South Korea Plays Down Aid Offer to North

U.S. and South Korean officials yesterday tried to play down recent comments by South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun that Seoul would grant unconditional aid to North Korea to help resolve the nuclear crisis (see GSN, May 11).

“I’m going to make a lot of concessions (to North Korea). … I’m going to provide institutional and material aid without conditions,” Roh said during a visit this week to Mongolia.

His comments, however, were “not a special declaration of change of policy,” a South Korean official said yesterday.

“Our understanding is that there is no change in South Korea’s policy toward the North,” added State Department spokesman Sean McCormack (Nicholas Kralev, Washington Times, May 12).

Meanwhile, the U.N. World Food Program announced plans yesterday to resume food aid to North Korea after the program stopped all work there in December (see GSN, Jan. 17).

The program would seek to feed 1.9 million people, a reduction from the 6 million it targeted last year, and the staff would be reduced to 10, down from 48 last year, said Tony Banbury, the agency’s regional director for Asia.

The reduced staff would still be able to ensure that the food was being delivered to needy mouths and not North Korean soldiers or officials, Banbury said (Edward Cody, Washington Post, May 12).

U.S. officials have expressed concern about aid not reaching its intended target in the past (see GSN, Sept. 16, 2003), and McCormack said yesterday that Washington would not contribute to the effort announced yesterday (Kralev, Washington Times).

U.S.-North Korean relations have deteriorated to such a point that Bush administration officials are primarily seeking to oust North Korea’s leadership instead of finding a diplomatic solution to the nuclear crisis, a U.S. nonproliferation expert said yesterday in Seoul.

“The regime-change crew is in charge now, and they are looking for any new ideas that can effect regime change,” said Jon Wolfsthal, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “If you were advising them, you could suggest anything to effect regime change — calling North Korea bad names, throwing spitballs, anything — and the administration would go out today and buy a spitball machine.”

The outlook for continuing multilateral talks to address the crisis is grim, Wolfsthal said, calling their prospect “a long drawn-out death that we are all obliged to watch” (Philip Dorsey Iglauer, Korea Times, May 12).

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