The Untold History of North Korea
The agreed framework deal that time forgot.
All are agreed that the regime in North Korea is of the most evil that the world has known, but while news events are reported in a vacuum, free from context, evil does not exist in a vacuum free from context.
The Clinton Administration entered into an a agreement in 94’ which pundits (if they ever report upon it at all) falsely say that North Korea broke. North Korea had a nuclear program which, at that time, was creating plutonium. Once entering into this agreement they FROZE that program for 12 YEARS, as well as making other concessions which are never reported.
In return, the USA agreed to provide them with 500,000 tonnes of fuel oil a year in exchange for shutting down their reactor, and USA also agreed to help them acquire two light water reactors for them, built by an international consortium, because these were considered more safe as far as nuclear proliferation was concerned. That agreement held for a number of years, but the most important part was that both sides agreed to drop their hostile policy towards each other and stop treating each other as enemy nations. This was thought to allow as quick a move forwards as possible to full political and economical normalisation. Could America have proven to be a good influence on North Korea? Should this agreement - signed in October 1994 - have continued to have been honoured by the American side, could this have facilitated the gradual economic and societal liberation of North Korea also?
We will never know.
In November 1994 the Republicans took control of the house and Senate for the first time since the 1940s (lead by newt Gingrich) and the first thing the Republicans did was begin attacking and undermining the agreement. Within a couple of years the oil shipments were delayed and the North Koreans felt there was no movement towards ending the hostile policy, they began complaining vociferously to any US representatives that they met with that the US was not keeping its side of the bargain. They felt that the US broke the agreement. But out of the 1994 agreement came another set of negotiations about their missiles, and by the end of the Clinton administration’s term, they were very close to an agreement under which NK would have ceased its production and testing of all missiles. This is not to say the Clinton administration’s hands were altogether clean in foreign police (they bombed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan and exacerbated conflict with their intervention in Kosovo, for example) but on the issue of North Korea, credit should be given where due - and it has not been due to many.
When the Bush came to power in early 2001 the neo-cons, lead by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, etc., were dead against negotiation with North Korea. They did everything they could to undermine the progress that had been made, and in 2002 they dredged up old intelligence that showed NK had bought equipment to enrich uranium, which could have lead to another way to develop the bomb. The Bush admin sent a state department official to NK to tell them that their agreement is over because they were building this uranium facility, which turned out not to be true. North Korea had denied they were building this uranium facility, despite the fact that they had a right to do it under the existing agreements. They said they were willing to talk about the issue but under the Bush admin the US refused to talk to them. Bush ripped up the agreement and put North Korea on the list of the Axis of evil.
In response NK said, “Ok, since there is no agreement, we’re going to go ahead with a nuclear program”; and by 2006 they had exploded their first nuclear bomb.
This end is where the media narrative seems to begin.
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