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North Korean infamy of being a Rogue

Preeti Nalwa, Ph.D. - 11/16/2010

The 75-page report by the seven-member Panel of Experts on Pyongyang’s compliance with UN sanctions has been released by the Security Council on November 10, 2010. The U.N. report says that North Korea “has continued to provide missiles, components and technology to certain countries, including the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Syrian Arab Republic,” and that North Korea “has provided assistance for a nuclear program in the Syrian Arab Republic.” This report was delivered to the Security Council’s North Korea sanctions committee in May 2010 but it was blocked by China for six months. The probable reason could be that it would have adversely affected the tense situation in March 2010 in Northeast Asia due to the sinking of the South Korean naval ship “Cheonan”, allegedly by a North Korean torpedo, in which 26 sailors had lost their lives. David Albright, a nuclear weapons expert, said the report's formal release will be important because “it places a U.N. imprimatur on allegations by Western intelligence agencies and independent experts”. [1] It will also press on the US notions of North Korea as a ‘rogue’ nation.

A judgmental analysis of North Korean nuclear behaviour without the rigour of an analytical disposition is a perilous academic and a policy-making choice. An uncritical acceptance of the US induced rhetoric and narratives about North Korea would be unhelpful in comprehending North Korean security behaviour and unwittingly keeps the embedded self-interest of the US concealed, convenient and suitable to the faux-diplomatic strategy of the US which remains otherwise untainted viz. North Korea. The security seeking of North Korea is pictured as transgressions while the impropriety of the enormous stockpiling of nuclear weapons by the US escapes the ethical scrutiny as does the violence it has inflicted upon the unsuspecting Japanese common people in the past (dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki-August 6 and 9 in 1945) and on Iraq and Afghanistan recently.

The hegemony seeking behaviour of the US is inbuilt in the inequitable standards and character of the regimes (e.g. the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty-NPT) it has created which makes them not only resistant to global governance but also reveals its duplicity in claiming leadership on issues of nuclear disarmament which it does not intend to pursue for the fear of compromising its own relative advantage in meting out carnage on a scale of unaccountable costs to the adversary. The US has unbottled the genie of a nuclear weapon akin to the mythical devil which multiplies itself at the site of its each and every drop of blood, read nuclear fuel reprocessing procedure. The notion of the so-called Atoms for Peace was propagated and the technology shared to sustain the exclusivity of the few. Since this strategy is no longer sustainable, the US builds the narrative of the “rogue”. While many fall into this rhetorical trap, some attempt to encounter it to unveil the larger interest of the US.

The support which North Korea provides to Pakistan is negligible to what the US provides to this nation which appropriates more than the larger part of the funding for its military and for exporting terrorism. A lot of media energy is being expended in drawing the attention of China’s connivance in blocking this report accusing North Korea of selling banned nuclear and missile technology to Iran, Syria, and Myanmar, using “multiple intermediaries, shell companies and overseas criminal networks to circumvent U.N. sanctions.” The reason furnished is that China wants to block a similar report by another UN panel of experts on compliance with an arms embargo for Sudan’s conflict-torn western Darfur region in which Chinese firms are suspected of violating the Darfur arms embargo. The complicity of the US in supporting the regimes of the Rwandan president Paul Kagame alleged to have committed genocide and other war crimes is well known. The U.S. has not ratified the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions on Child Soldiers. More significantly, the U.S. had attempted to block the progression of the Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict, adopted by the UN in May 2000. The US provides arms transfers, military aid, and military training to countries like Rwanda, Uganda and Republic of Congo which use children in armed conflict, worsening these conflicts and impeding those norms which hope to inhibit the use of child soldiers. In the public discourse such facts are not discussed along with similar accusations against China or are they conveniently ignored.

Though the North Korean nuclear weapons development programme might be “a worry for the world”, the larger role of the US in provoking such behavior also requires adequate explanation which goes back to the Korean War (June 25, 1950-July 27, 1953) when North Korea had faced the U.S. dilemma of using the nuclear bomb against it to expedite the end of the war. Since then, North Korea has struggled to make itself secure against external threat by acquiring the deterrent of nuclear capability. The technological prowess of North Korea’s nuclear capability is poor. North Korea’s launch of a three-stage Taepodong-2 missile on August 5, 2009 claimed to put "Kwangmyongsong-2" satellite in orbit was a failure. North Korea had first tested a Taepodong-2 in July 2006 estimated to have a range of between 4,000km and 10,000km. According to a BBC report, it failed less than a minute after lift-off. In case of its success, it would have brought the UK, Australia, and even the US mid-west within North Korea’s striking range. On another previous occasion, on August 31, 1998 North Korea attempted to place a small satellite into orbit, carried on board a Taepodong rocket. This too was disastrous in its first stage only which splashed down in the Sea of Japan and the second stage is reported to have flown over the main Japanese island of Honshu.

The scholarly continuum of the acceptance of the epithet ‘rogue’ primarily for North Korea ignores the fact that nations are not black or white but equally share the questionable grey areas of operation in promoting and sustaining their self-interest. Those with greater facility with the medium of language, media reach and wherewithal of greater communicative capabilities manage to create and project images on the international spectrum of opinion building and psychological manipulation which demand deconstruction of such narratives to get a clearer picture of the machinations of the complexity of international relations. If the US is sincere in its endeavour to rein in North Korea’s nuclear ambitions then it should propose Counter Proliferation Policy Initiative as were done in the Nunn Lugar cooperative threat reduction programme which was devised to secure and dismantle weapons of mass destruction and their associated infrastructure in former Soviet Union states-Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus, Russia and Kazakhstan. The expertise that this programme has gained over years in its progress and success can be put to use in engaging North Korea for denuclearization. For that, the US needs to once again open a dialogue with North Korea and give the Six-Party Talks a new lease of life by adopting an accommodative attitude towards a regime- it has long expected to be on the verge of collapse but which has continued to survive despite several setbacks.

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