Korea Times
Park Song-wu
2/11/2007
South Korea is thinking of chairing a working group for energy aid to North Korea as the United States is trying to differentiate this round of the six-party talks from a 1994 process, a Seoul official said on Sunday.
But Seoul has a firm position that all parties should jointly pay the “tax” for peace, he said.
“Denuclearization will benefit all parties, so the burdens should be shared jointly,” he said. “But we are thinking of taking the lead in the working group for energy aid, considering the circumstances of the other parties.”
He did not elaborate. But Tokyo is not expected to raise its hand to chair the working group, considering the Japanese anger over the North’s abduction of its nationals in the past.
Russia prefers forgiving the North’s debts instead of providing it with energy.
China, host of the multilateral dialogue, is already playing the most important role of chairing the six-party meeting.
What the United States apparently has in mind, and consented to by all parties, is the necessity to differentiate the result of these on-going negotiations from the 1994 Agreed Framework.
Since it was signed by Robert Gallucci and Kang Sok-ju in Geneva on October 21, 1994, Washington provided 500,000 tons of heavy oil annually to Pyongyang over the following seven years.
But the North’s promise to freeze its graphite-moderated reactors in return for two light-water reactors was not obeyed, causing the Bush administration to criticize the deal as a diplomatic failure of his predecessor, Bill Clinton. After that, U.S. diplomats even avoided meeting their North Korean counterparts bilaterally.
The U.S. policy, however, has recently reached a turning point.
“The Bush administration may have been driven to greater negotiating flexibility by a need to achieve a foreign policy victory to compensate for declining public support for the Iraq war and the loss of the Republican leadership of Congress,” Bruce Klingner, a senior research fellow for the Heritage Foundation said in a recent article.
But one thing that has not changed is the U.S. hope of not repeating the “mistake” it made with the Geneva agreement.
From 1994 to 2002, Pyongyang received 3.56 million tons of heavy oil, equivalent to $500 million, from the now-defunct Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO), and the United States shouldered the largest share of $347 million.
To shake off that bad memory, Washington wants to use the term “shut down” instead of “freezing” and even wants to avoid providing fuel oil to the North, reportedly citing the possibility that it can be used for military purposes.
So the talks have dragged on. And, to make things worse, the North Koreans are demanding a lot.
Japan’s Kyodo news agency reported that North Korea had demanded 2 million tons of heavy oil or 2 million kilowatts of electricity in exchange for taking the initial steps towards denuclearization.
Christopher Hill, the top U.S. envoy, expressed hope on Sunday that such technical issues could be discussed at working group meetings. On the same day, the Seoul official hinted that South Korea will chair the working group.
