U.S. Softens Proposal on North Korea

[milmor_1]

We could nearly open up a Forum for this subject alone.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/12/wo...gewanted=print

U.S. Softens Proposal on North Korea
By JOHN O’NEIL and CHOE SANG-HUN

The United Nations Security Council today took up a softened American proposal for sanctions over North Korea’s reported nuclear test, but its prospects were clouded when China appeared to pull back from its earlier support for tough measures.

In Washington, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, met with a senior Chinese diplomat, Tang Jiaxuan, to discuss North Korea, Reuters reported. A spokesman for the National Security Council, Frederick Jones, said the group talked about “the way forward in dealing with North Korea.”

The new American resolution, to be formally introduced this morning, would declare North Korea’s actions to be a threat to international peace and stability and would require countries to freeze assets related to Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs and ban the sale or transfer of materials that could be used in them. It would also ban travel by people involved in the programs and bar the sale of the luxury goods used to reward the regime’s elite, diplomats said late Wednesday.

But unlike an earlier version, it would allow but not require inspections of all cargo going into or out of North Korea, or the freezing of assets related to counterfeiting or narcotics, which American officials say are crucial sources of the hard currency needed to fund the weapons programs. Japanese demands for a ban on allowing North Korean ships or planes to enter other countries were also dropped.

In Beijing today, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry appeared to back away from a statement on Tuesday by the country’s United Nations ambassador expressing support for “punitive” sanctions.

“It’s necessary to express clearly to North Korea that the nuclear test is the wrong practice,” said the spokesman, Liu Jianchao. “As to what measures to take, I think the measures themselves are not punitive action,” he said. “One can say that punishment isn’t the goal.”

In South Korea today, a bitter political dispute erupted over how to respond to the nuclear test. South Korea and China, which provide the North with large amounts of aid and are its only significant trading partners, are the only countries in a position to exert significant financial pressure on Pyongyang.

Without their active participation, sanctions will be limited in their impact, analysts say. But the division at home leaves President Roh Moo Hyun of South Korea without a consensus as he prepares to meet the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, in Beijing on Friday.

After days of squabbling, the South Korean Parliament today passed a resolution condemning North Korea’s nuclear test. But some governing party lawmakers criticized the resolution because it did not mention American “responsibility” for the crisis.

The main opposition Grand National Party was also unhappy; it issued a separate statement demanding an end to two joint projects with the North — the Diamond Mountain tourism project, for which South Korea has provided the North with over $900 million since 1998, and an industrial complex in Kaesong, where South Korean factories produce garments and kitchen utensils with cheap North Korean labor.

At the same time, a top governing party leader in South Korea warned against joining the American-led Proliferation Security Initiative, which aims to intercept North Korean ships suspected of carrying weapons materials.

Seoul’s participation in the initiative “could work as a detonator for a military clash,” the leader, Kim Keun Tae, said at a meeting with cabinet ministers.

And in another sign of a gap between Seoul and Washington, Lee Jong Seok, the South Korean cabinet minister in charge of relations with North Korea, told Parliament today that negotiations, as well as sanctions, were needed because “North Korea is not a country that one can open up with pressure and sanctions alone.”

Seoul’s inability to make a quick decision, which stands in sharp contrast to Japan’s swift ban on imports and ships from North Korea, reflects a divide among South Koreans over how to reconcile their so-called Sunshine Policy of engaging North Korea with the American push for an economic blockade on the North.

A North Korean official warned Japan today that the regime would take “strong countermeasures” if Tokyo went ahead with the tough unilateral sanctions on the North it announced late Wednesday.

”The specific contents will become clear if you keep watching,” Song Il Ho, the North Korean ambassador in charge of relations with Japan, told the Kyodo news agency in Pyongyang. “We never speak empty words.”

North Korea rattled the Japanese in 1998 by firing a missile that flew over Japan and crashed in the Pacific.

In New York on Wednesday, John R. Bolton, America’s ambassador to the United Nations, said that he hoped for a vote on the draft by Friday.

“There are still a lot of comments that have been made and areas of disagreement, but as we have said repeatedly, we think this requires a strong and swift response,” Mr. Bolton said.

The new American draft still invokes Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter. But the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations in New York, Wang Guangya, said on Wednesday that Beijing wanted to restrict the reference to Chapter 7 to its Article 41, which provides for economic penalties, severance of diplomatic relations or the banning of air travel, but not military measures. China also reportedly wants the scope of sanctions to be focused more narrowly.