The US and Japan are scheming to further throttle North Korea by demanding that the UN impose economic sanctions, writes Faiza Rady The North Koreans have been at it again. Last week they dared to recklessly test-fire seven missiles into their own backyard. A threat to "regional and international stability" in Bush administration parlance, the missiles all landed in the sea with the exception of an ominous long-range Taepodong-2 missile that fizzled out 40 seconds after its launch. Japan was quick to respond. Backed by the United States but opposed by China, Russia and South Korea, it called for a UN Security Council vote on Monday to impose economic sanctions on Pyongyang. However, the vote has been postponed to support Chinese attempts to ease tensions, said US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Speaking at a press conference in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, a spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) described the latest missile launches as "part of military exercises to increase the nation's military capacity for self-defence. The DPRK's exercise of its legitimate right as a sovereign state is neither bound to any international law nor to bilateral or multilateral agreements," he said. The untold part of the story is that the US and South Korea were in fact conducting joint naval exercises prior to the DPRK's much- decried test-missile launch. Yet the US and Seoul never felt obliged to give the North prior notification of their war games, and the US-controlled Security Council would naturally scoff at any attempts to turn the tables around and impose sanctions on the superpower. Still, Pyongyang remains defiant, contending it is the US and Japan who are escalating tensions in the region, after having reneged on past agreements. Take the 1994 Agreed Framework (AF), an agreement signed between the US and the DPRK. The AF stipulates that North Korea stop construction of their graphite nuclear reactors, in exchange for normalisation of political and economic relations with the US, the construction of two electricity-generating light-water reactors by 2003 and an interim annual purchase of 3.3 millions of oil and fuel until the reactors were built. When none of these conditions were met, with the exception of the oil and fuel sales which the Bush administration suspended in December 2002, Pyongyang declared the AF null and void. The suspension of oil and fuel sales effectively cut off North Korea's life-line. Oil is used for food production, a vital industry in a country with three million people at risk of starvation. Cash- strapped and with its economy in shambles as a result of a long- standing US embargo, the DPRK was left with no option but to resume work on its nuclear energy generating programme. Besides throttling their economy, the US is posing an immediate threat to the North by regularly conducting war games with the South, contends Pyongyang. Apart from the US troops stationed in Iraq, the US military contingent in South Korea is the largest in the world with its massive deployment of some 40,000 soldiers. The Pentagon evidently means business. Besides serving to subdue recalcitrant "rogue states" into submission, military muscle-flexing usually precedes acts of war. Is the DPRK possibly paranoid about US intentions as befits a stubbornly Stalinist and "isolationist" regime? Not according to the record. The US is dead serious about waging war against the North, including nuclear war. In his 2002 State of the Union address, US President George W Bush described North Korea as a sworn enemy of the US, placing the country on his notorious "axis of evil", along with Iraq, Iran and Syria. The Pentagon then released a list of unpredictable "rogue states", including China and the DPRK, countries the US would "pre-emptively" attack with nuclear weapons if push came to shove in its "war against terror". Even former "dovish" US secretary of state, Colin Powell, rejected Pyongyang's demands for a mutual non-aggression pact by declaring: "we won't do non-aggression pacts or treaties, things of that nature." Instead, the US demands as a precondition to negotiations that the DPRK end its nuclear programmes. Pyongyang knows better. A declared "target of pre-emptive nuclear attack", North Korea's survival is contingent on its nuclear deterrence capabilities. It will not willingly self-destruct.
