US in touch with NKorea
Is it time for China to abandon Pyongyang?
BEIJING, Oct 1, (AFP): Washington has opened channels to North Korea to find out if the regime is ready to talk about giving up its nuclear weapons, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Saturday.
His office in Washington quickly clarified that North Korea has shown no interest in such discussions.
Speaking after a day of talks with China’s President Xi Jinping and top diplomats, Tillerson told reporters that US officials are in touch with Pyongyang.
The disclosure follows an escalating war of words between US President Donald Trump and North Korean strongman Kim Jong-Un, and Tillerson issued a call for calm.
Asked how he could know whether the North would even contemplate responding to new sanctions by coming to the table, the US envoy said: “We are probing, so stay tuned.”
Washington has no diplomatic ties with Kim’s autocratic regime, and has been leaning on Beijing to rein in its neighbour’s behaviour through tougher sanctions.
But Tillerson said US diplomats do not rely on China as a go-between in overtures to North Korea, and have themselves talked directly through “our own channels”.
“We ask,” he said. “We have lines of communication with Pyongyang. We’re not in a dark situation, a blackout, we have a couple, three channels open to Pyongyang.”
“We can talk to them, we do talk to them,” he said.
Channels
In Washington, the State Department said that while such communications channels do exist North Korea has shown no interest in talking about giving up its nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile, North Korea’s nuclear antics have rattled its alliance with China to the point that Beijing is allowing the previously unthinkable to be discussed: Is it time to prepare for the renegade regime’s collapse?
While China’s official goal is to bring Washington and Pyongyang to the negotiating table, it is also permitting once taboo debate on contingencies in case war breaks out in the isolated nation across its northeast border.
Observers say the public debate might be a tactic to try and coerce Pyongyang into cooling its weapons programme, with its nuclear and missile tests visibly angering Beijing, which has backed tough new United Nations sanctions on the country.
But it may also indicate growing calls to overhaul its relationship with the North, a longterm ally that it defended during the 1950-53 Korean War and has a mutual defence pact with.
Jia Qingguo, dean of the School of International Studies at Peking University, raised eyebrows earlier in September when he published an article entitled: “Time to prepare for the worst in North Korea”.
Released
The paper was published in English in East Asia Forum, a website of the Australian National University, but it is unlikely that he could have released it without the approval of Chinese authorities.
Jia urged Beijing to start discussing contingency plans with the United States and South Korea — talks that the two nations have sought in the past but China has resisted for fear of upsetting Pyongyang.
“When war becomes a real possibility, China must be prepared. And, with this in mind, China must be more willing to consider talks with concerned countries on contingency plans,” Jia wrote.
Beijing, he said, could discuss who would control North Korea’s nuclear arsenal — either the United States or China.
To prevent a massive flow of refugees across the border, China could send its army to North Korea to create a “safety zone”, Jia said.
Another touchy issue would be who would “restore domestic order in North Korea in the event of a crisis”. China, he said, would object to letting US soldiers cross the 38th parallel into North Korea.