North Korea Sanctions

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ANALYSIS & FEATURE

WEDNESDAY APRIL 15, 2009

Six-party pullout at direct shot at U.S. From news reports

North Korea apparently was serious in its threat to quit sixnation nuclear disarmament talks and the United States may have to offer direct dialogue to woo it back, analysts say. The North Korean move, they say, appears intended to pressure the Obama administration to start bilateral talks with Pyongyang on a broad range of issues, including missiles, denuclearization and establishment of diplomatic relations. Pyongyang, making good on an earlier vow, announced it would quit the talks and restart its atomic weapons program after the U.N. Security Council condemned its April 5 rocket launch. “It’s quite a serious situation,” said Paik Hak-soon of the Sejong Institute think-tank in South Korea. “The North thinks it has nothing to lose in this stand-off and it will continue building up its nuclear arsenal.” Paik said that Pyongyang is partly to blame for going ahead with the launch and not giving the Obama administration more time to review its North Korea policy. “Washington, for its part, should have sent a clear message that it would change its policy toward Pyongyang,” he said, faulting it for seeking a strong Security Council response to the launch. Kim Yong-hyun, a professor at Seoul’s Dongguk University, said the North is “ratcheting up the stakes” to win maximum concessions from the United States and the international commmunity. “Simply put, North Korea is asking the U.S., ‘Will you leave

North Koreans look at flowers named after state founder Kim Il-sung during an exhibition to commemorate the late leader’s birthday in Reuters-Yonhap News Pyongyang on Monday.

us or negotiate with us?’” Kim said. “From the North Korean perspective, it needs to raise tension as much as possible and drive the situation to the brink before it finally hits back to reverse the tide,” he said. Depending on the response, he said, it may take further action. However, he said the North may accept dialogue if the United States shows signs that

it will meet longstanding demands such as diplomatic recognition. “North Korea may not come back to six-party talks unless the United States and the international community offer greater incentives,” Kim said. Ko Yu-hwan, a professor at the same university, told Yonhap News that the statement was mainly directed at the United States.

Ko said he expects talks between North Korea and the United States at some point to pave the way for resumption of the six-way talks. “It is uncertain which side will begin the initiative.” Professor Yang Moo-jin of the University of North Korean Studies said the comments are some of the strongest he has ever seen from Pyongyang. “The statement says the

North is now moving to actions. It’s crucial for the United States, its allies and China to react wisely in order to control the situation.” While the North is pressing for direct negotiations with the United States, the six-party disarmament talks are likely to survive, according to Baek Seung-joo of the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses. “North Korea is complaining

about the unfavorable situation with the six-party dialogue, not the six-party dialogue itself,” Baek said. The North insists it put a peaceful satellite into orbit while the United States and its allies saw a disguised missile test in violation of a U.N. resolution. Yoo Ho-yeol, a North Korea studies professor at Korea University, said North Korea’s brinkmanship was reminiscent of its withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, an international accord meant to curb the spread of nuclear technology, in 1993. The following year, Pyongyang reached a bilateral deal with Washington to receive two light-water reactors in exchange for freezing its nuclear activities. The construction project, which cost South Korea billions of dollars, collapsed in late 2002 when Washington accused Pyongyang of running a secret uranium enrichment program. The fresh nuclear standoff led to the current six-party talks. “North Korea’s view has been that bilateral dialogue with the United States is more effective than the six-party talks in getting a deal, and it now wants another direct bargain,” Yoo said. Chosun Ilbo newspaper reported that Korean diplomats are grumbling at the low profile of Stephen Bosworth, the U.S. special envoy on North Korea, and the Sejong Institute’s Paik urged him to be more engaged. “Bosworth is working like a part-timer on the North Korean issue,” he said, adding that the envoy had been conspicuous by his absence in the run-up to the launch.

Little leverage left for N.K. sanctions BEIJING (Reuters) — Strengthened sanctions are unlikely to dent North Korea’s trade with benefactor China, but the global slowdown is taking its own toll on the isolated North, which said on Tuesday it will abandon nuclear talks. North Korea’s announcement that it will abandon the “useless” six-party disarmament talks and restart a nuclear plant followed the U.N. Security Council’s condemnation on Monday of its rocket launch nearly two weeks ago. The security council demanded enforcement of existing sanctions. Lower commodity prices may prove more painful to North Korea than the tightened sanctions, which will likely blacklist certain firms known to deal in military goods. “Sanctions won’t have a big effect, they won’t change their actions,” said Shi Jinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing. “There will be no impact on trade with China, which is mostly grains and basic materials ... Sanctions may have some influence on luxury goods,

but only a weak effect on overall trade volume.” The isolated country’s $2 billion annual trade with China, equal to about 10 percent of the North’s annual GDP, is its most important economic relationship. China repeatedly urged restraint as North Korea prepared its rocket launch. But it was reluctant to take a harder stand for fear of losing influence in Pyongyang and due to worries about the major political and economic risks if North Korea collapsed. Trade between the two countries has slipped in recent months, as a plunge in metals prices closed one of North Korea’s few channels of export revenues. The value of trade between the two countries dropped 3 percent in the first two months of 2009. North Korea profited from strong prices for minerals and ores over the last few years, ramping up exports of zinc, lead and iron ore to resource-hungry China. Most of those exports have dropped again since last summer, in line with sharp decreas-

es in metals prices buffeted by the global economic crisis. The North’s mineral deposits could be worth $2 trillion, according to an estimate by the South’s Korea Resources Corporation. But dilapidated infrastructure and a broken power grid hinder mining and the transport of minerals out of the country. The irregular pattern of North Korea’s alumina imports implies that its smelter only runs in fits and starts. Other ore exports are equally ragged, possibly indicating that North Koreans are only digging the easily accessible ores. Chinese companies that have tried to invest in North Korean mines complain of constant changes in regulations and report that the North tries to tie mining access to commitments to build mills and other industrial projects. “China and North Korea are friendly neighbors and we will continue to develop friendly cooperative relations with North Korea,” Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said on Tuesday after the

North’s withdrawal from the six-party talks. Diplomats’ expectations that China might use trade to influence its prickly neighbor rose when China cut off crude oil shipments in September of 2006, as North Korea prepared to test a nuclear bomb. It had tested ballistic missiles that July. In fact, energy trade data shows that China is reluctant to apply trade pressure. Increased oil products shipments offset the brief cut in crude supplies in 2006. “The imposition of these sanctions (in 2006) has had no perceptible effect on North Korea’s trade with the country’s two largest partners, China and South Korea,” wrote Marcus Noland, of the Washingtonbased Peterson Institute for International Economics. Data since early 2006 show that Chinese crude shipments have in fact been overwhelmingly consistent, at 50,000 tons a month. But imports of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), normally used as a cooking fuel in Asia, have plummeted since August 2007.

A Chinese paramilitary police officer stands outside the North AP-Yonhap News Korean Embassy in Beijing on Tuesday.

Why such soft sanctions? Is a smile the smartest sanction? By Chris Williams

The slow and seemingly soft response of the U.N. Security Council to the North Korean rocket launch attracted predictable criticism, aimed mainly at China and Russia. But are there other underlying reasons why the U.N. opted for a soft approach to sanctions, and are there other options? The last time the U.N. deployed significant sanctions against a seemingly missilecareless regime has been erased from public memory by subsequent events. The period was the 1990s, and the country Iraq. Ten years of sanctions eventually drew condemnation from UNICEF and others around the world, because it was claimed that they harmed innocent people, not the regime they aimed to depose. It was estimated that the measures led to the death of 4,000-5,000 children each month. In 1998, a highly experienced and respected U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, Denis Halliday, resigned talking of the “damage and futility which strengthens the leadership and further weakens the people”, and claiming that the action

was contrary to the U.N. Charter and Human Rights Conventions. He believed that not only were children harmed, but sanctions also increased family breakdown, divorce, crime, prostitution and brain drain. The then U.S. secretary of state, Madeline Albright, was not applauded for responding that “we think the price is worth it.” The judgment of history is that the justification for the Iraq invasion and therefore, we tend to overlook, also the sanctions, was unsound. Politicians may have forgotten this episode, but U.N. staff probably have not. It is unlikely that they would want to get into this situation a second time. In 1996, Juan Somavia, now director general of the ILO, had already made the point more formally at a Security Council meeting. “Most of the sanctioned countries are authoritarian regimes that don’t give a damn about what people think. The whole notion of sanctions affecting people in order to affect the leadership is invalidated. So, we must make a distinction between generalized sanctions that affect the people more than

the leadership and targeted sanctions that affect the leadership more than the people. Sanctions must be efficient. They must affect the conduct of those who took the decisions which led to condemnation by the international community, not the conduct of those who had no part in it. Targeting leadership is crucial, because the leaders do not care about the fate of their own people.” But what are the options for smart sanctions? Very few, it seems, when a country has insulated itself from most of the global systems and institutions. It might be hoped that North Korean elites are following events in Cambodia, and realizing that leadership accountability is globalizing and that miscreants who thought that they would evade accountability now find themselves facing an international court decades after their misdeeds. In fact, they need look no further than the history books in South Korea to see photos of the humiliated former presidents Roh Tae-woo and Chun Doo-hwan holding hands in the dock as they are sentenced on corruption and treason charges, in 1996. In her new book, “Educating

Against Extremism,” Lynn Davies assesses the spectrum of strategies, and highlights one that we often overlook, “lightness of touch.” Humor has a long history of addressing despotism, and this is well-recognized. In the apartheid era of South Africa political cartoons became illegal, even if drawn by children. In the Philippines, Estrada’s downfall in 2001 was precipitated by texting jokes about him. There seems to be something intrinsically moral about political humor. It is easy to get a laugh at the expense of Hitler’s moustache, as Charlie Chaplain proved. But it would be hard to get the same response about Gandhi’s facial hair. Anthropologists have often analyzed how derision against those who offend social norms has been an effective soft sanction in most cultures around the world. But it must ridicule behavior that can be changed, not personal characteristics that cannot. Of course, the efficacy of humor too seems limited in the case of North Korea. Satire normally depends on amusing and building solidarity among a wronged population. But first people need to hear and under-

stand the joke, and that seems unlikely. There are websites with North Korea jokes, such as about.com. Last year the Daily NK reported of Kim Jong-il jokes circulating on Chinese blogs. Of a painting of Adam and Eve, it was asked: Are they English, because the gentleman is sharing his only apple with a lady? Are they French because they are walking around in the nude? No, they are North Korean because they have no clothes and no food but think they are living in paradise. There is a small possibility that political elites in North Korea might sometimes see how they are ridiculed by the outside world, but their reaction to derision is likely to be anger rather than self-reflection. If there were any counter-movements within these cadres, a joke might help to fuel their cause, but again the scope seems limited. A few Korean leaders might feel that they would like to preserve their dignity among the neighboring elites who they occasionally meet, and not be Googlable figures of fun among their families and descendants in the future. They might remember that Korea has a very

interesting tradition of leadership accountability, through the historians who had the power to name a King after Death. Better to be Sejong the Great, than Kim the Clown. But the role of humor in building solidarity against abuses of power now has a global aspect. This week my East Asian students are asking, “Who is the most famous Japanese political leader?” Answer, “President Fujimori.” They are becoming restless about the leadership created by their political system. In Iran the joke is that President Ahmadinajad was planted there by the CIA, to make George Bush appear intelligent. American Iranians tell a similar story, but the other way around. Paradoxical humor can potentially be as destabilizing as obvious propaganda. The idea that Kim Jong-il could be supported by the CIA to give America an excuse for a presence in East Asia may seem farfetched. But recall that apparently in the 1950s and 1960s the CIA covertly funded radical artists, such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, to present the United States as an open liberal society in contrast to the Soviet Union.

Reactions from six-party talks participants From news reports

Members of the six-party talks yesterday reprimanded Pyongyang for defying global pressure and going ahead with its rocket launch. Japan on Tuesday said it strongly urged North Korea to return to the talks, hours after the communist regime said it would pull out of the process. “We strongly urge North Korea to return to the six-party talks and fulfill resolution 1718,” said Chief Cabinet Secretary Takeo Kawamura after Pyongyang announced it would also strengthen its nuclear deterrent and reopen nuclear plants. U.N. Security Council resolution 1718 — adopted in 2006 after Pyongyang’s missile and nuclear tests — demanded that the isolated regime refrain from further nuclear or ballistic missile tests. Russia voiced “regret” Tuesday over North Korea’s decision to pull out of six-nation nuclear disarmament talks and urged the Communist state to renew negotiations, the foreign ministry said. “Russia regrets that in response to the lawful and balanced reaction of the U.N. Security Council, Pyongyang has announced its withdrawal from six-party negotiations and the renewal of its nuclear program,” the ministry said. Russia — a permanent U.N. Security Council member and participant in the six-nation talks along with China, Japan, the United States and South Korea — urged Pyongyang “to return to the negotiating table.” “We urge North Korea to observe the UN resolution ... and return to the negotiating table in interests of the disarmament of the Korean peninsula,” the statement posted on ministry’s website said. “For its part Russia is ready to use every possible means to promote this goal,” it added. China called on North Korea Tuesday to remain in six-nation nuclear disarmament talks, after Pyongyang said it would abandon the process in protest at U.N. condemnation of its rocket launch. “The Chinese side hopes all sides will ... continue to advance and push forward the six-party talks and the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula,” foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told reporters. China is host of the talks and the North’s closest political ally, but it backed a U.N. Security Council statement released on Monday condemning the April 5 rocket launch. The statement also agreed to tighten sanctions against North Korea, which were mandated in a U.N. resolution passed after Pyongyang’s 2006 missile and nuclear tests but not enforced amid hopes of progress in denuclearisation. North Korea responded Tuesday by saying it would restart its atomic weapons program as well as abandoning the six-nation talks, which began in 2003 but have been stalled since late last year. It would certainly be interesting to see who would laugh longest if we found out that Kim’s Hollywood movies had really come in CIA wrapping paper. Maybe humor is pointless in the case of the North Korean regime. But whoever has the last laugh, the risk of North Korean elites not getting the joke seems less problematic than the risk of North Korean children not getting food. Watching the video of Kim Jong-il’s recent return to public life at the Supreme People’s Assembly reminds us that he probably does not employ press officers to warn of media mannerisms that might enhance the cartoonist’s armory. He also reminded me of my favorite Korean friend. The North Korean leader looked shy and bemused by the standing ovation, and he started to clap back. Perhaps he can be forgiven, aged sixty-seven. When others applaud him, my apparently precocious little Korean friend also looks shy and bemused and claps back. And he is not yet two. Chris Williams is based at the Center for International Education and Research, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. He can be reached at [email protected] — Ed.