North Korea digs in (page 2)
Meanwhile, relations with South Korea are at a nadir. After taking office in February, conservative South Korean President Lee Myung Bak ordered reconsideration of the economic aid agreements that his predecessors signed with the North in 2000 and 2007. Largesse, he said, should require North Korean reciprocity.
More recently, South Korean civic groups have been sending balloons to North Korea loaded with propaganda leaflets, including news about Kim Jong Il's health. In response, Pyongyang closed most cross-border traffic from 1 December, including a daily train service and tours from South Korea. On the same day, North Korea cut from 4,200 to 880 the number of South Koreans permitted to stay at the joint Kaesong industrial park on the north-south border – while still keeping open the South Korean factories there that employ 33,000 North Koreans.
Verification issue
The crisis over its nuclear programme – the crux of all North Korea's external relations, particularly with the United States – also took a turn for the worse from mid August, over implementation of the February 2007 agreement. The core of the issue is how to verify the 'complete and correct declaration of all nuclear programs' that North Korea was obliged to provide, along with disablement of all existing nuclear facilities, in exchange for fuel-oil assistance and Washington's removal of North Korea from the US state sponsors of terrorism list and Trading with the Enemy Act.
On 12 August, the George W. Bush administration postponed these measures because North Korea had rejected the onerous verification measures that Washington proposed in July. These included 'full access upon request to any site, facility, or location', whether or not it was in the North Korean declaration. Washington's refusal to remove North Korea from the terrorism list in turn led Pyongyang to begin to reverse the steps it hadbeen taking to disable its nuclear facilities.
To patch over the crisis, US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia Christopher Hill visited Pyongyang in early October with a less intrusive verification proposal, to which he said North Korea verbally agreed. On the basis of this verbal agreement, the US completed the action to remove North Korea from the terrorism list and the Trading with the Enemy Act on 11 October. This action was mostly symbolic, because a score of other sanctions measures restrict many areas of trade and financial dealings with North Korea.
The revised verification measures included the key conditions of facility visits, environmental sampling, document inspection and personnel interviews. The scope was limited to the facilities North Korea had declared at its plutonium-production complex at Yongbyon. Visits elsewhere to undeclared sites, such as weapons laboratories, the country's nuclear-test site or any facilities connected to an alleged uranium-enrichment programme, would require mutual consent. Pyongyang has not acknowledged uranium enrichment or assistance to Syria's nuclear programme. However, in a confidential side letter to its June declaration, it acknowledged US concerns about these activities and said it was not engaged in them in the present and would not in the future.
The verification issue has not yet been resolved, however. Throughout November, North Korea insisted that it never agreed to the collection of samples, although this is vital to verifying the accuracy of its plutonium declaration. (Not publicly released, this is reported to be 30 kilograms of separated plutonium, which is at the low end of the range of 28–50kg estimated in December 2007 by the Institute for Science and International Security). Analysis of nuclear samples from Yongbyon might also confirm IAEA suspicions that uranium particles found at the bombed al-Kibar site in Syria were from North Korean fuel rods. This might be one reason North Korea has baulked at allowing samples.
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