North Korea Dismisses U.S. Assurance Offer as “Laughable”

North Korea yesterday rejected U.S. President George W. Bush’s recent offer of a multilateral security assurance and again demanded a direct guarantee that Washington would not attack pre-emptively (see GSN, Oct. 21).

The U.S. plan is “laughable and doesn’t deserve even any consideration,” said a commentary from the Korean Central News Agency, the state-run information outlet.

“We have asked for the United States to stop its hostile policy and [for] a bilateral treaty between North Korea and the United States, and not for some sort of security guarantee,” the statement said.

Responding to the statement, Bush said he would “stay the course” and maintain the new U.S. strategy.

“I guess they’re trying to stand up to the five nations that are now uniting in convincing North Korea to disarm and my only reaction is we’ll continue to send a very clear message to the North Koreans,” Bush said yesterday during a visit to Indonesian island of Bali (Nesirsky/Kyoung-wha, Reuters, Oct. 22).

The U.S. offer still lacks important details that Washington plans to work out with North Korea’s neighbors — China, Japan, Russia and South Korea. Of  particular importance is the form the multilateral assurance will take.

The Bush administration has steadfastly refused to consider a bilateral treaty with North Korea, largely because it distrusts Pyongyang, but also because conservatives in the U.S. Congress would then be granted the power to reject the pact, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Instead the administration is considering two previous agreements as possible models that would not require congressional approval.

The first is a 1981 agreement signed with Algeria as part of the deal to free U.S. hostages in Iran. At the time, Iran refused to negotiate with the United States directly and used Algeria as an intermediary. In the eventual agreement, the United States promised Algeria that it would unfreeze Iranian assets and “not intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran’s internal affairs.”

“If the North Koreans get a security guarantee signed by the U.S. but guaranteed by China, that would add a considerable measure of credibility,” said Gary Sick, a former national security council official who worked on the Iranian hostage deal.

The second model is the 1994 multilateral security assurance offered to Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine to persuade them to transfer to Russia the nuclear weapons they inherited from the fallen Soviet Union.

Under that agreement, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States promised not to attack the three nations or to exercise “economic coercion” against them.

The assurance also promised that the nuclear powers would seek U.N. assistance if any of the three soon-to-be non-nuclear states were threatened with nuclear weapons, but stopped short of promising to defend them if they were threatened or attacked by Russia.

“It was an assurance, not a guarantee,” said Tufts University professor Robert Pfaltzgraff.

“We’ve given (security) assurances in a variety of ways in the past, and we’ve done this with regard to allies, but we haven’t done it with enemies,” he said.

Another unresolved detail in the U.S. offer is what would be demanded of North Korea for it to receive the security assurance.

The United States would almost certainly demand that North Korea rejoin the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and accept intrusive inspections, according to the Times.

Some Bush administration officials are also recommending that Pyongyang should renounce its suspected chemical and biological weapons capabilities as well, but others have argued that such demands would kill any deal (Sonni Efron, Los Angeles Times, Oct. 22).

Meanwhile, a U.S. congressional delegation is scheduled to visit North Korea next week, group leader Representative Curt Weldon (R-Pa) announced yesterday. Weldon led another delegation to Pyongyang earlier this year (see GSN, June 30).

Weldon said the bipartisan U.S. House delegation would try to put a “human face” on U.S.-North Korean relations.

“I’m not there to negotiate. We’re there to simply explore ideas,” he said.

Weldon said the group would try to visit North Korea’s nuclear complex at Yongbyon (Ken Guggenheim, Associated Press/San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 22).

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