Hydrablog

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/27/AR2008032704075.html
North Korea Test-Fires Missiles In Ongoing Show of Truculence
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, March 29, 2008; A09 [DPRK] [ROK-DPRK relations] [as 6-way talks chug along with marginal progress] [factions within DPRK leadership] [allows Kim to be for and against edicts of 6-way talks] [follwoup] following yesterday’s reports of a fracas between ROK and DPRK as result of new president in ROK, Lee Myung-bak] [also as result of factions within DPRK reported couple days ago] [yesterday’s repot that DPRK fires missiles again] [**]
TOKYO, March 28 -- North Korea test-fired a volley of missiles into the sea Friday and warned that it may stop disabling its nuclear facilities unless the United States drops its demands [****] [not unusual for DPRK but reports now attribute bombast to factionalism] [***] for more details about the North's nuclear arsenal.
The missile launch and the combative warning -- which accused the Bush administration of "persistently trying to cook up fictions" -- came one day after the North expelled 11 South Korean officials from an industrial park north of the demilitarized zone that separates the two Koreas.
South Korea downplayed the missile firings, characterizing them as part of a routine military exercise. [***] "We believe the North does not want a deterioration of relations between South and North," a government spokesman said Friday.
Still, three truculent actions in two days suggest that North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, after a relatively placid stretch of cooperative diplomacy, is feeling increasingly peeved by demands from the United States and South Korea.
The Bush administration is refusing to lift diplomatic sanctions against the North until it explains its suspected uranium enrichment program and details any efforts to sell nuclear technology to Syria or other countries.
On Friday, the North again insisted that it has "never enriched uranium nor rendered cooperation to any other country."
South Korea's new president, Lee Myung-bak, who was sworn in last month, is taking a much tougher line than his predecessors in dealing with the North. His government has said it will condition food aid and economic assistance on improvements in human rights and on timely dismantlement of the North's nuclear program. [****]
The flare-up in tension on the Korean Peninsula comes at an unusually stressful time for Kim's government, with the North facing dire food shortages due to weather-related crop failures, the soaring world price of food and reductions in aid from South Korea, China and the U.N. World Food Program.
The shortages are projected to peak late this summer, when China, the North's closest ally and primary benefactor, will be hosting the Olympic Games.
Analysts say that China expects Kim's government not to allow disturbances inside North Korea that could send hungry refugees spilling across the border into China during the Aug. 8-24 Games. [******]
For reasons that have not been explained publicly, China has been supplying less food assistance to North Korea in the past three years, according to figures compiled by the World Food Program. This year, in order to keep more food for its own population, China has also imposed tariffs on food exports. Combined with much higher grain prices on world markets, the 22 percent tariff has substantially reduced the impoverished North's capacity to buy food from any source.
Perhaps more important, South Korea has this spring delayed delivery of the free fertilizer that the North has come to rely on. As a result, analysts say, this year's harvest in the North will almost certainly fall far short of what is needed to feed the country next winter.
The World Food Program has warned that this summer the North will have about 25 percent less food than it needs to feed the country's 23 million people.
The areas most severely affected are in the rural north, but a South Korean aid group said this month that food shortages are also affecting the country's elite in the capital, Pyongyang.
Citing unnamed sources inside the country, Good Friends, a Buddhist group that sends food and other aid to the North, said that mid- and low-level officials in the capital were not receiving rations of rice.
In view of the near collapse of the state-controlled economy in the North and a sharp increase in corruption among local police, analysts say that widespread discontent over food shortages -- especially if it spreads among the urban elite -- has the potential to destabilize Kim's government.
Further complicating the situation for Kim, there are reports that North Korean military and industrial officials are unhappy with his government for allowing U.S. diplomats to visit a missile factory.
Keith Luse, an aide to Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), visited North Korea in February and later wrote that Kim's efforts to strike a deal with the United States on nuclear weapons might be a "stretch too far" for hard-liners in the North.
Pronouncements about the inner workings of the secretive North Korean government are mostly speculative. But the government's actions in the past two days show that, for whatever reasons, it is much less amiable than it was as recently as last month, when it welcomed the New York Philharmonic for an unprecedented concert in Pyongyang.
A statement Friday from the North Korean Foreign Ministry warned that the United States is endangering an agreement brokered last year by six nations. The deal was intended to rid the North of nuclear weapons while providing it with energy assistance and ending its diplomatic and economic isolation.
The North insisted in Friday's statement that it has submitted paperwork fulfilling all its obligations under the agreement.
"Should the U.S. delay the settlement of the nuclear issue, persistently trying to cook up fictions, it will seriously affect the disabling of nuclear facilities which has been underway so far with a great deal of effort," [****] the statement said.
The Bush administration has said North Korea has, in fact, disabled much of its primary nuclear facility, a plutonium plant at Yongbyon.
But it says that the North has failed to explain the extent of a different bombmaking process -- uranium enrichment -- and has refused to talk about whether it has shared nuclear technology with other countries, including Syria.
© 2008 The Washington Post Company