Glenn Brown
White House Mulls Plan To Admit North Koreans
Thu Jul 24 13:37:43 2003
208.152.73.96

White House Mulls Plan To Admit North Koreans Washington Post: July 16, 2003 -- by Glenn Kessler

The Bush administration is considering admitting thousands of North Korean refugees into the United States in an effort to increase pressure on the government in Pyongyang during the standoff over its nuclear weapons programs, officials said yesterday.

Officials have not yet settled on how many refugees the United States would be willing to accept a year. One faction is pushing for as many as 300,000 refugees, while officials who believe such a step would hurt relations with China have countered with a proposal to limit the number to 3,000 in the first year, an official said.

President Bush's senior foreign policy advisers plan to discuss the proposal tomorrow at a White House meeting that will focus on the North Korean crisis, including Pyongyang's recent assertion that it has finished producing the plutonium needed for several nuclear weapons and the administration's efforts to win North Korea's agreement for multilateral talks that would include Japan and South Korea.

The White House said yesterday it is seeking to confirm North Korea's claim that it has completed reprocessing 8,000 spent reactor fuel rods into the raw material for weapons. Intelligence reports indicate North Korea began reprocessing in June, but officials had believed that Pyongyang could have reprocessed only several hundred rods by now. "North Korea has made a lot of claims in the past, and it's not something at this time that we can confirm the accuracy of," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said.

The administration has insisted that any future discussions with North Korea must include participants from other nations. North Korea has demanded bilateral talks. China said yesterday it had proposed a multilateral framework for the negotiations that would allow for bilateral meetings on the sidelines.

Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo this week completed a four-day trip to Pyongyang during which he met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and presented a letter from Chinese President Hu Jintao, presumably about the proposal.

Administration officials, however, greeted the idea coolly, saying they were interested only in multilateral talks.

China, which participated in the only talks between North Korea and the United States since the crisis erupted last October, has emerged as an important player in trying to resolve the standoff. Some officials are concerned that the plan to accept North Korean refugees would undercut efforts to bind China more closely to the U.S. position.

North Korean refugees generally flee into China, which often sends them back, and any move by the United States to open up immigration would likely increase the number of refugees. "The Chinese will be enraged by this," one official said.

Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) has pressed the administration to make it easier to accept North Korean refugees. Last week, at Brownback's urging, the Senate voted to change a legal technicality that has made it difficult for North Koreans to claim refugee status. A provision in South Korean law automatically extends South Korean citizenship to refugees fleeing North Korea, but that status makes them ineligible to assert they are refugees in the United States.

Officials said other issues must be addressed, including whether the security methods imposed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks would make it difficult to accept so many refugees. North Koreans, coming from a country listed as a state sponsor of terrorism, would face particular scrutiny, in part because officials are concerned that some of the refugees actually would be agents for the North Korean government.



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