N. Korea OKs Step Toward Peace Talks

In a major step toward bringing a new level of stability to northeastern Asia, North Korea on Monday accepted a basic framework for negotiations that could bring a formal end to the 47-year-old Korean War.

The breakthrough came after seven hours of talks involving senior representatives from the United States, South Korea and North Korea at the New York Palace Hotel. The accepted framework calls for those three participants plus China to meet in New York on Aug. 5 to prepare for full negotiations among the four parties.

“The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea [North Korea] will enter the four-party talks,” declared the head of North Korea’s delegation, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan, after Monday’s meeting.

The purpose of the August meeting is to set the time, place and format of formal negotiations.

In Hong Kong, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright hailed the development.

“We welcome the [North Korean] commitment to participate in this historic process,” she said in a prepared statement issued here. “The successful conclusion of a peace agreement would bring lasting peace and stability to the Korean peninsula and contribute greatly to the peace and stability of the entire region.”

Full-scale negotiations, which U.S. and South Korean officials said they expect to follow the Aug. 5 meeting, would attempt to replace the uneasy armistice--which for 44 years has left the Korean peninsula a tense area divided by a 2 1/2-mile-wide Demilitarized Zone--with a permanent peace.

About 37,000 U.S. soldiers are stationed in South Korea to help guarantee that country’s security. In addition to a possible treaty, negotiations would address a series of “confidence-building measures” aimed at bringing stability to North Korea’s shattered economy and guiding one of the world’s most isolated and unstable regimes back into the community of nations.

Monday’s meeting followed more than six months of hesitation on the part of Communist North Korea, which first agreed to consider entering four-party negotiations at the beginning of the year, shortly after it formally apologized for sending a submarine full of armed commandos to South Korea.

That apology came, as did Monday’s diplomatic breakthrough, against the backdrop of North Korea’s collapsing economy and reports of serious food shortages and widespread famine there. In earlier meetings, North Korea had consistently tried to wrest pledges of massive food aid and U.S. diplomatic recognition as the price of entering full negotiations.

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U.S. officials said the North Koreans raised the food issue again Monday but then dropped any link between aid and the talks.

“The North Koreans always raise food, and they did this again today,” said one senior U.S. official. “We answered as we always do: ‘We don’t accept the link, but watch what we do.’ ”

Since September 1995, the United States has donated more than $33 million in humanitarian aid to the North, most of it food aid, but has repeatedly refused to tie any commitment to food assistance and a peace process.

The four-party formula was first proposed as an unconditional offer of peace talks by President Clinton and South Korean President Kim Young Sam when the two met on the South Korean island of Cheju in April 1996.

What led North Korea to give up its demands Monday was unclear, although U.S. officials who participated in the talks and analysts said they believe it was more than just food.

“Food was a part of it, but this was also about trust,” commented one U.S. official. “We had to develop a degree of trust, to show them that this wasn’t some kind of trap.”

Others, noting Pyongyang’s desperate economic situation, said the North Koreans simply had no other cards to play.

“It was a political necessity from their standpoint to go forward,” commented Scott Snyder, a Korea specialist at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington. “It’s a major failure of a brinkmanship strategy when you find yourself having to cave in on your own extreme demands.”

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Still, there were signs of at least some kind of looser link between Monday’s agreement and food aid.

Snyder said the United States had given the North Koreans a face-saving way to enter the talks, noting that the Clinton administration had kept a careful tally of international food donations to Pyongyang. The assistance had reached a level of 600,000 tons--exactly what the North Koreans had requested in January.

South Korean and U.S. officials also said they had agreed to take up the food issue in the full negotiations, linking it with the need for general economic development.

While participants in Monday’s meeting described it as one of the most friendly and cordial ever conducted among the three countries, progress still came slowly.

“It took a long time to put together what looks like a brief and simple statement,” commented one U.S. participant.

Monday’s breakthrough followed a much more modest agreement reached Friday between U.S. and North Korean negotiators that will allow U.S. investigators to resume searching for the remains of U.S. military personnel still listed as missing during the Korean War. U.S. officials believe that it might eventually be possible to retrieve the remains of as many as 4,000 people.

The prospects of a successfully negotiated Korea peace treaty coupled with at least a partial economic and political integration of North Korea into the global community carry considerable potential benefits for the United States.

In addition to easing tensions in a part of the world where U.S. soldiers are stationed, such a development could help reduce the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.