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SKorea could resume steel shipment after NKorea nuke deal
2008-10-13
South Korea indicated Monday it could go ahead with a steel shipment to impoverished North Korea after Pyongyang and Washington reached a deal to save a six-nation nuclear disarmament pact. The United States announced Saturday it is dropping the North from a terrorism blacklist after the two sides reached agreement on nuclear inspections under the pact. North Korea in turn said it will resume work to disable its plutonium-producing atomic plants at Yongbyon and will readmit inspectors from the UN's atomic watchdog. Conservative South Korean media slammed the US deal as "unprincipled" but the unification ministry said it hopes for a thaw in inter-Korean relations. "We hope that (delisting) will have a positive impact on improving relations between South and North Korea," ministry spokesman Kim Ho-Nyoun said. "We are considering (policy) readjustment...including the issue of providing food and steel." The South in September postponed a shipment of 1,500 tonnes of steel pipe because the disarmament pact was in danger of disintegrating. The North had been promised a total of one million tonnes of heavy fuel oil, or equivalent-value aid to patch up power stations, in return for its disablement. Cross-border ties have been frigid since conservative President Lee Myung-Bak took office in Seoul in February. He promised to link economic -- but not humanitarian -- aid to denuclearisation, a policy which enraged the hardline communist state. Despite acute shortages the North has not asked the South for its customary food shipment this year. The North had begun work to reactivate the plants which were closed last year under the pact. It was protesting the US refusal to drop it from the terrorism list, which blocks some bilateral and multinational aid, until agreement was reached on "verification" inspections of nuclear activities. The US State Department said the North agreed to verification of all of its nuclear activities, including an alleged covert highly enriched uranium programme and suspected proliferation. However, visits to sites not included in the North's nuclear declaration delivered in June will require "mutual consent." That declaration dealt directly only with the plutonium-producing operation at Yongbyon. Some 50 people burnt portraits of the North's leader Kim Jong-Il outside the US embassy in Seoul in protest at the delisting. Conservative papers were scathing about the "mutual consent" exemption. "This is an unprincipled concession made by the Bush administration which is desperate for a diplomatic achievement in its final days," the largest-selling newspaper Chosun Ilbo wrote. It said agreements at negotiations involving the two Koreas, the United States, Russia, China and Japan had made it clear that suspicious sites should be subject to inspection along with declared locations. JoongAng Ilbo also accused the US of "unprincipled" negotiations. It acknowledged Washington did not want its achievements so far going to waste. "Even so, backing off after having firmly proclaimed that it would not remove North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism unless all of North Korea's nuclear facilities were thoroughly verified is the result of a lack of strategy," the paper said. "There are many who are surprised by how the United States repeatedly concedes to North Korea in negotiations," it added. Dong-A Ilbo newspaper said Pyongyang had not honoured its promise of an accurate declaration and complete verification. "On the contrary, verification could grow more complicated as inspection of nuclear facilities is now possible only with the North's consent."
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