By Kim Young-jin
The trip to North Korea by a delegation of U.S. officials to assess its food situation would provide a chance for Washington and Seoul to narrow any remaining gaps over Pyongyang’s request for aid, analysts said.
The delegation, led by Robert King, special envoy for North Korean human rights issues, arrived in Pyongyang Tuesday.
The trip comes amid regional efforts to coax the North back to multilateral denuclearization talks. But some have speculated that Washington’s possible resumption of U.S. aid runs the risk of alienating Seoul.
The allies held intensive consultations on the matter earlier this month, necessary because Washington says politics does not factor into its decision on the matter. Seoul ties the resumption of aid to apologies for last year’s two deadly provocations.
Analysts based in Washington said more diplomacy was needed before any resumption of assistance takes place.
“The U.S. cannot look like it is abandoning Lee Myung-bak’s position when he has been such a good ally,” said Victor Cha, Korea chair at U.S.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies “There has to be some face-saving for Lee Myung-bak.”
He added, “The amount of food to be given is not large.”
Such a move could be a nod towards Seoul, which, despite U.N. reports of a dire food shortage, says the situation is not particularly worse than in other years.
Scott Snyder, director of the Center for US-Korea Policy of the Asia Foundation, said more consultation was needed after the U.S. assessment.
“There will be a need to make sure that both governments have the same position. As long as both governments continue to coordinate closely, it does not mean that both must take the same actions in response to the situation,” he said.
Washington officials say the trip does not necessarily mean the resumption of aid, suspended in 2008 over a lack of transparency and the rising prominence of the Pyongyang’s nuclear program.
Accompanying King will be John Brause a deputy assistant administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S. AID).
Cha, a former director for Asian affairs at the White House’s National Security Council, said U.S. AID’s involvement, which negotiated a 2008 agreement allowing for unprecedented access, set the bar for what monitoring should strive for in the future.
“Obama needs to do better than (the 2008 agreement) to make a defensible argument that the food is guaranteed not to be diverted to the military,” he said.
Efforts to coax the North back to bilateral and multilateral dialogue have been thwarted by the two Koreas differing over the Cheonan sinking and Pyongyang’s deadly shelling of Yeonpyeong Island eight months later.