Evening Walkthrough February 11

Remarks by Christopher R. Hill
Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs
Evening Walk-Through, St. Regis Hotel
Beijing, China
February 11, 2007

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  Hi. Good evening.  How are you?  We were informed today by the Chinese side of a decision that we really concur with that tomorrow will be the last day.  So, those of you who are running out of shirts, you just need one more shirt. 

We have spent the last few days, I think as many of you know, discussing energy issues.  To be sure, we have been prepared to provide some energy assistance, but we’ve not been prepared to provide energy as a substitute for denuclearization.  We are not interested in an energy deal; we are interested in a denuclearization deal.  And, in fact, it’s a denuclearization deal that would be, the purpose of which would be to address some of the underlying problems in the region and really to put Northeast Asia -- and especially the Korean Peninsula -- on a very different footing. 

I had a lengthy and very frank meeting this evening with the head of DPRK delegation.  I laid out for him what we were prepared to do, and what we are not prepared to do.  And so I gave him something to think about. 

We have throughout the process worked very closely with other delegations.  I would say all five delegations came very much prepared to deal with denuclearization.  And so I think it is for the DPRK now to discuss this among themselves, to discuss this with their capital, Pyongyang.  And then we’ll see whether something can be done in the morning.

Again, the Chinese informed us late in the afternoon -- we had all, the head of delegation meeting, around 4:00 or so.  And the decision was that tomorrow would, in fact, be the last day.  We are certainly prepared for that. 

We worked very hard on this.  I would say a number of delegations have worked very hard.  We have looked for all kinds of ways to move this process forward.   But this is not about energy; this is about denuclearization.  This is about addressing the problems of weapons of mass destruction on the Korean Peninsula.  So, we will see how we do tomorrow.  And I would expect to leave here either tomorrow evening or Tuesday morning, depending on the flight schedule.

QUESTION:  Can you elaborate the difference between those two types of deals, a little bit more concrete?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  We were prepared to look at some energy assistance, because the DPRK really needs energy assistance.  Actually, we are looking at economic and energy assistance.  But we are not looking for assistance of that kind that would somehow allow the DPRK to avoid denuclearization.  That is, we are not looking to provide energy assistance so that they could simply -- so that they could avoid taking the further steps on denuclearization.  I think it is important to understand that the Six-Party process, and maybe it’s different from previous processes, but certainly our goal is to achieve what we set out in the September ’05 statement.  Our goal is a complete denuclearization. 

Now, we understand you can't just get there in one jump.  You have to step several steps; so we are prepared to take several steps.  We are prepared to help the DPRK along the way, especially in economic and energy terms.  But we are not interested in providing that kind of assistance so that they don’t have to take the next step.  It’s very important that they continue the steps and finally to get out of this nuclear business, which I do believe has really caused great harm to their economy and has created a situation of insecurity and isolation for the DPRK. 

We’ll have to see.  I must say, any of those of you who have been involved in negotiation, you know that there is a point at which you set a deadline, and you lay out your position, and you hope that the other side is interested in trying to cut a deal.  But at the end of the day, we cannot be more concerned about the DPRK’s future than the DPRK is.  They have to decide what’s important for them.  They have to decide what their future is, and I cannot be more worried about than they are.  We will just have to see. 

QUESTION:  Is it the matter of wording or numbers at this point?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  No, it’s an amount of energy.  Again, we want to help their economy, and we especially want to help the North Korean people who, we believe, have suffered enough.  But the way to help them is to get them to give up these weapons and to get out of a business that, I think, has really caused great harm to them.  So we can help them through the provision of some assistance, but that assistance shouldn’t be used as a substitute for dealing with the root cause of their problem -- the root cause of their isolation, which is their effort to try to develop these weapons.  We have another day, and anyone who is familiar with negotiation realizes that often most of the work takes place on the last day.  We have to see.

QUESTION:  So, is it the U.S. insisting on complete denuclearization, that they need to get out of the nuclear business?  And they’re saying they would only do that if you provide them X amount of, or tons of crude oil?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  I love the way you express yourself with your hands, but I still don’t understand the question.  Try it again, OK?

QUESTION:  Right.  Denuclearization.  Completely getting out of the nuclear business… 

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  Yes.  We have a September ’05 statement, I think a very important statement.  Six countries who agreed that what we are aiming at is complete denuclearization.  But we were also prepared to address some of the underlying causes of the problems in Northeast Asia.  We are prepared to address the issue of finding a peace mechanism on the Korean Peninsula.  We are prepared to address some of the problems of essentially building a community in Northeast Asia.  But we need the DPRK to be signed up to the proposition that they need to get rid of nuclear weapons.  There is no role for nuclear weapons in this process. 

We’ve waited a long time.  The DPRK had a number of reasons, self-described reasons, why they could not participate in the implementation of the statement.  We have really tried to work with them multilaterally, bilaterally, to get them to a position where they were prepared to deal with the issue at hand.  I felt, and I think the DPRK would agree, that we came up with some pretty good proposals in Berlin that would enable us to go forward.  And now we have this one remaining issue.

I think it is encouraging that throughout these four days, when we have talked about energy, we have not seen other problems really arise; energy seems to be the issue for them.  We have to keep that in perspective.  That is, the perspective of trying to assist the DPRK economy, not the perspective of putting ourselves in a position of allowing the DPRK to take assistance and avoid denuclearization.

QUESTION:  Mr. Ambassador…

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  They should allow you to stand in the front.  OK? 

QUESTION:  There are certain [inaudible] reporting that you and Mr. Kim Gye Gwan agreed in Berlin that the financial sanctions will be lifted within 30 days and preliminary implementation measures will be begun within 60 days.  I was wondering if you could confirm this.

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  There are a lot of leaks as to what the nature of the discussions were.  I am not gong to corroborate or go into all that, except to say we are down to energy.  OK?  We worked out issues, we worked out ways to address many of the other issues, and we are down to energy.  And so that’s the issue at hand.  If we can come to an agreement on what can be done to assist their economy and then maintain the momentum for the complete denuclearization, we are going to be fine.

So all these other issues you mentioned, it’s very nice that you’ve gotten people to talk about them, but they are not the problem right now.

 QUESTION:  Where is the process if you got home without a deal tomorrow?  Are you still on standby for an offer?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  I think we have a real problem if we cannot reach an agreement on this.  I am not going to foretell the future, but it would be a real problem.

QUESTION:  Is the problem just as much about timing, that they are continuing to frontload the assistance to the level that you’re… and they’re not following through on their side of the bargain?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  They often want things up front, but the real problem is -- The goal here is denuclearization, and it leads to a number of other approaches to addressing the problems of the region.  There have been energy deals in the past.  This is not an energy deal.  So we cannot really look at energy as a substitute for addressing the real problems of the region, starting with the problem of nuclear weapons.

QUESTION:  Did they shift today?  They have a shift in position?  Because in the past, you’ve talked we’d worked through a lot of the toughest issues. 

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  We have got another day to go, and I had a very, very frank, honest exchange with the DPRK delegation this evening.  I think they understand where we stand, and they understand what needs to be done.  We want to make progress on implementation, but we can’t do it in a way that will make it impossible to make further progress -- because we are not interested in just stopping at one step.  We are not interested in stopping at initial steps.  We are interested in completing the journey to denuclearization. 

These are tough things when you are in the middle of these negotiations.  But at a certain point, you have to kind of look at where you are and where you have to go and make certain decisions.  I am very comfortable with what we have done.  It’s true of any negotiation and, frankly, it’s true in anyone’s life.  You just do as much as you can, and when you feel you’ve done as much as you can, I think you can kind of relax about it and feel you’ve done everything you can do.  That’s kind of where we are in this.  By the way, all of us, I mean all the five countries, have worked very hard, with very good cooperation throughout.  So it’s for them to decide what they want to do. 

QUESTION:  Ambassador Hill, are you getting a sense that this is more bluster or conviction by North Korea, and that you actually have a chance of coming to agreement tomorrow?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  We are down to one day.  And if you look at a negotiation, often -- in any negotiation, you look at the pattern of things that happen -- it’s often on the last day.  I am not here telling you the negotiations have failed, because there is another day.  We have to see.

QUESTION:  Is this a “take it or leave it” offer for North Korea?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  I am not writing your leads for you.  You have to write your own lead.  We had a very good discussion about what can be done and what cannot be done.  And I kind of laid out what it is we are in this for, which is complete denuclearization.  We’re prepared to do this in stages.  I understand you cannot dig a well with one shovelful, to use the Chinese expression.  But you ultimately have to be assured that the other guy is also interested in going in the direction you are going. 

QUESTION:  You’re so confident that it’s just this one issue.  There were a bunch of things that came up today, but no other floorboards are starting to stick up?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  If something fails, a lot of other things will pop up.  There’s no question.  But if it’s successful, it will probably be that the one issue gets resolved.  Look, if we don’t resolve this issue, probably there will be ten other issues that get mentioned.  But I can tell you the last four days we’ve been discussing energy.

QUESTION:  Can you [see] any flexibilities of the North Korean side in this energy issues?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  Again, I don’t want to go into too many details on my discussion, but I certainly didn’t get the impression they wanted to just forget about this session here.  But you’d have to ask them rather than me.  I’m not a good mind reader. 

QUESTION:  It is just the energy demand that leads you to believe they’re not committed to denuclearization?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  That’s a fair question.  If I were they, I wouldn’t let this thing go by just because of some energy assistance.  I would not.  And if I did let it go by because of energy assistance, there would probably be some other things in my mind that I would have let it go by for.  Again, if it doesn’t work – and we’ve got another day to go – you should ask them, “Was it just the energy, or was it other stuff?”.  I’m sure they’d be willing to answer you. 

QUESTION:  Mr. Hill, you said the issue is energy.  What makes you confident as a negotiator that the issue is energy and not a broader unwillingness to move towards denuclearization?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  Oh, I don’t know.  It’s hard to answer that.  A couple of other issues have come up from time to time.  But the hardy perennial of the last few days has been energy, and I think I understand where they are coming from on it.  So I would say it’s energy, but I could be proven wrong.

QUESTION:  Mr. Hill, are they basically saying…

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  Wait -- this gentleman hasn’t had a chance to ask a question.

QUESTION:  Thank you.

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  You’re welcome.

QUESTION:  So what is the down side for them if you in fact recess tomorrow night?  They already have UN sanctions pending against them.  What you have laid out for them is going to be the cost of this ending?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  The downside is, I think, the diplomatic process certainly would be dealt a significant setback.  It doesn’t mean we are not going to deal with this issue.  I think I’ve said many times we have a lot of options for dealing with the issue.  We just don’t have the option of walking away from it.  We’ve got to deal with it.  We have really wanted to make the Six-Party process work, and we have worked very hard to do that. 

It was interesting talking to the Chinese -- who, by the way, are working very, very hard on this – talking to them this evening.  I realized how the U.S. and China have been able to work much more closely together, thanks to this process.  I think I’ve made that point many times.  We have to -- Look, we’ve got another day to go, but I am just kind of sketching this out for you.  I hadn’t planned to talk about this specific issue, but I noticed that it’s been mentioned elsewhere; so I might as well let you know it seems to be the energy. 

Certainly we need to make sure all the countries in region are able to talk to each other.  I feel that my delegation has been in very close contact with all the other delegations.  We have flat out worked.  We’ve done everything we can do bilaterally, multilaterally.  We’ve had good partners throughout this. We’ve been working, on many of the denuclearization issues we’ve been working very closely with the Japanese, with the South Koreans.  It’s been very good chemistry, but we’ve got to get this issue done.  Otherwise we’re not going to be able to move ahead. 

QUESTION:  Ambassador, you keep talking about the first step – and you don’t want to take one step, you want to complete the whole journey.  So what is the first step that North Korea is offering?  What have they offered to do?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  We have a whole list of so-called initial actions which I have refrained, up until now, from describing.  But I think as soon as the deal gets done or doesn’t get done, I’ll be happy to describe them all for you.  But right now -- We have a whole list, and I was very pleased – and we worked on this in Berlin – that the DPRK is prepared to do this.  And they reiterated that today.  So there’s a lot on the list that I think is in our interest if we can get it done.  But we can’t have a situation where energy, where they look for a level of energy whose real purpose is to avoid taking subsequent steps.  Because if we stop at this list, if just do what we hoped to do in this early harvest, or these initial actions, we haven’t really solved anything.  We need to go forward and finally finish the task of implementing the September agreement. 

QUESTION:  Is North Korea offering a freeze then?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  I don’t like that word.  I’ve told you I don’t like that word, and the reason I don’t like that word is it implies things can thaw out again.  What we are looking for is to get them to shut things down and finally dismantle them and abandon them.  We’re not satisfied with stopping at some intermediate step. 

QUESTION:  So it’s sort of a question of amounts, right?  And not sequencing?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  You know, you asked me about sequencing the other day and I didn’t understand you, and I still don’t understand you.  We have an agreement on what we need to do, and we have a timeframe during which we need to do it.  What we don’t have is an agreement on energy assistance for this energy-starved country.  They do need help, and we’re prepared to help them.  But we’re not prepared to do it in a way that gets us away from the real task here, which is denuclearization.  With denuclearization, a lot of things are going to be possible for the DPRK.  Without denuclearization, it’s going to be a very, very tough road. 

QUESTION:  The amount that they are demanding is unreasonable?  It’s too much?  Is that what you’re saying?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  Again, I would rather you write your own lead.

QUESTION:  Mr. Hill, why this one day deadline?  Why?  Do the negotiators feel that more days are no longer useful?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  We’ve spent the last four days basically talking about one issue.  And I think if we declared a deadline a week from now, we’d probably spend the next seven days talking about it.  I don’t think we need to talk about it.  I think we need to make some decisions about it.  I think one day is plenty time to make a decision about it.  Everyone’s position is well known at this point. 

QUESTION:  There was a report that Mr. Kim Gye Gwan has a booked a flight back to Pyongyang for Tuesday.  Did that have anything to do with the [inaudible]?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  You’ll have to check with the airline.  I just don’t know.  I suspect he could get on the flight even without -- I’m sure he could get on it even as a standby passenger, but you’d just have to check with the airline.  I don’t know.

QUESTION:  Barring a breakthrough tomorrow, is this whole process in trouble?  And what are the options?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  I’ll tell you what.  If this doesn’t work, I’ll be happy to talk to you all and talk to you about where I see the process.  But let’s put it this way; it wouldn’t help. 

QUESTION:  Ambassador Hill, what’s your schedule tomorrow?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  I haven’t really thought about it.  I think I’ll head out there to the Diaoyutai in the morning.  And if there’s a willingness to deal with these issues, I think we’re going to be doing a lot of work tomorrow.  And if we don’t have anything, I might try to get on an earlier flight. 

QUESTION:  Mr. Ambassador?  Does the Japanese unwillingness to provide aid handicap you, or is this solely the comfort level of the North Koreans?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  The problem is not Japan.  The problem is the DPRK.  I think I can state that fairly boldly there.  We have worked very well with the Japanese delegation.  We have been very close to the Japanese delegation throughout.  Obviously Japan has some issues that need to be addressed in bilateral context, just as the DPRK has issues with us that need to be addressed bilaterally.  And we have set up mechanisms for doing that.  But the mechanisms will only work if we can come to an agreement.  But the problem is not Japan.  Japan has been with us, very closely together with us.  The problem is the DPRK has got to make a decision about denuclearization. 

Hey, I really want to get upstairs and go to bed, if you don’t mind.

QUESTION:  Is this the issue that…

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  One more question.  OK.

QUESTION:  Is this the issue you wanted to kick down the road?  And, if so, when would you have taken this…

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  We’ve always had the approach that there would be a working group for economic and energy matters.  It’s always been my view that, rather than discuss energy amounts, it would be much better to put them in a working group.  Not so much to kick them down the road -- that is, to avoid dealing with them -- but rather to put them in a working group, where you could actually have people who know what they’re talking about address them.  My ability to discuss megawatts and tons of fuel oil and things like that is fairly limited.  I know how to gas up my car at a self service gas station, but I shouldn’t be negotiating that.  It should get to a working group, where you can actually look at what things are really needed, et cetera, et cetera.  So that was the idea.  It wasn’t to kick it down the road to avoid it; it was simply to kick it over to people who know what they’re talking about. 

QUESTION:  Can you identify the other working groups?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  If you don’t mind, let me just do that tomorrow, either when we have the deal or don’t have the deal.  But I would be happy to name the five working groups.  I think you’ve got a few of them already.  You know that the idea is there would be a couple of bilateral groups including ours, including Japan’s.  There would be the energy group and a couple of others.  But I’ll tell you what.  I can give a more comprehensive view.  As I answer the questions, I find myself sort of being careful the way I talk to you.  It’s just that I’d really like this to work.  And I don’t want it to be more difficult as a result of the fact that I’m tired and I tell you too much, or something, or too little. 

QUESTION:  So basically are you saying the amount they’re demanding is unreasonable?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  See, you’re asking me to write your lead again.  I’m not a journalist.  You have to figure that out. 

QUESTION:  But the demand…

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  You have to figure it out.  I just feel that energy is there to provide some assistance.  It is not there as the centerpiece of the deal, nor is it there to take the focus off denuclearization.  If the DPRK is prepared to denuclearize, then we can resolve a lot of issues.  I think the DPRK needs to look at these nuclear weapons and understand that these weapons have created more insecurity than security.  They have helped impoverish the DPRK and, most tellingly, have helped to isolate the DPRK.  That is a little country in great need of assistance and, frankly, in great need of some friends. 

QUESTION:  And if North Korea doesn’t agree to these particular conditions, would you still contemplate coming back for more talks?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  Me personally?  Let me talk about where we are tomorrow. 

QUESTION:  Mr. Ambassador, we understand you’re right that you say a freeze would not be enough to stop energy aid in the first…

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL:  I didn’t say that.  Let me just say we are not interested in just freezing things.  We are interested in moving things on to implement the joint statement, which calls for complete denuclearization.  And we are willing to do that in steps.  We are willing to be reasonable about how you pace that.  But we are not willing to pretend that the nuclear problem isn’t an urgent problem.  It is an urgent problem that needs to be dealt with. 

Any steps we take we want to be fairly short duration, because we want to keep moving in the right direction.  And so we have to evaluate all the issues with that thought in mind.  That is, how do we keep the pace, keep the momentum so that we can achieve the goal of denuclearization.  And when we achieve that goal, many, many things are going to be possible for the DPRK. 

OK.  Got to go.  See you later.  Thanks.

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