Engaging Pyongyang in talks

The peddling of nuclear know-how and equipment from Pakistan to North Korea figured notably during the four-day talks on Pyongyang's nuclear programme held last week in Beijing. North Korea, however, denied the accusation that it had received any nuclear technology or material from Pakistan.

The six-nation parleys between North Korea, South Korea, Japan, the United States, China and Russia ended on February 28 without any breakthrough. But the talks were not a total failure and they did succeed in achieving some modest results.

Chinese foreign minister Li Zhaoxing, closing the session, announced that all sides had agreed to set up a working group and hold the next round of talks in Beijing before the end of June.

Keeping in view the " extreme lack of trust" between the United States and North Korea, as the Chinese have put it, and the wide gulf in their respective viewpoints, it has become absolutely necessary to hold further talks on Pyongyang's proposal to "freeze" its nuclear programme and Washington's demand for dismantling all nuclear arms schemes.

There has, however, been a subtle change in US stance. Though North Korea's continued defiance is a major concern for the United States, the latter appears to be moving towards a greater emphasis on diplomatic moves than on sabre rattling during the election year. The Bush administration needs to avoid the collapse of the talks with North Korea before the presidential election in November.

That is why in Washington's view the criterion for success is that the North Koreans do not walk away from negotiations. The Americans appear to be quite satisfied that Pyongyang has agreed to hold lower level talks in the form of " working groups" which will at least provide the illusion of continued progress. The North Koreans, on the other hand, do not have to strike a deal ahead of the November election.

Interestingly, a senior US official has described the talks as "very successful" saying all but Pyongyang has agreed to the goal of nuclear-free North.

According to him, the recent talks have been "very successful in moving the agenda towards our goal of complete, verifiable and irrevocable dismantling of North Korea's nuclear programme (CVID)."

Efforts by senior negotiators to hammer out an agreed text of joint statement failed because North Korea rejected the language used and repeated its denial that it had an enriched uranium weapons programme.

Also, head of the North Korean delegation Kim Gye-gwan repeated his country's denial that it had acquired uranium enriching know-how from Pakistan despite the confession of Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan that he had sold nuclear secrets to Pyongyang.

The crux of the dispute between the United States and North Korea is that Washington accuses Pyongyang of secretly pursuing a uranium enriching programme for making a nuclear bomb. North Korea on the other hand denies any uranium enriching programme and has offered to freeze plutonium facility.

It has emphasized its commitment to keep the peninsula free of nuclear weapons but wants the Americans to promise that they will not attack North Korea and provide diplomatic and economic incentives.

The US is not averse to incentives but it first wants the North to commit itself to verifiably and irreversibly ending the nuclear programme. It thinks that a North Korean pledge to "freeze" its nuclear programme is not enough.

The Chinese and the Russians seem to be taking a more realistic view. In the opinion of Chinese foreign minister Li, the recently concluded second round of talks featured a substantial dialogue and made a "big step forward.".

Li thinks the road is "longer and more bumpy, but the time is on our side, on the side of peace." Russia's chief delegate Alexander Losyukov has described the results achieved as "modest". In his opinion the working groups will provide a " reasonable base" for the continuation of discussion of the problems arising from the different positions held by the United States and North Korea.

Since the first round of the talks in August, there have been three important developments that appear to have put additional pressure on North Korea. Iran, a co-member of "the axis of evil", signed an agreement with the UN watchdog allowing for broad and intrusive inspection of its nuclear programme.

In a major breakthrough, Libya has agreed to abandon and dismantle all of its weapons of mass destruction projects. There were revelations that a top Pakistani scientist headed a black market for peddling nuclear technology. These three developments perhaps explain the change in North Korean attitude from its earlier outright hostility toward the United States.

There is, however, a danger that if the future talks fall apart that will certainly lead to upgraded confrontation between the United States and North Korea. Russia's chief delegate at last week's parleys, Alexander Losyukov, has warned that the impasse can aggravate the situation and lead to military intervention..

According to a report in The Economist, the bare bones of a possible deal have emerged: North Korea will end its nuclear weapons programme in return for aid from China, Russia and South Korea. The United States and Japan have reportedly declined to contribute aid, at least for the time being. However, much remains unclear about the proposed deal .

Is Pyonyang ready to scrap or just freeze its nuclear programme? Does its offer apply only to its plutonium facility, to which it has already admitted, or does it also apply to its secret uranium enriching programme whose technology it has acquired from Pakistan?

North Korea has a history of backtracking on its commitments. In a deal with the United States in 1994, North Korea had agreed to stop making plutonium in return for which the US and its allies would supply Pyongyang with fuel and build two electricity generators from which it is difficult to make weapon-grade materials. But the agreement collapsed in 2002 after Washington said that North Korea had admitted having a secret programme to enrich uranium. (Pyongyang, however, denied having made any such admission).

After the collapse of the agreement, North Koreans expelled the IAEA's inspectors and announced its withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

North Korea has now admitted to trying to make the nuclear bomb by the plutonium route and claims to have produced 8,000 spent nuclear-fuel rods which can produce about six atom bombs. North Korean claim that it is not pursuing the uranium route appears to be hollow in view of the admission by Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan.

According to a report published in The Economist of February 27, alarming details continue to emerge about the extent of the black market in Pakistan's nuclear know-how. A Sri Lankan businessman has revealed to the Malaysian police how Pakistan's top nuclear scientist had sold Iran second-hand parts from centrifuges used to enrich uranium and had also arranged for enriched uranium to go to Libya.

On February 24, the IAEA's inspectors informed the agency's board that they had discovered yet more nuclear experiments which Iran had not yet disclosed. After this disclosure the Americans may revive their demand, dropped last year, that Iran be taken to the United Nations Security Council for getting sanctions imposed against it. If that happens, let us hope and pray that Pakistan does not again steal the limelight for peddling nuclear know-how to other countries.

The writer is a former ambassador.

Train wreck of another kind

History has been derailed. It was chugging along quite satisfactorily until the end of 2000: the cold war long over, no threat of a major war anywhere, democracy spreading even to the most unexpected places by non-violent means, and a growing commitment to multileralism in all the major powers.

Now there is a great (and greatly exaggerated) fear of terrorism, American troops rule over 50 million deeply unhappy Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 55-year-old NATO alliance is starting to come apart under the strain, and even the United Nations is at risk.

If it were a train wreck, the investigators would not just be asking what happened; they would also be asking how likely it was to have happened. Was this just a fluke accident, or was it a system failure that was bound to happen sooner or later? Well, this is a different kind of train wreck, but the same question is still worth asking: was the world bound to end up in this mess, or have we been the victims of a huge historical accident?

The two main forces that have driven us off the familiar track and down this worrisome detour are the Islamist terrorists of Al Qaeda and the neo-conservatives who populate the upper reaches of the Bush administration.

Was it really inevitable that Al Qaeda would invent a novel way to carry out a massive terrorist attack that would cause thousands of casualties? And was it equally inevitable that American neo-conservatives would use that terrible event as a launching pad for their own project?

Al Qaeda and the other radical Islamist organisations associated with it are very small, very weak, and very isolated even within their own society. In almost thirty years of trying, the Islamists have not succeeded in toppling even a single pro-Western government in the Arab world.

Before 9/11, most observers of the Arab world would have said that the Islamists had already peaked in terms of popular support - without ever becoming truly popular - and were starting down a long, slow decline towards irrelevance.

Then Osama bin Laden's people hit upon a new means of attack that could cause mass casualties: suicide teams of aircraft hijackers that included trained pilots. Nobody had ever considered that within the realm of probability before, so nobody was really watching out for it, and the attack was a spectacular success. But it was a one-off success, unlikely ever to be repeated, since now the security forces know what to look for - nor are there dozens of other novel ways for terrorists to wreak huge damage just waiting to be discovered.

All of Al Qaeda's subsequent attacks have been perfectly conventional car-bombs, and the casualties they have caused over the past thirty months do not exceed one thousand people. Even with the short-term boost that their spectacular attack on 9/11 gave to the Islamist cause, they have still failed to overthrow a single Arab government. They just got lucky once. It was a fluke.

As for the neo-cons in the Bush administration, it was an electoral fluke of the first order that they were even in office at the right time to exploit the Islamist attack for their own purposes.

Their project was the unilateral exercise of American power to create a US-friendly global environment - 'pax americana', they used to call it - and they had even chosen an attack on Iraq as the way to launch it (which is why an attack on Iraq was on the agenda in the very first Bush cabinet meeting in January, 2001). But they had not even mentioned this project during the 2000 election campaign, and in normal circumstances they would have had a hard time persuading the US public to back it.

It was the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington that convinced a majority of Americans that the world was full of dangerous people who had to be dealt with, and gave the neo-cons the chance to hitch their 'pax americana' project to the 'war on terror' that Mr Bush proclaimed after 9/11.

The invasion of Afghanistan would probably have happened even if Al Gore had been president: popular pressure to punish the regime that had given the terrorists bases was enormous, and the attack on Afghanistan was seen both in the US and elsewhere as a legitimate and entirely legal response to the terrorist attack. But Iraq was a very different case.- Copyright

Muslims' pre-poll dilemma

Muslims in India number between 130 and 140 million. But they are spread in such a way that if they want to elect members of their own community, they can at best win 10 to 12 seats in the 545-member Lok Sabha. However, the 13 per cent of their vote can tip the scales in some 100 constituencies because of joint electorate.

The community seldom looked beyond the Congress in the past. At best, a few regional parties caught its attention since it regarded them as secular. The Bhartiya Janata Party, or its earlier version, the Jana Sangh, was never in the picture because the Muslims found it biased against them.

Still for the first time, many in the community, particularly the educated lot, are fiercely discussing the BJP as an option for casting their vote in the election beginning on April 20. Some of them are even toying with the idea of joining the party as Arif Mohammad Khan has done. They believe they can change its thinking from within.

Also, the growing impression is that the BJP under the leadership of Atal Behari Vajpayee is moving towards liberalism. There is yet another consideration: many Muslims argue that since they have to live in India, they should cultivate the BJP which they consider is the most representative body of the Hindus.

The Muslims who have suffered the pangs of partition - and they are still paying for it - are justified in seeking a person or party to be their messiah in the difficult time they face. The Congress, its refuge, took the community for granted and left it to fend for itself. But that was the time when this attitude mattered little since India's temper was secular.

Even seven to eight years ago, saffronization was too limited to be feared. The BJP had to resign from office after 13 days because no party was willing to sully its image by joining hands with communal forces. The situation has changed since.

The BJP-led government has nearly completed its term with the support of those who once swore by secularism. Power became the ideology for them. This made the Muslims worry whether secularism had a future in India.

The BJP leaders' appeals to the Muslims to join the party have come at a time when many among them are uncertain and confused. Arif told me that he did not get the ears of the Hindus at any platform and expected to convince them through the BJP that the Muslims were not their adversaries. On the other hand, many Muslims have begun to say: If Hindutva is what the Hindus want they can have it since they constitute 80 per cent of the population.

If this is the approach, it is wrong. The majority of Hindus are pluralistic in their thinking. Only some in the upper caste have redefined Indian culture as Hindu. Still the challenge to pluralism is a challenge to all Indians - the Muslims or others - to prove their commitment to the basic doctrine of secularism. My worry is that the Muslims may one day convince themselves that they are second rate citizens and may acquiesce to Hindutva in the absence of a united front of secular forces.

The nation has to go back to the ideals for which it had struggled to win freedom. The top on the agenda was to build a country which would be secular and not mix religion with politics or the state.

The majority of the people opposed the two-nation theory and consecrated pluralism in the constitution they adopted even after the country was partitioned on the basis of religion. The constitution guaranteed equality to all before law, without making any difference on the basis of caste, creed or colour.

The ruling BJP believes that Hindutva and secularism are synonymous. The party cites a Supreme Court judgment to buttress its contention. Vajpayee argues secularism is pitted against Hindutva in the belief that the two are antithetical to one another.

This is incorrect and untenable. L.K. Advani rejects the talk that the BJP has put Hindutva on the back burner for the sake of power politics. Whatever its contention, the Vajpayee government is busy saffronizing even the administration.

Count the appointments of governors, heads of institutions, chairmen and members of Prashar Bharti and film censor boards and many secretaries to the government of India. There is hardly anyone outside the charmed circle of the RSS which makes no bones about establishing a 'Hindu rashtra'.

True, the BJP has put its best foot forward. But the Muslims should have known by this time that militancy and moderation are part of the Sangh parivar's tactics. The RSS came to the fore in the 1940s, particularly around partition. A climate of militant Hindu nationalism culminated in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by Nathuram Godse, a former RSS member. Jawaharlal Nehru took a series of steps which weakened Hindu communalism.

The RSS revived its militancy in the 1960s by latching on to the demand that the government should ban cow slaughter. After a few years, the parivar took the line of moderation.

Vajpayee was made the BJP president from 1969 to 1972. The RSS found in him a perfect mukhut (mask) to hide its design of changing secular India into a theocratic state.

The militant phase of the Sangh parivar was seen again when Advani led the rath yatra to Ayodhya. Hundreds of Muslims were killed. Even after a lapse of 14 years, those who committed murder have not been punished. The Babri masjid was razed to the ground in 1992. The inquiry commission appointed nearly 12 years ago is still working - and getting extension after extension - to find out who the guilty are. Whoever they are, they are definitely not the Muslims.

The parivar adopted a low profile after destroying the Babri masjid. But militancy was back in full fury in 2002 when as many as 2000 Muslims were killed during a planned massacre in Gujarat. The complicity of the state government is proved and reproved almost everyday by the new evidence which is coming forth against the state police.

Still Vajpayee claims that during his regime there were no communal riots expect the 'chhota' (small) ones. The Gujarat massacre was the biggest after partition. It was no aberration, as the BJP leadership goes on saying. It was plain ethnic cleansing. And if Vajpayee is sincere about winning the confidence of the Muslims, some action should still be taken against chief minister Narender Modi.

Those who feel that Vajpayee is distancing the BJP away from the RSS should recall his words in America: "No one can take away my right to remain a swayamsevak". And those who differentiate between the BJP and the RSS should be wiser after the disclosure by Ram Vilas Paswan, a former minister in the Vajpayee cabinet: "There is no difference between the BJP, Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal."

The writer is a freelance columnist based in New Delhi.