North Korean officials believe the Libyan regime would not have collapsed had it held on to its nuclear weapons, the outgoing British ambassador to Pyongyang said Wednesday, casting doubts on the likelihood that the North will relinquish its nuclear capabilities.
The remarks by Ambassador Peter Hughes came as South Korea and the United States have been holding a rare series of talks with the North on a possible resumption of the long-stalled six-party denuclearization process.
Since late July, Seoul and Washington officials have held three rounds of bilateral talks with their North Korean counterparts to prod the North to take concrete steps toward denuclearization. If Pyongyang accepts preconditions, including a halt to all nuclear weapons activities and a moratorium on nuclear and missile testing, South Korea and the U.S. have said they will resume the six-party talks, which offer economic and political aid to the North in exchange for its denuclearization.
North Korea quit the six-way forum in April 2009 in protest of U.N. and international sanctions over nuclear and missile tests. The Pyongyang regime, however, has recently started to push for the unconditional resumption of the talks, which also involve China, Japan and Russia.
"I have had discussions with high-level officials, who have made clear to me their view that if Colonel Gadhafi had not given up his nuclear weapons, then NATO would not have attacked his country," Hughes said, referring to the toppled Libyan dictator, Moammar Gadhafi, who ruled his country with an iron fist for 42 years.
The ambassador was speaking at a panel discussion in Seoul hosted by the Kwanhun Club, a fraternity of senior Korean journalists. He was briefly visiting South Korea on his way home to Britain after recently completing a three-year tenure in Pyongyang.
On the prospects of North Korea's own denuclearization, the envoy was highly pessimistic.
"The North Korean regime has made very clear that their overriding policy is total denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula," he said. "You have to look behind that to find out what it means. It basically means in real terms that there would have to be total denuclearization of the world before they will give up their nuclear weapons."
Defying international calls for its denuclearization, North Korea revealed a uranium enrichment facility last November in a possible indication of a second way to build atomic bombs, in addition to its known plutonium-based program.
Hughes ruled out any possibility of a Libyan-style revolt in North Korea, saying the authorities tightly control any flow of information within and across the borders.
"There is no civil society, there's no center of dissent, there's no intellectual grouping, there's no way of actually communicating outside of the mobile phone," he said.
"In terms of collective action, there is also a very repressive and tight security regime. Travel is almost impossible without permission, even from one village to the next. So we cannot see a circumstance in which it will be possible to generate a collective action."
The ambassador also described a pervading sense of secrecy in the communist nation. Even now, one year after North Korean leader Kim Jong-il appointed his third son, Jong-un, to high-level political and military posts, no one will confirm the younger Kim's likely future as successor, Hughes said.
"It has become a habit at national events to propose a toast to the health of Kim Jong-il and the young general, Kim Jong-un," he said. "If you ask officials afterwards who this young General Kim Jong-un is, they will say he's General Kim Jong-un. They will not say he's the successor or he's going to replace Kim Jong-il. That is not an issue for discussion."
North Korea is widely reported to be preparing for a back-to-back hereditary power transfer to Kim Jong-un, who was first revealed to the public last September as a four-star general and a vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission of the ruling Workers' Party. The elder Kim inherited power from his father, the country's founder Kim Il-sung, who died in 1994.
"In terms of atmosphere, we have felt no concern amongst the people. I can only say that there is not, as far as we can tell, universal support for this process," Hughes said. (Yonhap)
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