieve a Nagasaki-sized blast. From early estimates given by Russian and Chinese defence authorities, before the seismic data emerged, the North Koreans may have advised that this was what they intended.
The UN Security Council is moving to apply some sanctions, but senior Russian diplomatic sources predict veto-wielding China will agree only to "symbolic" measures. "I don't see how China is going to sign up sanctions which undermine the security and stability of its own borders," said a Russian official, adding that even the mild ones could be counterproductive. "If the purpose is to change the North Korean behaviour the effect will be contrary."
It would meet every sanction with a "symmetrical reaction". If, for example, a naval blockade was imposed, Pyongyang might try to seize a Japanese ship on some pretext. "The last few years have proved that the campaign of pressure has decreased security, not increased it," the official said.
"Just pressure and no talk doesn't produce any results. We still think the only way is the diplomatic way, resuming the six-party talks. The faster the US realises it the better."
2 comments:
This is a very good article. Thank you. Comparing Kim style of government to Hun Sen is right on the money.
The only difference is Hun Sen government taking advantage of democracy ideaology while ruling with communist style approach. These men are crazy, but smart at the same time. They know how to surround themselves with the right people.
Thank you not UNTAC you gave Cambodia to political groups
but not the people of Cambodia!
Go to hell with those evil! UN
Post a Comment