Advertisement
Advertisement

American notes of caution

Chinese diplomacy appears to have revived the stalled negotiations to get North Korea to abandon its nuclear programme. The six-party talks, hosted by Beijing, may resume as early as February 6, after being in recess since November. The other participants are the United States, Russia, Japan and South as well as North Korea.

Last week, China arranged for the top North Korean and US negotiators to meet in Beijing, following a visit by North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. Mr Kim reportedly assured President Hu Jintao that he would 'push forward' with the multilateral talks.

But there is a hitch: the US is continuing to press charges that North Korea is involved in the large-scale counterfeiting and distribution of US currency and that this, along with drug smuggling and other illicit activity, is helping to pay for the country's weapons of mass destruction.

Pyongyang said on January 3 that it would not return to the six-party talks unless the US lifted financial sanctions it imposed in the autumn. A few days earlier, explaining why the penalties were imposed, US ambassador to Seoul Alexander Vershbow said they were a matter of law enforcement against 'a criminal regime'.

'We can't somehow remove our sanctions as a political gesture when this regime is engaging in dangerous activities such as weapons exports to rogue states, narcotics trafficking as a state activity and counterfeiting of our money on a large scale,' he said.

The US insists that it is enforcing the law and that this issue is separate from the six-party talks. A team from the US Treasury Department was in Seoul this week to brief South Korean officials on the evidence Washington has gathered on Pyongyang's involvement in producing and circulating large amounts of high-quality fake US$100 bills, known as 'supernotes'. The Chosun newspaper in Seoul quoted South Korean officials as saying that the evidence offered by the US was 'pretty convincing', and that a separate investigation by Beijing had confirmed that the North was 'engaged in wrongdoings'.

China has not commented publicly on the issue. But the renewed US pressure comes at a particularly sensitive time: it has prompted speculation that some hardliners in the Bush administration want to scuttle the six-party talks, hoping instead to undermine the North Korean government by imposing a blockade and starving it of funds.

However, Washington has said it is ready to resume the talks and that this should be done without preconditions. If Pyongyang agrees, it will be a measure of Beijing's influence: the American counterfeiting charges against North Korea are a frontal assault on Mr Kim's government.

The US Treasury Department in September accused Macau-based Banco Delta Asia of being a front for North Korean counterfeiting, money laundering and other illicit financial activities - and halted all dealings between it and US financial institutions. The following month, the department froze the US assets of eight state-owned North Korean firms, saying they were involved in spreading weapons of mass destruction.

At about the same time, the US Justice Department indicted a leading member of an Irish Republican Army splinter group on charges of conspiring with Pyongyang to put millions of dollars of counterfeit US currency into circulation in Asia and Europe. It marked the first time the US had formally cited North Korea in a US court on counterfeiting charges. US officials said the charges were part of an intensifying effort to halt Pyongyang's wide range of criminal activities.

Michael Richardson is a visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. This is a personal comment

Post