The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Korea is not a tropical country. In the autumn, the leaves turn yellow and red, and by October the process is pretty far along, especially in North Korea. Which is why there are grave doubts that Kim Jong-Il is in good health, as Pyongyang pretends, and indeed some question whether he is alive at all. And despite the Oct. 13 agreement by Washington to take KimÕs neo-Stalinist regime off its list of terrorism sponsors, which persuaded North Korea to let international inspectors back into its Yongbyon nuclear site, we still donÕt know where its nuclear weapons (if they exist) might be hidden. Kim, the absolute ruler of North Korea since 1994, has not been seen in public since early September. There was intense speculation in South Korea that the 66-year-old dictator had suffered a stroke and undergone surgery. The North Korean regime denied anything was wrong (as it always does), and on Oct. 11 it finally produced some recent footage of Kim Jong-Il inspecting a womenÕs military unit. The only problem was that it was an outdoor location with lots of trees and bushes, and all the leaves were a lush green colour. Nowhere in Korea looks like that in mid-October; a horticultural expert estimated that the event took place in July or August. This confirms that Kim Jong-Il is at least seriously ill. For all we know, he may be dead, and there may be a succession struggle going on behind the scenes in Pyongyang. (Jong-Il inherited power from his father, Kim Il-Sung, who founded the regime in 1948, but none of the current rulerÕs children have been publicly groomed for the throne.) Whatever the state of palace politics in Pyongyang, however, the regime retains the ability to run circles around the Bush administration in diplomacy. The most recent confrontation began last month, when North Korea announced that it intended to restart nuclear activities because the US had not kept its promise to remove Pyongyang from its terrorism blacklist. That was part of the six-country deal signed last November, in which North Korea agreed to end its nuclear activities in return for badly needed aid. As part of the deal, Washington agreed to remove North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism. But the Bush administration overplayed a weak hand: it stalled on removing the terrorism label in the hope of forcing North Korea to allow American and International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors freer access to suspected North Korean nuclear sites. So the North Koreans simply stopped dismantling the Yongbyon nuclear site and announced that they were re-activating it. It took the Bush administration, desperate for at least one apparent foreign policy success, only a couple of weeks to yield to PyongyangÕs demand. Washington removed North Korea from the terrorism list Oct. 11, and Pyongyang let the inspectors back in the next day. But they canÕt go wherever they please. As before, international inspectors only have access to ÒdeclaredÓ North Korean nuclear sites. ÒUndeclaredÓ sites Ð ones that Pyongyang forgot to mention Ð can only be inspected with the regimeÕs permission. The whole play around the terrorism designation was an attempt by Washington to force Pyongyang to allow wider access, and it has failed miserably. The harshest critic of this outcome is none other than John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security in the first Bush administration. WashingtonÕs climb-down left all the key questions unanswered, he complained: ÒWhere are their weapons? Where is the rest of their plutonium? Where is their uranium enrichment program? What have they done in terms of outward proliferation? And we got essentially nothing new on that other than a commitment to keep negotiating.Ó The rest of the world still doesnÕt know whether North Korea has usable nuclear weapons, or how many, or where they might be hidden. Whoever is in charge in Pyongyang is playing a weak hand very well.
