By Kim Young-jin
It has become a mantra among North Korea watchers: Pyongyang, focused on survival, is quite unlikely to relinquish its nuclear weapons program that is its main bargaining chip and method of deterrence.
Such pessimism raises the question: If denuclearization is but a distant hope, why all the fuss to resume the long-stalled six-party negotiations on the North’s program?
Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly, who served as the George W. Bush administration’s chief negotiator with Pyongyang, has a simple answer ― it is the process that matters most.
“This process of testing assumptions that are currently believed through the vehicle of the six-party talks is worthwhile,” Kelly told The Korea Times on the sidelines of a security forum in Seoul.
“For example, with the assumption that denuclearization is highly unlikely, it is essential that we always be asking, ‘Is this still true?’ It might change at some time.”
Kelly knows the process perhaps as intimately as anyone, having led the talks that spawned the six-party framework in 2003 amid the second North Korean crisis. The talks fell apart in 2009 when the North left, indignant over international sanctions for its missile and nuclear tests.
Momentum has picked up recently to resuscitate the talks in the wake of two recent rounds of inter-Korean denuclearization talks and one between Pyongyang and Washington. The forum also includes Japan, Russia and China.
The sides appear far apart on how to resume, with Seoul and Washington insisting on verifiable denuclearization steps first while Pyongyang rejects all preconditions.
But most experts, including Kelly, believe the players have enough at stake to return to the negotiating table.
“This (the talks) gives all of them a chance to at least update their knowledge,” he said.
Among the benefits of resumption is that Seoul is kept in the loop in relation to the North’s agenda, the retired diplomat said. Before the talks were established, Pyongyang long favored direct negotiations with Washington, a situation Kelly called “fundamentally unsound.”
Another bright point is the ability to pressure Pyongyang by harnessing what Kelly calls the “difficulty it has in its complex relationship with China.”
Beijing, which provides food and fuel to the North and represents the vast majority of its trade relations, has been pushing Pyongyang to rejoin in a bid to maintain stability in the economically-vibrant region.
“Because China favors the six-party talks, and North Korea is dependent for so many things on China, it puts them in a difficult position inherently. So complicating the life of North Korea is one of the effects of the six-party talks.”
Much has transpired since the last the time the talks took place. Last year, it raised the stakes by waging two deadly attacks on the South and finally revealing the uranium-enrichment program that it admitted to Kelly in 2002.
He said players should keep an open mind and that past agreements could be used as starting points for negotiation.
“You go there with a serious purpose to listen to what the North Koreans say, listen to what the Chinese say, see what North Korea says publically and privately…and see where you go from there,” he said.
The perception that the North exploits the process to extract aid has come into focus since the second nuclear crisis. Kelly said this could make it much more difficult to “sell modest parts of the program.”
On the North’s internal situation, the former official said the Stalinist state was “fundamentally unstable” due to increasing skepticism among citizens toward the system caused by an increasing flow of information penetrating its borders.
Circumventing reported crackdowns along the Chinese border, North Koreans are said to be receiving more news from the outside through word-of-mouth from traders and foreign DVDs. They can also speak with relatives in China via Chinese cell phones.
“I think most North Koreans now know that at least from their viewpoint that China is rich and South Korea is rich and they are poor. There is a much better sense that their conditions are because that’s the will of their government, not some outside force,” he said.
“And this constant need for food and fuel and money from outside puts a lot of pressure on the situation.”
While it was difficult to predict any imminent instability, Kelly believes South Koreans and others should be preparing for such a moment. “I don’t think this is a system that can persist indefinitely,” he said.