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 6자회담..

Today the new round of the Six-Party Talks - DPRK vs. USA, China, S. Korea, Japan and Russia - started in Beijing. Well, it seems that many of the observers are expecting a kind of progress.. (Actually I don't expect nothing - no real progress! Why? I'll explain my opinion later - AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!!)

Anyway.. here's the latest about the issue:

☞ Nuclear talks resume amid U.S. calls on N. Korea to denuclearize (연합)

☞ 中, 8일 밤이나 9일 합의문서 초안 작성할 듯 (VoP)

☞ '이행조치-상응조치' 합의 가능할까? (DailyNK)

CNN - the day before the beginning of the talks:

Asia Times (HK/China) already published following article last week (2.03):

North Korea: Something might just happen
 

Raise the topic of the upcoming round of six-party talks on North Korea's nuclear weapons, and responses may range from "not again" to "what else is new?"
 

Forecasts of abject failure, while understandable in view of the prior record of rhetoric, disappointment and breakdown, may be premature. It's just possible - even probable, in the view of some but hardly all experts - that something substantive will emerge from all the yakking across the table and on the sidelines when
the protagonists cross swords yet again in Beijing beginning next Thursday.
 

No, that's not just because Christopher Hill, the US envoy to the talks, has been dropping upbeat remarks ever since he met his North Korean counterpart, Kim Kye-gwan, two weeks ago in Berlin. One might expect Hill, after all, to say, as he did in Washington before taking off for talks-before-talks in Seoul this weekend, "We believe we can make progress."
 

And Hill might also be expected to qualify that remark, as he carefully remembered to do, with the footnote that he was "very mindful of the fact that I expected progress in December, and it didn't happen".
 

But now things are different, really different, in the view of some of the experts. Now, they say, North Korea is going to Beijing to negotiate seriously, to drop a few bones for the Americans to chew on, to make an offer the US side just can't refuse - and then return to Pyongyang and await the next stage in the great bargaining game.
 

The logic here is that Kim Kye-gwan took the initiative in asking to see Hill, not the other way around, and specified that they should meet not in China but in Berlin, where Hill was scheduled to give a talk at a local college. Away from Chinese pressures, they engaged in intensive discussion for three days, after which North Korea came out with the extraordinary announcement that they had reached "a certain agreement" after talking in "a sincere atmosphere".
 

No one here is confusing "a certain agreement" with anything like final agreement on how the two sides are going to live up to the word of the joint statement of September 19, 2005, in which everyone - China, Japan, Russia, the US, and the two Koreas - agreed on providing huge amounts of aid to North Korea, and North Korea agreed to give up its nukes.
 

There is the sense, however, that Kim Kye-gwan, having returned to Pyongyang for final instructions, presumably handed down from North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, is not going to go back to Beijing with nothing to offer.
 

"It looks like there will be a piecemeal agreement," said Han Sung-joo, who was the South Korean foreign minister when the US engineered the 1994 Geneva Framework Agreement under which North Korea was promised twin light-water nuclear reactors in return for locking up its 5-megawatt reactor at its nuclear complex at Yongbyon and ceasing development of nuclear warheads.
 

"The United States needs a modicum of success after the debacle in Iraq," Han reasoned. "North Korea has a handful of piecemeal concessions to satisfy the political needs - without giving up [its] nuclear program."
 

No way, of course, does Han think North Korea is about to abandon its nuclear program until extracting much more from the US and others at the table. "They're keeping the weapons to the last stage," he said, playing "the good-boy role" all the while "weakening the rationale" for a strong alliance between the United States and South Korea.
 

Han offered this Machiavellian estimate of North Korea's strategy for negotiations at a conference staged in Seoul by the Korea Society and the Security Management Institute, a local think-tank, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Korea Society, a prestigious organization, led by retired senior US diplomats and funded in large part by Korean donations. Although Han believed North Korea would make an offer at the talks, he seemed to believe the purpose might well be to deepen fissures that are already evident in the US-South Korean relationship.
 

"We are at the point as to whether the alliance is pulled apart or stays together," said Han, who returned to public office as South Korea's ambassador to the US several years ago. "South Korean views on the alliance are quite polarized," he noted, with debate focusing on such issues as the extent of the North Korean threat, human rights in North Korea and, eventually, what kind of structure will emerge if North and South Korea move to reunification.
 

Don Oberdorfer, author of The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, offered more details on what he believed Kim Kye-gwan might bring to the table.
 

"The North Koreans are very likely to shut down Yongbyon and bring back [inspectors]," he said, an allusion to inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency whom North Korea expelled at the end of 2002 after the breakdown of the 1994 Geneva agreement.
 

The deal might depend, said Oberdorfer - for many years a diplomatic and foreign correspondent for the Washington Post - on the US acting "to modify the Treasury Department sanctions that seem so painful to them". The inference was that Hill might be ready to offer to remove some of the restraints imposed by the Treasury Department in September 2005, shortly before the Statement of Principles was issued, on financial institutions dealings with Banco Delta Asia, the Macau bank through which Treasury officials accuse North Korea of channeling counterfeit US$100 bills.
 

Oberdorfer seemed surprisingly optimistic about the talks. "It appears there's going to be new life breathed into diplomacy," he said. All the participants "will have more of an opportunity to work positively" as all sides weigh the alternative of North Korea "continuing to make nuclear materials" and moving "toward war".
 

Nor was Oberdorfer pessimistic about the outlook for US-South Korean relations. "South Korea is going to move closer to the center," he said, suggesting that the South would pull back from policies viewed by the White House, as well as South Korean conservatives, as too soft toward North Korea. At the same time, he predicted, "The US is going to move closer to the center" with "an opportunity for both governments to work together" - but "not with such discrepancies".

Others were not nearly so sanguine about the upcoming talks.
 

Kim Sung-han, professor at the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security, affiliated with South Korea's Foreign Ministry, said only when the two allies, the US and South Korea, resolve their own differences "can we move closer to resolving the North Korea nuclear problem".
 

David Steinberg, director of the Asian studies program at Georgetown University, noted "an intensive rivalry as to which country", the US or South Korea, "will take the lead in dealing with North Korea". As for the alliance, he said it was in its present state "very tenuous indeed" with problems in the relationship "attributed to differences in policies toward North Korea".
 

Some observers believed the six-party talks were not likely to go anywhere until after the 2008 presidential election in the United States. A South Korean military officer was heard to murmur, "We're screwed," when asked what he thought of the six-party talks - and the likelihood of a serious deal emerging from them. The inference was that any agreement acceptable to North Korea would undermine the US-Korean alliance - and South Korea's determination to stand up against North Korea's demands.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/IB03Dg01.html