Back from the brink, but barely

The Bush administration has backed away from its wildest rhetoric against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and signed an agreement with Pyongyang on the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. But it is already disputing what is in the agreement.

It is no longer personally insulting DRPK leader Kim Jong Il or using terms like “axis of evil” to describe the governments of North Korea, Iraq and Iran. Bush coined that belligerent phrase in his 2002 State of the Union address, back in the days when Washington neo-cons thought they were on a roll and would soon be able to subjugate the DPRK after successfully imposing their will on oil-rich Iraq and Iran.

The DPRK did not buckle before this attempted intimidation. It soon announ ced to the world that it possessed nuclear weapons and would not yield to Wash ington’s threats.

Then came the resistance in Iraq and worldwide condemnation of the U.S. war and occupation there. And now the Bush administration’s problems over its racist handling of the disaster after Hurricane Katrina.

Their hands full for the moment, the beleaguered but still aggressive imperialist strategists in Washington undoubtedly wish that Korea would go away for a while. They may have signed the agreement as a stop-gap measure, and are already backing off from some of their commitments.

The document comes out of six-party talks in which China, Japan, Russia and South Korea have also taken part. The two imperialist countries—the U.S. and Japan —have been putting heavy pressure on the DPRK to not only abandon its nuclear weapons program but to end all efforts at developing its own nuclear power, which is badly needed in this energy-starved far-northern country.

When the talks began, Washington hoped it could line up the other countries against the DPRK. It hasn’t achieved that.

Sentiment in South Korea grows more hostile to the U.S. all the time. On Sept. 11, thousands of demonstrators tried to pull down a statue of Gen. Douglas MacArthur at Inchon, the spot where U.S. forces first landed in Korea at the end of World War II. The statue is a symbol of the continuing U.S. military occupation of the south that has divided the country ever since.

The division is a deeply emotional issue in Korea, where millions of families were torn apart by the U.S. occupation and the 1950-53 war that followed. An overwhelming majority of the people in north and south support reunification, and the two governments have begun a process of allowing some family visits and developing economic cooperation.

Washington is doing everything it can to thwart this process. Since a cease-fire in 1953, it has refused to negotiate a formal end to the Korean War. It then uses the lack of a peace treaty as justification for keeping 32,000 troops in the south.

Statement of DPRK Foreign Ministry

A statement by the DPRK’s Foreign Ministry on Sept. 20 explains its position with regard to the agreement:

“The joint statement reflects our consistent stand on the settlement of the nuclear issue between the DPRK and the U.S. and, at the same time, the commitments of the U.S. and south Korea responsible for denuclearizing the whole of the peninsula.

“As already known, the issue over which the DPRK and the U.S. have had most serious differences in the ‘verbal commitments’ to denuclearize the peninsula so far was the issue of the former’s right to nuclear activity for a peaceful purpose, to be specific, the issue of the U.S. provision of light water reactors (LWR) to the former. ...

“The present U.S. administration, denying in principle the DPRK the right to nuclear activity for a peaceful purpose which pertains to an independent right of a sovereign state, insisted that it could not provide LWRs in any case under the pretext that the DPRK pulled out of the NPT [non-proliferation treaty] and is no longer member of the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency].

“Opposing this wrong stand of the U.S., we made it clear that the basis of finding a solution to the nuclear issue between the DPRK and the U.S. is to wipe out the distrust historically created between the two countries and a physical groundwork for building bilateral confidence is none other than the U.S. provision of LWRs to the DPRK. We strongly demanded that the U.S. remove the very cause that compelled the DPRK to withdraw from the NPT by providing LWRs to it.

“At the talks, all the parties concerned except the U.S. supported the discussion of the issue of respecting the DPRK’s right to nuclear activity for a peaceful purpose and providing LWRs to it.

“This time the U.S. delegation got in touch with Washington several times under the pressure of the trend of the situation and had no option but to withdraw its assertion. The six-parties agreed to take harmonious measures to implement phase by phase the points agreed on in the joint statement in accordance with the principle of ‘action for action’ in the days ahead.

“As clarified in the joint statement, we will return to the NPT and sign the Safeguards Agreement with the IAEA and comply with it immediately upon the U.S. provision of LWRs, a basis of confidence-building, to us.

“As already clarified more than once, we will feel no need to keep even a single nuclear weapon if the DPRK-U.S. relations are normalized, bilateral confidence is built and we are not exposed to the U.S. nuclear threat any longer.”

U.S. reneged before

A similar agreement was reached in 1994, during the Clinton administration, but the promised power plant was never built, leading the DPRK to withdraw from the NPT and go ahead with its nuclear program. Korea has been under the threat of U.S. nuclear weapons for 60 years now.

Washington is now saying that the DPRK has to dismantle everything before new discussions begin, even though the agreement just reached says it will provide security guarantees and economic incentives according to the principle of “commitment for commitment, action for action.”

The Sept. 21 New York Times reported that “The Bush administration on Tuesday brushed off a demand from North Korea for a light-water nuclear reactor, saying that the accord announced Monday in Beijing left it clear that the North must abandon its nuclear weapons program before such a matter can be discussed.”

The DPRK says Washington “should not even dream” that it would dismantle its nuclear program before it receives a new nuclear plant.

Some die-hards in the Bush administration are already criticizing the agreement as giving “too much” to the DPRK. Democrats will undoubtedly claim they could have served imperialism’s interests in Korea more effectively by not concentrating so heavily on Iraq.

One thing is for sure: The struggle will go on to get the U.S. troops out of Korea and end the Pentagon’s threats so the Korean people can build a sovereign, united country.