North Korea Will Need to do More to Get Off U.S. Terror List

Washington has rejected North Korea’s claim that the US has agreed to remove Pyongyang from a list of state sponsors of terrorism.^[1] After talks in Geneva on normalizing relations between Washington and Pyongyang, North Korea’s state media reported that the US had pledged to remove it from the terrorist list and to lift sanctions against it.^[2]

“No, they haven’t been taken off the terrorism list…their getting off that list will depend on further de-nuclearization,” Christopher Hill, the U.S. chief nuclear negotiator; earlier, Hill had characterized the bilateral talks as “very substantive,” but meant to lay the groundwork for further discussions.^[3]

The official Korea Central News Agency had reported that Pyongyang had pledged in Geneva to take “practical measures to neutralise the existing nuclear facilities in the DPRK^[4] …….In return for this, the US decided to take such political and economic measures for compensation as de-listing the DPRK as a terrorism sponsor and lifting all sanctions that have been applied according to the Trading with the Enemy Act.”^[5]

On Tuesday, Sept 25, Hill pressed North Korea to do more to be removed from the list of nations supporting terrorism as he arrived for a fresh round of disarmament talks in Japan.^[6] Hill asserted that he would meet in Beijing with his North Korean counterpart Kim Kye-Gwan on Wednesday, the day before the start of the next round of six-nation talks.^[7]

Hill comes to Japan just as the moderate Yasuo Fukuda took over as prime minister. Abe has, in the past, urged the United States not to remove North Kea from the terrorist list due to North Korea's kidnappings of Japanese civilians in the 1970s and 1980s.^[8] However Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice hinted that Washington may remove North Korea from the list of terrorism sponsors without a resolution on the dispute over the kidnappings.^[9]

"We are dealing with those issues but there has been no decision made [on the blacklisting, and] obviously, this is something the DPRK very much wants but we've made it very clear it depends on further denuclearization," Hill also he would "compare notes" with his Japanese counterpart Kenichiro Sasae to coordinate their positions before the new round of talks.^[10]

Apart from mandating US sanctions, inclusion on the US terror sponsor list also means that a listed state is blocked from receiving loans from multilateral bodies like the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.^[11]

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^[1] North Korea was added to the sponsors of terrorism list in 1988 after one of its agents confessed to bombing a South Korean aircraft, killing all 115 people on board.
^[2] Anna Fifield, N Korea terror list claim rejected by US, Financial Times, September 4 2007, available at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ab9baa88-5afc-11dc-8c32-0000779fd2ac.html (last visited September 26, 2007).
^[3] Id.
^[4] The state’s official name is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea(DPRK).
^[5] Id.
^[6] AFP Staff, No US decision on NKorea, terror list, Agence France-Presse, September 25, 2007, available at LEXIS, News Library, Wire News Services.
^[7] Id.
^[8] Id.
^[9] Id.
^[10] Id.
^[11] Id.