North Korea offered talks Thursday with South Korea and the United States, but laid out pre-conditions that Seoul dismissed as ‘absurd’ and analysts said would do little to reduce soaring tensions. The demands laid out by the North’s main military body included the withdrawal of UN sanctions and a permanent end to South Korea-US joint military drills.The North’s conditions were swiftly rejected by South Korea which, together with the United States, has made any talks conditional on the North putting its nuclear weapons programme on the table.
‘North Korea’s demands are totally incomprehensible. It’s absurd,’ foreign ministry spokesman Cho Tai-Young told reporters.
South Korea’s new president, Park Geun-Hye, has made tentative — and conditional — offers of talks, but the North’s initial response was to swat them away as a ‘crafty trick’.
Some analysts see the North’s engagement in a debate over dialogue — no matter how unrealistic the conditions — as a welcome shift from the apocalyptic threats that have been pouring out of Pyongyang. But others like Daniel Pinkston, a North Korea expert with the International Crisis Group, ruled out any softening of Pyongyang’s position and said those hoping for dialogue were being wilfully naive.
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‘So what is there to even talk about?’ Pinkston said. ‘The North is committed. It’s burned its bridges. Any reversal could only be made at immense domestic cost to the regime.
‘And there is simply no way any US administration is going to sit down and confirm a change in the status quo with the North as a nuclear state,’ Pinkston said. ‘We’re still firmly on a collision course, and it’s not going to end well.'
The first step demanded by the North’s National Military Commission was the withdrawal of ‘cooked up’ UN sanctions that were imposed after the nuclear test in February. North Korea has repeatedly cited the sanctions as a prime trigger for the current crisis.
| Good. They're working. Tighten them up... |