North Korean refugees have left Canadian embassy in China

by - Fri Feb 11, 2005 12:16

China has been shepherding 6 party talks for nearly two years.

China, South Korea and Germany joined calls from the United States and around the world for Pyongyang to resume negotiations.

Standing right in the firing line is South Korea, under constant threat from a neighbour that keeps 70 percent of its 1.2-million-strong army along a border that passes just 65 km (40 miles) north of the capital, Seoul.

"The assessment is that North Korea may be trying to raise its negotiating stakes," Vice Foreign Minister Lee Tae-shik was quoted as saying on Friday. "But it could turn into a very serious problem if the North takes additional steps."

North Korea's Foreign Ministry said on Thursday the state had been forced to boost its defences and to acquire nuclear weapons to contend with U.S. hostility and the policy of the Bush administration to seek regime change.

It pulled out of the six-way talks, which also involve the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea, but left the door open a crack to a possible resumption of negotiations.

South Korean officials swiftly joined their U.S. counterparts in saying talks were the only solution to end the North's isolation.
They said the news only confirmed what was already known about the North's nuclear ambitions.

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said his nation, which experts say lies in range of North Korean missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads, will use the power of persuasion.

"We are going to persuade North Korea by presenting it with a case that its interests are best served by dismantling its nuclear programmes," Koizumi told reporters.

South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon, in Washington on Thursday, said the South could not tolerate the North possessing nuclear weapons.

PRESSURE, MEDIATION

China, one of North Korea's few friends and the country that exercises the most influence there, issued a brief response that it hoped talks would continue and was watching developments.

Australia, one of the few Western countries to have official ties with the North, tried to mediate.

Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said he had spoken with North Korean Ambassador Chon Jae Hong and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and hoped the climate for talks would improve.

"I took some encouragement from the fact that although (Chon) thought the climate wasn't right at the moment, that implied that matters could change and the climate could be better," he said.

Some analysts said North Korea might be raising the stakes while U.S. attention was focused on Iran's nuclear programmes in order to obtain better terms. North Korea has engaged in brinkmanship in the past at crucial diplomatic junctures.

"We don't see a serious alternative to the six-party talks," said Germany Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer on a visit to tsunami-hit Aceh in Indonesia. "We appeal to North Korea that they should go back to the negotiating table."

Three rounds of six-party talks have been held since August 2003 but a fourth failed to take place last September when North Korea refused to show up.

Bush has backed a diplomatic solution to the crisis but now faces two nations he once named as part of an "axis of evil" being defiant about their nuclear programmes -- North Korea and Iran. He went to war with Iraq, the third "axis" nation.

North Korea sent a message of solidarity to Iran late on Thursday on the 26th anniversary of the Islamic Republic to praise its success in working to defend its sovereignty, a move almost certainly intended to further enrage the United States.

Analysts warned, however, that such brinkmanship could have dangerous consequences and Seoul should not
underestimate the danger.

"North Korea's rejection of dialogue is the worst possible choice. The North's Foreign Ministry statement has changed the nature of the nuclear issue," the South's conservative Dong-A Ilbo newspaper said in one of several strongly worded editorials.

"North Korea may be thinking that it can control the nuclear issue. That would be a gross mistake," it said.

UNAMBIGUOUS

Ralph Cossa, president of the Pacific Forum CSIS think tank, said the North had crossed an important threshold and the United States must make sure it was on the same page as its allies because divisiveness would play into the North's hands.

"... it seems foolish, and foolhardy, to ignore the intended message," Cossa wrote in a paper after the declaration. "This sounds to me like an unambiguous declaration by North Korea that it is a nuclear weapons state."

Rice said Washington had assumed since the mid-1990s that North Korea could make nuclear weapons. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he did not know whether it did indeed have a bomb.

Nuclear proliferation experts said North Korea had probably produced enough plutonium for as many as eight weapons but no one could say for certain if it could assemble and deliver one.

South Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman Lee Kyu-hyung said Seoul's assessment of the North's nuclear capability remained unchanged at "material for up to three bombs".

Thursday's statement was Pyongyang's first response to Bush's January 20 inauguration speech in which he said he was committed to ending tyranny.

While Bush did not specify countries in his address, Rice has singled out North Korea as one of six outposts of tyranny.

The crisis over the North's nuclear ambitions erupted in October 2002 when the United States said North Korea had acknowledged it had a secret programme based on highly enriched uranium as well as a plutonium scheme that it had put on hold.

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blog bits-
http://www.technorati.com/tag/korea
chronology of North Korean missile development from post Korean War to 1998.
Since then the Taepedong (readong 2) missile has been tested and has a range of 4,300 - 6,000km. (Moscow or Alice Springs in other words)
http://www.mi.infn.it/~landnet/NMD/chun.pdf

interesting other stuff includes research on waste recycling and bacteria, the North Koreans might end the world by blasting us with really really dirty and smelly old yoghurt cartons.
Be scared.
Be right fucking scared to your designer underwear.

by toneore Wed Dec 29, 2004 21:45 toneore at eircom dot net

They are neither. The comment is a churlish and ignorant, condeming these people, who want only freedom and a better life, to a certain death. People in NK are oppressed, starving and are, in fact, little more than slaves.

The sooner the NK regime collapses, the people liberated, and their nutjob dictator put on trial the better. Tell you what Derrick - why don't you go an live there and defend the revolution? I'm sure you would look good in a brown tunic...

by derrick Wed Dec 29, 2004 11:25

These counter-revolutionaries and spies should be handed back to the proper authorities.