Center for International Policy

As printed in the Easy Bourse (Communiqués de presse) - Paris, France (AP)

July 25, 2006

N Korean Foreign Min Expected To Attend Malaysia Forum

KUALA LUMPUR (AP)--North Korea's ruler rarely travels abroad, and mystery shrouds his dictatorship. One of the few North Koreans who interacts with the world is Foreign Minister Paek Nam Sun, who is expected to attend an international forum in Malaysia this week.

Any statement by Paek, a 78-year-old former ambassador to Poland, will be scrutinized for policy nuances at the Asean Regional Forum, or ARF, Asia's biggest annual security conference. But chances that he and other diplomats will lay the groundwork for a breakthrough in the standoff over the North's missile and nuclear programs are remote.

Six-party talks on the North hosted by Beijing have stalled, and the U.N. Security Council condemned the hardline communist regime after it test-fired missiles this month. At the forum in Malaysia, Paek is unlikely to deviate from the North Korean position that Washington must lift financial sanctions if nuclear talks are to resume, commentators said.

"It is their first coming out after their missile tests," Lee Chung Min, a Korean expert on Asian security, said Tuesday. "They know they're going to get a barrage of criticism, mostly discreet and under the table."

Lee said he believed Paek was more of a messenger than a decision-maker, partly because the North's Foreign Ministry usually implements policies that have been crafted by the ruling Korean Workers' Party. Power is heavily concentrated in the hands of leader Kim Jong Il, and state officers stray from the official line at their peril.

"They're all on a very short leash," Lee said. Paek "will never, ever go beyond the talking points," he said.

Paek and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are expected to arrive in Kuala Lumpur for the forum on Thursday. Paek has met two of Rice's predecessors at previous ARF meetings - Madeleine Albright and Colin Powell - but a bilateral encounter this time is not scheduled.

The security conference brings together the North's five dialogue partners in the stalled talks on the country's nuclear program - China, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the United States. But North Korea has said it is unwilling to discuss the issue with them in Malaysia.

Paek's career is the story of an elite loyalist who rose steadily through the government layers over the decades. He was born in 1929 in North Hamgyong, a province on the Chinese and Russian borders that is home to a coal mine notorious for forced labor as well as a key missile base.

Paek graduated from the prestigious Kim Il Sung University in the showcase capital of Pyongyang, and later participated in Red Cross talks with South Korea in the 1970s. Diplomatic involvement with South Korea, the North's wealthy neighbor and former battlefield foe, has always been a key to career advancement for North Korean officials.

He became foreign minister in 1998, soon after Kim Jong Il emerged from a traditional three-year mourning period for his late father and national founder, Kim Il Sung.

Selig Harrison, an American scholar on North Korea, said in an e-mail message to The Associated Press that he had met Paek twice and described him as "a very direct and cogent spokesman who presents the (North Korean) position of the moment with a minimum of rhetorical trimmings."

"My impression is that he is a trusted apparatus man in the Workers' Party who is not identified with either the hard- or soft-line views in the Pyongyang leadership," Harrison wrote.

Some North Korean officials are believed to favor a more conciliatory approach to the outside world, while others, especially in the military, favor a harder line in which the threat of force serves as essential leverage in any negotiations. Still, signs of debate are few, and most experts say Kim Jong Il's decisions meet little or no internal resistance.

Paek speaks some English, but is reluctant to use his language skills at international meetings. He is considered a controlled speaker, though North Korean pronouncements can often turn belligerent in their attacks on alleged U.S. aggression or other perceived plots by outsiders.