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Analysis: No Easy Path to North Korea Deal

Council on Foreign Relations

April 13, 2007
Prepared by: Carin Zissis

Nearly two months after Six-Party Talk members signed a tentative denuclearization agreement, the April 14 deadline for North Korea to shut down the main reactor at its facility at Yongbyon looms. At stake are millions in energy and humanitarian aid, not to mention progress toward denuclearization and renewed inspections. Yet a dispute over frozen North Korean funds in a Macao bank imperils the entire deal.

The North says it will extend an invitation (FT) to nuclear inspectors only after it receives $25 million from Banco Delta Asia. The funds have served as a major point of contention between Washington and Pyongyang since 2005, when the United States blacklisted the Macao bank for allegedly laundering North Korean money. Although the U.S. Treasury Department moved to release the funds in late March, a series of bureaucratic obstacles intervened. Pyongyang responded to the delay by walking away from negotiations in Beijing.

Macao authorities will release the funds before the April deadline, according to the Treasury Department and South Korean officials. Christopher R. Hill, Washington’s chief diplomat to the Six-Party Talks, said the decision “should mean that we will be back in business in terms of denuclearization.” But whether North Korea will disable the reactor in time remains in serious doubt. Pyongyang asked members of a U.S. delegation visiting North Korea for a one-month extension. New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, one of the delegates, pressured North Korean officials to meet the deadline (CBS/AP), saying the shutdown should only take a “few days”.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2007 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.