President Bush’s efforts to resolve two major foreign-policy challenges in his waning days in office have prompted double-barreled criticisms, with leaders here and abroad questioning concessions his administration has made to Iraq and North Korea.
On the North Korean front, the Bush administration is drawing fire for removing North Korea from the U.S. list of terrorist-sponsoring nations without obtaining a firm agreement allowing outside inspectors to take samples from nuclear sites.
Here, public criticism has come from South Korea and Japan over an agreement on outside nuclear inspections in North Korea.
“Washington itself admitted a lot of ambiguities exist,” South Korean Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan told the South Korean parliament last week. “Through consultations with other countries, we will ensure that sampling is an essential part of verification.”
Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso has said that the situation will be “tangled” if the U.S.-North Korea verification deal was only a verbal understanding.
Tokyo’s top envoy to the six-party talks, Akitaka Saiki, said after meeting his Chinese counterpart that Beijing is not ready to call the group’s next meeting because of differences “over how to put the U.S.-North Korea deal on paper,” Japan’s Kyodo News agency reported.
Chief U.S. negotiator Christopher R. Hill returned from a visit to Pyongyang in early October with what the State Department said was an “agreement” to verify a nuclear declaration submitted by the communist state in June.
The department has not released the main document, but only an accompanying “fact sheet” with “U.S.-North Korea understandings on verification.”
The “understandings” outlined specific verification measures, such as “the use of scientific procedures, including sampling and forensic activities,” which would provide relatively reliable clues about the North’s nuclear activities.
North Korea, however, insisted last week that it had made no such promises and rejected the notion of allowing any samples to be removed at the site of its plutonium-making plant at Yongbyon.
“The method of verification will be … confined to field visits,” the official KCNA news agency quoted a Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying. Changing the written agreement is “an act of infringing upon sovereignty little short of seeking a house search.”
Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said: “The Japanese, South Koreans and even the Chinese are unhappy about the level of consultations, because now we have ambiguity, and they are frustrated that this situation has emerged.”
Officials and analysts said it is likely that the North Koreans are trying to buy time until President-elect Barack Obama takes office.
But Evans Revere, president of the Korea Society in New York, said North Koreans had been repeatedly warned against making such assumptions.
“If Pyongyang thinks that the next administration is going to give them an ‘easier ride,’ I think they are making a mistake,” Mr. Revere said. “During the North Korean delegation’s recent visit to New York, many people made precisely this point to them.”
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