White House sticks to decision to avoid talks with North Korea

Seoul - With a rogue nuclear weapons program drawing world attention, North Korea has sent messages in every way it knows how that it wants direct talks with Washington — using shrill propaganda diatribes, silky diplomatic feelers, and this week, by stiff-arming a South Korean presidential envoy.

But Bush administration officials are flatly refusing, holding fast to the view that North Korea should be dealt with multilaterally, either by a group of its neighbors or by the United Nations Security Council.

"This is not a U.S-D.P.R.K. problem," a high-ranking American official said here today, using the initials for the Democratic Republic of North Korea. "It is very important that the multilateral process start." Before too long, he added, the United States will get the issue on the way to the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Security Council.

The atomic energy agency board of governors is expected to meet in Vienna in February to decide whether North Korea's expulsion of inspectors and sabotaging of surveillance equipment merits forwarding the case to the Security Council, which has the power to impose sanctions.

Although North Korea's state-controlled news media have repeatedly warned other countries to keep their "noses out" of its nuclear affairs, the words took on bite with a bit of inter-Korean political theater in the last week.

After lavishly praising Kim Jong Il before foreign correspondents, South President Kim Dae Jung of South Korea sent an envoy bearing a letter for North Korea's leader. Although the envoy, Lim Dong Won, had met Kim Jong Il three times in the past, a fourth meeting was not to be.

After waiting in Pyongyang for two days, he delivered the letter to aides and returned empty-handed.

"Standing up the envoy was clearly an unacceptable insult," a centrist daily, Joon Ang Ilbo, said today in an editorial headlined "Another insult from the North." Noting that a meeting had been agreed upon in advance, the editorial said that South Korea's president "has been humiliated before the world."

As if to say that inter-Korean dialogue was to be limited to trains and trucks, Mr. Lim returned with North Korea's promise that a long-delayed opening of road and rail connections across the demilitarized zone would take place sometime in February.

"However, the North Koreans asked me to let the United States know Pyongyang wants Washington to come out for bilateral dialogue," said Mr. Lim, who was the architect of South Korea's so-called sunshine policy, or engagement with the North.

But in response, Bush Administration officials stood fast.

"The important point for us is that this is not an issue between the United States and North Korea," Assistant Secretary of State for Nonproliferation John Wolf said Wednesday at a news conference. "North Korea is in breach of its obligation to the international community."

On Tuesday night in Washington, when Mr. Lim was boarding a plane to leave Pyongyang empty-handed, President Bush praised the multilateral approach in his State of the Union speech, saying: "America is working with the countries of the region — South Korea, Japan, China and Russia — to find a peaceful solution, and to show the North Korean government that nuclear weapons will bring only isolation, economic stagnation and continued hardship."

In the fight over venues, Pyongyang feels it will lose leverage in a group. It no longer trusts its historic allies, Russia and China, not to gang up on it to score points with the United States, South Korea and Japan.

"This strategy is also dubbed a 'serpent' strategy as it is to be carried out in the way a serpent does. i. e. swallowing up the object after strangling it," the Korean Central News Agency, the North's state-run agency, said Wednesday. "The U.S. strategy is aimed to destabilize the system in the D.P.R.K. and destroy it, while refusing to recognize its political system."

North Korea also fears that, after Baghdad, the Bush administration will shift its "regime change" focus to Pyongyang.

Seeking regime survival, North Korean diplomats around the world have said this week that they would only trade a verified dismantling of their nuclear program in return for a nonaggression treaty with the United States that had won Senate ratification.

Pak Gil Yon, North Korea's ambassador to the United Nations, its only diplomatic mission in the United States, told reporters Wednesday that congressional ratification was essential because the word of the Bush administration could not be trusted.

But ratification may be difficult.

In his State of the Union, Mr. President Bush said: "Today the North Korean regime is using its nuclear program to incite fear and seek concessions. America and the world will not be blackmailed."

At that, members of Congress stood up and applauded loudly.

Bill Clinton, who was President during the last crisis with North Korea over its nuclear arms program, said earlier this week that the United States should negotiate a comprehensive agreement with North Korea, before Pyongyang starts building bombs.

The United States should "give them a nonaggression pact if they want that, because we'd never attack them unless they did something that violated that pact anyway," he told Reuters in Davos, where he was attending the World Economic Forum. "North Korea has greater capacity to produce atomic weapons than Iraq does, and less capacity to feed itself than Iraq does. So for the North Koreans, their `cash crops,' if you will, are missiles and bombs."

"It is urgent that before they, out of economic necessity, get more irresponsible, we do what we can with the South Koreans, the Japanese, the Chinese and the Russians to make a big deal with them, a verifiable deal to end all nuclear programs and their long-range missile sales," he said, hewing to a multilateral approach. "They sometimes think the only way they can get anybody's attention is to misbehave."

"We can't keep going through this endless cycle of rewarding their misbehavior," said Mr. Clinton. whose administration negotiated a nuclear control agreement in 1994. "So we need a comprehensive agreement here, and I think we should do that sooner rather than later because they can make big bombs, and do it well." -- New York Times

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