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Updated Wednesday, August 6, 2008 0:00 am TWN, By Frank Ching, Special to The China Post

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Can the North Korean peace talks unravel?

North Korea’s recent behavior, including the killing of a South Korean tourist who wandered into a restricted military area and threat to expel South Koreans who work at the tourism site, indicates that there is still a long way to go before it can be considered a normal country, fit to join the international community.

And yet, the world has little choice but to deal with North Korea, and the six-party talks process, while moving very slowly, has made significant progress — including Pyongyang’s decision to shut down and seal core nuclear facilities, allowing U.S. and other experts to oversee disablement of facilities, providing 19,000 pages of documents on its nuclear programs and publicly blowing up the Yongbyon cooling tower.

These moves culminated on June 26 with North Korea providing a declaration of its nuclear programs to China, chairman of the six-party talks.

On the same day, President George W. Bush announced the American lifting of the application of the Trading with the Enemy Act with respect to North Korea and notified Congress of his intent to remove North Korea from the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism. By law, however, the removal of North Korea from the list can only take place 45 days after Congress is notified.

The North Korean foreign ministry then issued a statement that pointed out that the U.S. measure had “not yet taken effect due to its procedural factor.”

Since then, there seems to have been something of a deadlock. This deadlock is essentially over verification. While the U.S. had hoped that a verification protocol would emerge from the July six-party talks in Beijing, in the end, there was only a restatement of general principles.

The diplomatic environment was improved when the foreign ministers of the six countries involved — the United States, North Korea, China, Japan, South Korea and Russia — held an informal meeting in Singapore during the Asean Regional Forum. It was the first meeting of the six countries at such a high level.

However, if an accord on verification is not reached, then the six parties cannot move on to the final phase of denuclearization, the “dismantlement and abandonment” stage, which involves moving plutonium-and bombs out of North Korea.

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