Looks like North Korea is for Kerry--or is it the NYT: With an eye on U.S. vote, North Korea rails at Bush
James Brooke/NYT NYT
Tuesday, August 24, 2004
iht.com
SEOUL North Korea called President George W. Bush an imbecile and a tyrant who puts Hitler in the shade, unleashing a stream of insults Monday that seemed to rule out any serious progress on nuclear disarmament talks before the American elections in November.
"The meeting of the working group for the six-party talks cannot be opened because the U.S. has become more undisguised in pursuing its hostile policy toward North Korea," a spokesman for North Korea's Foreign Ministry told the country's state-controlled news agency.
A new round of talks was to be held in Beijing in September or October, as North Korea's neighbors and the United States seek to persuade North Korea to stop manufacturing nuclear weapons.
The tirade Monday was apparently in response to a campaign remark last week by Bush, who referred to Kim Jong Il, North Korea's leader, as a "tyrant."
Some South Korean analysts, often optimists on Pyongyang's behavior, said North Korea was following a standard negotiating tactic of ratcheting up the rhetoric before settling down for real talks.
"North Korea has made an ultrastrong statement right before a very important set of negotiations. It is their typical tactic," said Yun Duk Min, a professor at the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security in Seoul.
But other analysts of North Korea have said in recent days that Pyongyang was waiting to see who it would have to deal with in January: Bush or the Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry.
"The negotiating process is stalled. It is clear they have just refused to participate in talks before the American presidential election," said Alexander Losyukov, who was Russia's negotiator at the talks until this past spring and is now Russia's ambassador to Japan. He added in an interview last week: "There are expectations in Pyongyang of a change in American policy. Probably they are wrong." Kerry has indicated that if elected president, he would pursue direct bilateral talks with North Korea within the existing six-country framework of the United States, North Korea, South Korea, China, Japan and Russia. However, he has sharply criticized Bush for promising to pull out one-third of the 36,000 American troops in South Korea without winning any reciprocal military concession from Pyongyang.
"The North Koreans made it very clear, politely, that they want Mr. Kerry to win the election," said Kenneth Quinones, a former U.S. diplomat who was in Pyongyang this month for a Korean studies conference.
"North Koreans are going to play wait-and-see," Quinones added in an interview in Tokyo. The six-party talks have stabilized the situation, said Quinones, who worked on talks in 1994 that led to the first nuclear-control accord with North Korea. "But the process will require the U.S. to sit down with the North Koreans in a smoke-filled room for three months and bring out an agreement," he said. In Pyongyang, official irritation with the United States has increased with the passage last month by the House of Representatives of the North Korean Human Rights Act, a bill that seeks to support North Korean refugees in China.
Increasingly nervous over the defector issue, North Korea has criticized South Korea for taking 460 North Korean refugees to Seoul last month.
"If anything, the anti-American, anti-Japanese rhetoric has intensified," Quinones said.
In the tirade Monday, Pyongyang's diplomatic spokesman called Bush "an idiot, an ignorant, a tyrant and a man-killer."
"Bush's assumption of office turned a peaceful world into a pandemonium unprecedented in history, as it is plagued with a vicious circle of terrorism and war," the statement continued. "The president's aides and allies are a typical gang of political gangsters."
The spokesman concluded that the U.S. president was "a bad guy."
North Korean nervousness is expected to rise in late October, when warships from the United States, Japan and other allied nations are to conduct joint exercises in the Sea of Japan.
The maneuvers will be held under the banner of the Proliferation Security Initiative, a program designed to block illicit cargoes from an unnamed country.
Previous training has taken place in locations distant from North Korea, like the Coral Sea off the coast of Australia.
To calm nerves on the peninsula, South Korea's top nuclear negotiator is to visit China and Japan this week. Hoping to break the deadlock on setting up a round of working-level, preparatory talks on North Korea's nuclear program, Deputy Foreign Minister Lee Soo Hyuck will fly to Beijing Tuesday for talks with his Chinese counterpart, Vice Foreign Minister Wu Dawei.
On Friday, Lee will visit Tokyo for talks with his Japanese counterpart, Mitoji Yabunaka.
Japan does not have relations with North Korea and therefore has minimal leverage with Pyongyang. China, a major source of food and fuel for North Korea, may not want to lean on Pyongyang until after the U.S. elections. North Koreans often bridle at Chinese pressure.
The New York Times
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