Korea Experts: U.S. Spurned '02 Kim Effort
WASHINGTON - North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, in a previously undisclosed message to President Bush in November 2002, said the United States and North Korea "should be able to resolve the nuclear issue in compliance with the demands of the new century," according to two private U.S. Korea experts who delivered Kim's message to the White House.
"If the United States makes a bold decision, we will respond accordingly," Kim said in a written personal message to Bush that he sent through Donald Gregg, a former U.S. ambassador to South Korea, and Don Oberdorfer, a Korea expert at the School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.
Gregg and Oberdorfer write about their mission to Pyongyang in an opinion piece in Wednesday's editions of The Washington Post.
Kim's offer was conditioned on U.S. recognition of North Korean sovereignty and assurances of non-aggression, Gregg and Oberdorfer wrote.
They said they took the message to White House and State Department officials and urged the administration to follow up on Kim's initiative.
But the administration spurned engagement with Kim who, in response, the authors said, moved within weeks to expel the U.N. inspectors from the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency, withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and reopen plutonium facilities that had been shut down since 1994 under an agreement with the Clinton administration.
Just a month before the November 2002 meeting with Kim, Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly had led a U.S. delegation to North Korea, where they confronted officials with intelligence information suggesting that the regime had secretly embarked on a uranium enrichment program in defiance of pledges in 1994 not to pursue nuclear weapons.
Multilateral efforts to negotiate a dismantling of the North's nuclear facilities since then have not prospered.
As Gregg and Oberdorfer point out, at the time they delivered Kim's message to senior officials in Washington, the administration was deeply immersed in what turned out to be an unsuccessful diplomatic effort in the U.N. Security Council to head off war with Iraq.
U.S. 0fficials were not immediately available for comment on Kim's reported 2002 overture to Washington.
Gregg and Oberdorfer said they see a new opportunity for a breakthrough with North Korea in Kim's conciliatory comments last week in which he raised the possibility of reversing his nuclear program and rejoining the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
They urged that Bush follow up on Kim's overture by communicating directly with him after consultations with Asian partners of the United States in six-party nuclear disarmament talks. |
