North Korea is desperately seeking to reverse its economic downfall by getting the sanctions withdrawn. The agreement signed in February in Beijing exactly served this purpose well for North Korea.
It took long and painful negotiations to bend North Korea from its overtly aggressive bomb programme and persuade it to agree for the inspections of its nuclear facilities by IAEA officials. The inspection and shutting down of the Yongbyon nuclear plant will be a major achievement in recent years and North Korea will receive considerable amount of economic aid in return. The aid package is worth US $300 million.
Probably, the successful signing of the accord in February and the consequent agreement of North Korea to shut down the nuclear facility at Yongbyon by April this year have raised the hopes of the countries in the region.
When the talks resumed on Monday, there were expectations that the process might accomplish far more than just denuclearization. One dramatic possibility is a formal peace treaty to officially end the Korean War.
The countries in the region are fed-up with the kind of tensions they had to go through for the past over fifty years with a divided Korean Peninsula in their neighborhood which threatened to explode into a full-scale war at any moment.
It may be an over-ambition on the part of these countries to hope for a settlement to the long-standing issues in one stroke. But, the very fact that North Korea is now agreeable to trade its nuclear ambitions for economic aid is a great progress in the situation.
The hopes, though not openly expressed by any one, also make them bound to go to the aid of North Korea in its economic transformation, in order to realize the dream of a non-nuclear and peaceful Northeastern Asia.
North Korea, on its part, is expected to do more to earn the trust and goodwill of the countries that are willing to rush economic assistance to that country in return for its renunciation of nuclear ambitions. North Korea has used its nuclear programme as a bargaining tool in the past to wring economic aid from the United States. It is for the concerned countries to take advantage of this and try and bring peace and stability to the region.
Bates Gill, a China specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington said ‘These are the precise issues that North Korea really wants to address: They want a peace treaty. They want a normal relationship with the United States.’
The talks between Japan and North Korea this month in Hanoi have not resulted in anything significant. But, the traditional animosities notwithstanding, even Japan cannot afford to forego the present opportunity. Hopes fly high because there is an all-round realization of the value of the opportunity at hand.
The caution that it is unrealistic to expect the six-party talks to become a diplomatic cure-all for the region’s complicated security issues may be correct to a large part. But, it cannot be denied that the February deal brought about by the six-party conference has begun paving the path in the direction of finding solutions to the remaining conflicts in the region.
