Tentative nuclear deal is set with North Korea

Tentative nuclear deal is set with North Korea
By Jim Yardley
Copyright by the International Herald Tribune
Published: February 12, 2007

BEIJING: Negotiators for the six nations in the North Korean nuclear disarmament talks were poised to announce an agreement Tuesday but were awaiting approval from their respective national capitals, the chief American envoy said early Tuesday.

Christopher Hill said diplomatic teams from the United States, North Korea and the other four participating countries — China, Japan, Russia and South Korea — pushed negotiations past a self-imposed Monday deadline into early Tuesday before agreeing on a final text. The six chief envoys were scheduled to reconvene at 10:30 a.m. to learn if each nation has approved the deal.

Hill declined to offer any specifics about the agreement until approval was assured. But he suggested that the pending deal was essentially the same as the draft proposal that has been under discussion for five days — except for revisions in a single paragraph. That paragraph presumably has focused on the question of energy assistance for North Korea. The North's demand for huge, upfront shipments of fuel oil and electricity had threatened to scuttle the talks.

"Everybody had to make some changes to try to narrow the differences," Hill said as he returned to his hotel at 2:41 a.m. "One would hope that we can all agree on this tomorrow."

Hill said he had been in frequent contact with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during the late-night negotiations and signaled that the United States was satisfied with the tentative deal. "We feel it is an excellent draft," he said. "I don't think we are the problem."

Qin Gang, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said early Tuesday that "active progress" had been made in the negotiations and confirmed that an agreement had been circulated to the national capitals.

The fate of the deal appears to rest with North Korea's delegation winning approval from the country's authoritarian leader, Kim Jong Il. The deal is expected to require North Korea to close and seal its main nuclear reactor within six weeks and allow international nuclear inspectors into the country for the first time in more than four years. The North would receive energy and economic assistance, as well as security guarantees, but the timetable for those rewards remained unclear.

Pyongyang had nearly scuttled the negotiations by insisting on a huge energy aid package, including front- loaded shipments of fuel oil. Different reports suggested that North Korea had demanded two million tons of heavy fuel oil and two million kilowatts of electricity in exchange for its approval of any agreement.

The deal, if approved, would give fresh momentum to a diplomatic process that on Sunday had teetered near collapse. But it also leaves many of the most difficult objectives yet to be achieved. North Korea still has not agreed to turn over its nuclear weapons or weapons fuel, a critical step that is the subject of future negotiations.

The closure of the country's main reactor at Yongbyon could serve to block the country from developing more new weapons. The agreement also is expected to establish working groups to address denuclearization, normalization of diplomatic relations, energy and economic assistance and a peace treaty formally ending the Korean War. The United States and North Korea never signed a peace treaty after the war and still have no full diplomatic relations.

Diplomats described a frenzied day of meetings as everyone raced to beat the Monday deadline. The United States and North Korea, after meeting privately Sunday, held another meeting Monday. Japan and North Korea also held talks. The two countries have been bitterly at odds over the North's past abductions of Japanese nationals. Kenichiro Sesae, the chief Japanese envoy, told North Korea that Japan would not pay for any of the North's aid package until progress was made on the abduction issue, the Japanese news agency Kyodo reported.

In Washington, hard-liners in the Bush administration have been deeply suspicious of taking a diplomatic approach and have argued that the North has no intention of abandoning its nuclear weapons. Hill, who has spent much of the past two months traveling the world to resuscitate the talks, has described the objective as a step-by-step process that would dismantle Pyongyang's nuclear arsenal rather than freeze it.

Pending approval, Hill said the working groups could be quickly established while chief negotiators could reconvene in Beijing as soon as next month. He said the tentative agreement would create a succession of deadlines that would need to be met as a precondition of the deal. "This is only one phase of denuclearization," he said. "We're not done."