Center for International Policy

In Brief: Plutonium Power Play

Fareed Zakaria: Selig Harrison is one of the few Americans who has been granted access to North Korea and its senior most officials. He has been visiting the country for more than 30 years; he’s just returned from there with news that North Korea is planning to remove fuel rods at a nuclear reactor by the end of the year to obtain more plutonium for nuclear weapons. Here to share insights from his recent trip is Selig Harrison, the Director of the Asia program at the Washington-based Center for International Policy. Selig, explain that--the North Koreans have been unwilling to get involved in the six-party talks to re-enter. Now they’re increasing their supply of plutonium; what’s going on?

Selig Harrison: Well what’s going on is bargaining; they want to return to the six-party talks because as many of them said, we would be the major beneficiaries if the September 19th 2005 six-party declaration were followed through on. But they--they want bilateral talks with the United States to precede their return to the six-party talks because they want to get the US to compromise on the issue of financial sanctions, which we have imposed on North Korea, practically a week after we negotiated an agreement with them on September 19th last year to de-nuclear(ize) in return for normalization; we imposed financial sanctions. So they want bilateral talks to work out a package deal that will enable those sanctions to be lifted.

Fareed Zakaria: Is--is that proof that sanctions are working--that they’re--that they’re hitting the regime where you want to hit them?

Selig Harrison: Sanctions to them are a symbol of a regime change approach on the part of the Bush Administration which they consider completely incompatible with the idea of the September 19th declaration which was to move toward normalization, so it’s a political symbol, as well as something that is hurting them but it’s not hurting them in the sense that many of the hardliners in Washington think. They think this is a way of bringing down the--the North Korean regime; well it’s not bringing them down; I can tell you that. But it is slowing down their growth and slowing down their foreign trade, their foreign investment with the rest of the world and thus running completely counter to our stated desire to see North Korea open up to the outside world.

Fareed Zakaria: Now let me ask you about something people have said when coming back. Over the last two years people have said they have noticed more normal economic activity in North Korea--markets, shops, restaurants, even--even companies; are you seeing--did you see any of that?

Selig Harrison: Yes; I’ve seen it just--just a steady increase. There was much more activity economically in Pyongyang than I’ve ever seen before--more cars, more--more bicycles, more restaurants, more enterprise. People can't really go into private enterprise but they’re--it’s sort of a halfway house to privatization. The government is loosening up; the government still has nominal control over everything but let’s say you want to run a restaurant. You lease the right to run a restaurant at a certain place and if you can make money on it you get to keep much more of it than you could a couple of years ago--to plow it back into the business and enter into foreign relationships if you want to. There are incentives in play there now. So it’s--Pyongyang is kind of a city state which definitely is changing and improving in the sense of loosening up. The rest of the country has pockets of great poverty, food problems, flood problems, and it’s--there’s a big difference between the countryside and Pyongyang.

Fareed Zakaria: Final question--do you think that the officials you dealt with seriously want to make a deal with the United States where they would put their nuclear program back in a box?

Selig Harrison: Absolutely; the--the terms have to be what they consider equitable. The first most important thing is some way has to be found to--to change the financial sanctions that the United States has introduced. We’ve lumped together action against what we consider elicit financial transactions--money laundering, counterfeiting which we have to do. We’ve lumped that together with wholesale measures that block all North Korean economic intercourse with the outside world and that’s a regime change approach; that has really nothing to do with law enforcement on the part of the Americans trying to push it. So I think that if we could find a way to compromise the financial sanctions issue in bilateral negotiations we could go back to the six-party talks. They do want to move toward de-nuclear(ization) if it is tied as it is supposed to be under the September 19th agreement with steady movement toward the normalization of relations. And they consider financial sanctions the reverse.

Fareed Zakaria: A complicated diplomatic minuet; thank you for sharing it with us--Selig Harrison.

Selig Harrison: Thank you.