Canada and the United States have called for a meeting of “sender countries” to the1950-53 Korean War. The meeting is to be held 16 January in Vancouver attendees are to be known as the Vancouver Group. New Zealand along with Australia, Belgium, Britain, Colombia, Ethiopia, France, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the Philippines, South Africa, Thailand and Turkey, Japan, India, Sweden and others (as yet unannounced) have been invited.
On the face of it this meeting should be a good move. Dialogue between Korean War participants and supporters aimed at formally ending the state of war is long over-due.
Unfortunately this meeting is not aimed at ending the war. The stated objective is to find ways to increase the sanctions pressure on North Korea to give up its nuclear programme.
This will prolong the war, not end it.
The history of the past 67 years tells us that pressurising North Korea through isolation and sanctions simply does not work.
The United States placed its first sanction on North Korea 28 June 1950 when it invoked a total embargo on all exports to North Korea. President Truman’s Proclamation 2914 later the same year effectively applied further sanctions under existing US legislation. Through the following decades to the early 1990s further legislations were enacted applying sanctions against socialist countries which included North Korea.
In March 1992 United States sanctions became more specific with sanctions imposed against two North Korean companies for “missile proliferation activities”. Further specific missile proliferation sanctions were imposed through the ‘90s, but slowed down after 1999 when President Clinton eased most of the sanctions imposed since 1950.
Attitudes hardened under President Bush and in 2006 the United States managed to persuade the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to pass a resolution placing international sanctions on a wide range of military and luxury items.
In doing this the Security Council allowed itself to become an instrument in the implementation of United States foreign policy. Delighted with this leverage the United States has since then instigated further UNSC sanctions on North Korea ten times to December 2017.
The reasons for the United States sanctions have altered over the years. In the 1950s the objective was to penalise any country practising a socialist economy. Today the “pressure campaign against North Korea's decades-old nuclear program has the intention of leading to diplomatic talks with the regime. All of it has always been intended to lead to talks,” according to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in the joint press conference with Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland.
In announcing the meeting Freeland said: “We believe it’s going to be successful, and a successful outcome of the international pressure campaign is a diplomatic engagement and a real conversation. And so those are the issues that we will be discussing in Vancouver in January.”
The United States and the UNSC sanctions are claimed to be targeted at the North Korea elite and the missile/nuclear development programme. But these targets are not being hit.
The supply of consumer and luxury goods has expanded in Pyongyang department stores since 2006. Missile and nuclear capability has expanded exponentially over the same period.
Neither the lives of the elite nor the nuclear programme are being hindered by the sanctions. Instead, as was the case in Iraq, sanctions are hitting the most vulnerable in North Korean society - the children.
The sanctions simply do not work.
Increasing the pressure campaign with a further tightening of the sanctions and isolation screws can never lead to a ‘real conversation’ taking place. Increasing sanctions pressure will only increase tensions on the Korean Peninsula.
Having lived under the threat of war for over six decades, the North Korean people are resilient, tough and iron-willed. They are absolutely determined never to agree to talks under the duress of sanctions pressure.
A real conversation can only be based on acceptance of the fact that North Korea feels genuinely threatened by the presence of United States troops in South Korea and Japan with their near year-round military drills designed to forcefully display their massive land, sea and air destructive strike capability.
North Korea will only agree to talks when the objective is a cessation of hostilities in the form of a peace settlement agreement as provided for in the 1953 Armistice Agreement. Only with a formal peace treaty can discussion move onto denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula.
Statements from North Korea’s Deputy Ambassador to the United Nations Kim In-ryong have made North Korea’s position clear:
“The rolling back of the hostile policy towards DPRK is the prerequisite for solving all the problems in the Korean Peninsula. Therefore, the urgent issue to be settled on Korean Peninsula is to put a definite end to the U.S. hostile policy towards DPRK, the root cause of all problems.”
“Unless the hostile policy and the nuclear threat of the US is thoroughly eradicated, we will never put our nuclear weapons and ballistic rockets on the negotiating table under any circumstances.”
Instead of finding ways to increase pressure on North Korea, which can only lead to prolonged further tension, the Vancouver Group should be identifying ways to address North Korea’s existential concerns. This means a “rolling back of the hostile policy” (of which sanctions are a part) and withdrawing “the nuclear threat of the US”.
It is putting the cart before the horse to try and pressurise North Korea into give up its nuclear weapons without a robust internationally agreed upon peace treaty in place.
It is only by addressing these issues that the Vancouver Group can defuse tension on the Korean Peninsula.
Peter Wilson
Secratary
NZ DPRK Society
1 January 2017