North Korea set to test Obama’s resolve: analysts

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25 April 2009
North Korea halts foreign food-aid programme

Eugene Sun Yim

Five US non-governmental organisations have been told to halt their food programmes in North Korea, but they remain hopeful about their other work in the country. Eugene Sun Yim reports.

The North Korean Government recently ordered staff from five US non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to vacate Pyongyang, unexpectedly curtailing a food distribution programme that has benefited nearly 1 million North Koreans.

The food programme was part of a larger programme sponsored by the US Agency for Intern ...

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Apr 25, 2009
North Korea has ransom on its mind

By Donald Kirk

SEOUL - North Korea is playing a new kind of bargaining game in the confrontation with South Korea and the United States. It is holding hostages for ransom under the guise of criminal charges in hopes of extracting even more concessions from both countries.

For the American audience, the victims are a pair of female television journalists, one Chinese-American, the other Korean-American, grabbed by North Korean soldiers along the Tumen River border with China on March 17. North Korea on Friday said it had confirmed "the crimes committed" by the two, Laura Ling and Euna Lee of Current TV, half-owned by the former US vice president Al Gore, and is ready to bring them to trial.

The wording of the news report, carried by Pyongyang's Korean

Central News Agency, had ominous overtones.

A "competent organ" - presumably the North's pervasive security apparatus - was said to have completed its "investigation". All preliminary to an event that is sure to provide real theater even if no foreigner beside the accused will be in whatever passes for a courtroom in Pyongyang.

The inference was that Ling and Lee had admitted, if not been forced to confess, the unspecified "hostile acts" that North Korea said weeks ago they were committing when picked up on the border. It's no secret that they were reporting on defectors escaping human-rights abuses - a taboo topic in North Korea. From there, North Korean security officials should have no trouble building an espionage case.

The trial of Ling and Lee is emblematic of North Korean strategy on a much larger scale. The obvious goal is to draw the United States into dialogue, and a renewed promise of billions of dollars in aid. Another target for North Korea is the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), the US-spurred effort to get nations to join in blocking shipments of nuclear materiel and technology as well as any long-range missiles to deliver them.

It was very much with PSI in mind that North Korean negotiators summoned South Korean officials earlier this week to the first North-South dialogue in more than a year. It took place in the industrial complex at Kaesong, 60 kilometers north of Seoul and just above the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas.

The South Koreans balked, unsuccessfully, about having to meet the North Koreans inside the North's administration building rather than in the relatively neutral complex headquarters. Then, in a 22-minute confrontation, the North Koreans asked for far more money from the 100 or so South Korean companies that employ 40,000 North Korean workers in the complex. As a corollary to that demand, they also repeated the "warning" issued the day before, that South Korea would be considered to have made a "declaration of war" if made good on its promise to the Americans to join PSI.

At the same time, the North Koreans refused to respond at all to South Korean demands to see a South Korean engineer arrested on March 30. He has been accused of insulting the North during a conversation with a North Korean waitress. In effect they are holding the engineer, a middle-aged man who works for Hyundai Asan - the company that built the zone - for ransom in the same spirit in which they are holding the American journalists.

Every South Korean official one encounters, whether on the Blue House staff of President Lee Myung-bak or at the Foreign Ministry or the Unification Ministry, declares that South Korea's position is irrevocable, that South Korea will join PSI.

Tactically if not strategically, however, South Korean leaders are playing a waiting game - possibly using PSI as a threat to North Korea in response to its threats against the South. They also seem to hope that pressure from others is going to help before the crisis deepens.

The latest reason for delay appears to be the visit to Seoul this weekend of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who is arriving from Pyongyang where he has seen top leaders, possibly including Kim Jong-il.

Lavrov himself cautioned not to "expect any immediate breakthroughs" after seeing North Korea's Foreign Minister Pak Ui-chun, but he is assumed to have suggested that a return to dialogue would be a good idea. "We should not yield to emotions," he was quoted as saying by the Russian news agency ITAR-TASS. "Hopefully, we will be able to overcome this crisis."

This kind of diplomacy may assert Russia's historic interest in the Korean Peninsula as a counterweight to China's overwhelming influence, but how much either side wants to help is far from clear.

Despite China's interest in hosting six-party talks, in which the North has said it will "never again" participate, China has contributed to a sense of confidence among North Korean strategists that they can get away with frightening the world. The refusal of China, the North's ally from Korean War days onward, to support any effective response in the United Nations or elsewhere, underlines China's growing support of the North over the past few years.

Far from discouraging North Korea, China since 2004 has vastly increased its level of economic and other aid. Just as Chinese "volunteers" saved North Korea from takeover by American and South Korean forces in the "coldest winter" of 1950-1951, and then waged the bloodiest battles of the war along where the shooting finally stopped in July 1953, so China has come to the rescue while the starving country plunges billions into nukes, missiles and space exploration.

As tensions increase on the Korean Peninsula, Chinese policy-makers need, or believe they need, to stand ever closer to North Korea in a "big brother" act that is sure to deepen divisions and confrontation.

China now provides the North with US$1.5 billion in aid a year, nearly four times as much as the $400 million it gave in 2004. North Korea has a favorable trade balance with China, and multi-millions more in goods and cash flow beneath the books in traffic across the long Yalu River border to the west and the much shorter (but shallower and easily traversed on foot) Tumen River in the northeast.

"The North Koreans know they have the Chinese in their pocket," Scott Snyder, a North Korea expert with the Asia Foundation, remarked at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

But why? The answer lies in China's desire to assert its historic hegemony over the entire Korean Peninsula - and its influence in northeast Asia. It's also possible the Chinese fear that diminished aid to North Korea would hasten the collapse of the regime, bring about a flood of refugees across the borders and destabilize the peninsula to the point of chaos with a bloody and unpredictable outcome.

Nick Eberstadt, a long-time analyst of Korean problems with the American Enterprise Institute, cites the danger of an "explosion of Chinese subsidies".

The most frightening aspect of North Korean advances in nuclear and missile technology is the threat it poses not just to its neighbors - and enemies - but to the world at large.

Bruce Bechtol, a former US Marine in Korea and now a professor at the Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia, warned of rapid strides made by North Korea while the United States was pressing six-party talks to get the North to abandon the program. Under the circumstances, ransom for the two journalists - and for the Hyundai Asan engineer - might gain their release but accomplish little else.

"The North Koreans are advancing their capabilities and are proliferating that to the Iranians," he said. He believes, "No matter how much we paid to the North Koreans, they would still build the missiles and proliferate them."

Journalist Donald Kirk has been covering Korea - and the confrontation of forces in Northeast Asia - for more than 30 years.

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North Korea 'preparing for second nuclear test'

North Korea has begun preparations for a second nuclear test at a site in the north of the country, South Korean government sources have said, raising the diplomatic stakes over stalled nuclear disarmament talks.

By Peter Foster in Beijing
Last Updated: 10:32AM BST 07 May 2009

The preparations began days after Pyongyang threatened to conduct further nuclear tests following its censure at the United Nations for a failed ballistic missile launch early last month.

It takes place as Washington is dispatching Stephen Bosworth, its special envoy on North Korea, to Beijing and then to Seoul, Tokyo and Moscow in an effort to bring the isolated Stalinist regime back to the negotiating table.

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Analysts say that Pyongyang will attempt to use the threat of a second nuclear test as a lever to gain concessions from negotiators. The last test in October 2006 was only a partial success according to the assessment of US defence officials.

The signs of increased activity at the Phunggye-ri site in the North Hamgyong province were reported in the South Korean Chosun Ilbo newspaper, quoting unnamed government sources.

South Korean commentators have said that Pyongyang, which has officially pulled out of the six party talks after the UN blacklisted four North Korean companies linked to the arms trade, could be ready to conduct a second test in a matter of weeks.

"Underground nuclear tests are hard to predict and you can't tell when exactly a nuclear test would be possible, but we think the North is ready to conduct a test in a near future if it wants to," the Chosun Ilbo quoted the South Korean government source as saying.

Relations on the Korean peninsular are now at their lowest point for a decade following Pyongyang's missile test last April in defiance of pleas from world leaders and a 2006 UN resolution banning North Korea from conducting ballistic missile tests.

The US called the April launch a "covert" weapons test, however the UN Security Council remained divided over the issue with China and Russia supporting Pyongyang's contention that it was a lawful "satellite" launch.

On Wednesday, the US state department said that the US President Barack Obama had held telephone talks with his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao, at which the US raised "concerns over recent actions by North Korea".

Although China, North Korea's long-standing ally, was slow to condemn Pyongyang over its missile test, Beijing was far less understanding of the previous nuclear test, condemning it as "brazen".