YONHAP NEWS

(News Focus) Obama assures Seoul not being bypassed in U.S. talks with Pyongyang

By Lee Chi-dong
SEOUL, Nov. 19 (Yonhap) -- On his first trip to South Korea, U.S. President Barack Obama sought Thursday to show to both South and North Korea that Washington's imminent dialogue with Pyongyang will be conducted through close consultations with Seoul, officials and analysts here said.

   Obama gave the media an unexpected headline by announcing that he will send a high-powered envoy to the North Korean capital on Dec. 8. The Obama administration has already notified Pyongyang of its plan to dispatch Stephen Bosworth, special representative for North Korea policy, in what would be its first bilateral contact with the North since taking office for the purpose of reactivating the dormant six-way nuclear negotiations.

   After months of belligerent behavior marked by missile and nuclear tests in spring, Pyongyang's top leader Kim Jong-il said North Korea could return to the six-party talks, pending the success of the bilateral talks with Washington.

   "President Obama seems to have considered South Korea's position," a South Korean nuclear negotiator told Yonhap News Agency, referring to Obama making the announcement himself. "It demonstrates that the two sides are in close consultation with each other on the U.S. plan for direct talks with North Korea."

   Cheong Seong-chang, senior researcher at Sejong Institute, a security think tank in Seoul, agreed with that view.

   "It shows that President Obama explained to President Lee in detail about the plan for dialogue with North Korea during the summit held just before Bosworth's trip," he said.

   It is a message to North Korea that "you should befriend South Korea to become a friend of the U.S.," he added.

   South Korea felt brushed aside in the early 1990s when the U.S. reached out to North Korea while inter-Korean relations remained frozen. Hard-line officials here say it may still be premature for the U.S. to talk bilaterally with North Korea, which they argue has just begun to feel the pain from the U.N.-led sanctions imposed on it after the missile and nuclear tests.

   In a joint press conference after their summit, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak and Obama, while repeating their warnings and incentive offers to the North, reaffirmed their resolve to break away from the past pattern of dealing with the recalcitrant communist regime Obama said provokes and then returns to talks, only to leave again demanding more concessions.

   The South Korean president said he and Obama "completely agreed on the need to resolve the North Korean nuclear issue in one single step as I proposed under a grand bargain."

   The grand bargain, a phrase Lee used publicly in September as a means to North Korea's denuclearization, aims to strike a comprehensive one-shot deal with North Korea on its nuclear ambitions, an alternative to the piecemeal approach under the Bush administration which sought to resolve the issue in stages starting with easy steps.

   Obama, without using the term "grand bargain," said he and Lee "are in full agreement on a common approach going forward," adding Pyongyang will be granted a host of economic and political rewards if it takes "concrete and irreversible steps" toward denuclearization.

   South Korean officials stress that South Korea and the U.S. share the grand bargain concept regardless of the expression used by Obama.

   Cheong, the Sejong Institute researcher, said Lee and Obama may agree to the need for a comprehensive resolution of the nuclear issue but not necessarily the grand bargain plan, which Cheong sees as intended to pressure Pyongyang through a unified proposal among its five dialogue partners. The other parties in the six-party talks are China, Russia, and Japan.

   In their meeting, Lee and Obama sidestepped thorny issues, such as calls by South Korean conservatives to delay transferring operational control of South Korean troops back to Seoul from Washington, slated for April 2012, or the lingering debate over whether South Korea should send combat troops to Afghanistan.

   Seoul plans to increase the number of aid workers in Afghanistan next year and attach troops to protect them.

   Obama, welcoming the decision, said the contribution will "help support the strengthening of Afghanistan's capacity."

   Obama kept his Seoul trip brief in comparison to his stay in Japan and China.

   A South Korean foreign ministry official said Obama's schedule in Seoul was relatively simple but added he will have a chance to do more when he visits Seoul again to attend the G-20 economic summit next year.

   lcd@yna.co.kr
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