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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: FaultLine who wrote (56898)	11/13/2002 6:17:16 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 281500

Important decision being made about North Korea. I got it from "Reuters" Via "The Zealand Herald" Newspaper. I then did a search of the NYT and found a better written version November 12, 2002 Crunch Time Approaching on Oil for Nuclear N.Korea By REUTERS Filed at 0:27 a.m. ET SEOUL (Reuters) - The top U.S. envoy on North Korea departed South Korea for China Tuesday, leaving unresolved differences between Washington and Seoul about how to respond to communist North Korea's nuclear arms program. World attention is focused on Iraq's looming deadline for complying with a U.N. resolution on arms inspections, but crunch time is also approaching for efforts to disarm North Korea, a second member of President Bush's ``axis of evil.'' With a tanker of fuel oil headed to North Korea and a pivotal allied meeting opening in New York Thursday, a Seoul official said South Korea and the United States were apart on whether to continue supplying North Korea with energy aid under a 1994 agreement which North Korea's new arms program has violated. ``There are still differences between the U.S. and South Korean governments over whether to allow the oil shipment,'' an official at South Korea's presidential Blue House told Reuters, requesting anonymity. ``South Korea's position is that the current shipment should go ahead and then we'll decide, based on North Korea's reaction,'' the official said after the visit by U.S. envoy James Kelly. South Korean President Kim Dae-jung has made his ``Sunshine Policy'' of engaging the North one of the hallmarks of his single five-year term, which ends in February after an election for his successor next month. Kelly, who flew to China Tuesday, made no public remarks in Seoul. A Bush administration official said the United States was still consulting South Korea and Japan on the fuel-oil shipment. KEDO DECISION LOOMS The stated position of the three allied governments is the issue will be resolved at an executive board meeting of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO) to open Thursday in New York. The meeting will be attended by U.S., Japanese, South Korean and European Union officials. KEDO is implementing the 1994 Agreed Framework, under which North Korea agreed to freeze its nuclear program in exchange for 500,000 tons of fuel oil a year and two light-water reactors that cannot easily be converted to produce weapons material. Washington, which funds the oil supplies while allies finance the reactors, has not announced a decision on the oil shipments. ``There is still time to deal with North Korean fuel shipments should KEDO decide to do it. KEDO is looking at the case. I don't want to get ahead of the diplomacy here because we're talking to KEDO about it,'' said the senior Bush administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity. But there are some U.S. voices calling for turning back the latest shipment of fuel oil that left Singapore on November 6 for the 10-12 day voyage to North Korea. The KEDO executive board can recall the vessel while it is at sea, diplomats have said. Kelly has said on several occasions the disclosure about North Korea's nuclear arms scheme has sapped support in the U.S. Congress for funding next year's fuel-oil aid. Some EU lawmakers have called for freezing Europe's KEDO contribution. ``EXTREME SCENARIO'' Chang Sun-sup, the South Korean executive member of KEDO, was quoted by a newspaper as playing down differences over the oil. ``Turning around the ship loaded with oil already on its way to the North is an extreme scenario,'' the Korea Times quoted Chang as saying Monday before leaving for New York. The foreign ministers of South Korea and Japan, which are within range of North Korean ballistic missiles, met in Seoul Monday and later issued a statement underscoring their shared fear that halting the oil supplies would provoke Pyongyang. Japanese Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi and South Korean Foreign Minister Choi Sung-hong agreed KEDO was important and effective and the issue ``should not be decided in a hasty way'' a Japanese official said. North Korea's stance, restated almost daily by its state media, is that resolving the nuclear issue will require Washington to negotiate a non-aggression pact with Pyongyang and guarantee the sovereignty of Kim Jong-il's communist rule. The United States has said there is nothing to talk about until North Korea has verifiably abandoned a uranium enrichment program it said last month it was running.