ေၿမာက္ကုိရီးယား-အေမရိကန္ဆက္ဆံေရး တုိးတက္မူ႔ တေစ႔တေစာင္း

Bush administration lifts North Korea sanctions

သတင္း- (m.s)

အေမရိကန္သမၼတ ေဂ်ာ႔ဘုရွ္က ေၿမာက္ကုိရီယားႏုိင္ငံကုိ ဒီေန႔ အၾကမ္းဖက္ေသာ ႏုိင္ငံမ်ားစာရင္းကေန ပယ္ဖ်က္ေပးဖုိ႔ ေၿခလွမ္းစတင္လုိက္ပါၿပီ။ ဒီလုိပယ္ဖ်က္ဖုိ႔စဥ္းစားလုိက္ရတာဟာ ေၿမာက္ကုိရီးယား အစုိးရ ဟာအခ်ိန္ၾကာေအာင္ ေစာင္႔ဆုိင္းခဲ႔ရတဲ႔ (၆)ႏုိင္ငံေဆြးေႏြးမႈ သေဘာတူညီခ်က္ အတုိင္း သူတုိ႔ရဲ႕ ႏၷဴကလီယား လက္နက္လုပ္ငန္းစဥ္အေသးစိတ္ကုိ တရုတ္အစုိးရ ထံေပးအပ္ ခဲ႔လုိ႔ဆုိပါတယ္။

ဒါဟာ အေမရိကန္အစုိးရ၏ ႏုိင္ငံၿခားေရးေပၚလစီၿဖစ္တဲ႔ ကုိရီးယားကြ်န္ဆြယ္မွာ ႏၷဴကလီယား လက္နက္ကင္းစင္ေရးအတြက္ ပထမဦးဆုံးေၿခလွမ္းၿဖစ္တာေၾကာင္႔ အေမရိကန္ကထားရွိတဲ႔ ကတိအတုိင္းဒီလုိတုန္႔ၿပန္ခဲ႔တာလုိ႔ဆုိတယ္။ အေမရိကန္သမၼတ ေဂ်ာ႔ဘုရွ္ဟာ တခ်ိဳ႕ ကုန္သြယ္ေရးပိတ္ဆုိ႔ထားမူ႔ကုိလည္း ပယ္ဖ်က္လုိက္ပါၿပီ။

ေၿမာက္ကုိရီးယား အစုိးရ ရဲ႕ ဆက္လက္ေဆာင္ရြက္မူ႔ကုိ (၄၅) ရက္ထိေစာင္႔ၾကည္႔ေလ႔လာ သြားမွာၿဖစ္ၿပီး၊ တကယ္လုိ႔ ဆက္လက္တုိးတက္မူ႔ရွိပါက တခ်ိဳ႕ ကုန္သြယ္ေရးပိတ္ဆုိ႔ထားမူ႔ကုိ ပယ္ဖ်က္ေပးဖုိ႔ ႏွင္႔ အၾကမ္းဖက္ႏုိင္ငံစာရင္းကေန ပယ္ဖ်က္ေပးဖုိ႔ အေမရိကန္အထက္ႏွင္႔ ေအာက္လႊတ္ေတာ္ေတြမွာ တုိက္တြန္းေတာင္းခံ သြားေပးမယ္ လုိ႔ဂတိၿပဳခဲ႔ပါတယ္။

ဒီေက်ညာခ်က္ကုိ အေမရိကန္ႏုိင္ငံဆုိင္ရာ ကုလသမဂၢသံအမတ္ေဟာင္း ဂြ်န္ေဗာ္တန္ႏွင္႔ လႊတ္ေတာ္အမတ္အခ်ိဳ႕ တုိ႔ ကၿပင္းၿပင္းထန္ထန္ ေ၀ဖန္ခဲ႔ ပါတယ္။ ဒါဟာ ေဂ်ာ႔ဘုရွ္ ရဲ႕ အေမရိကန္ႏုိင္ငံၿခားေရးရာ ေပၚလစီ ရွဳံးနိမ္႔တာလုိ႔စြပ္စြဲ ေ၀ဖန္သြားပါတယ္။

ဒီလုိအေမရိကန္အစုိး၏ ေၿမာက္ကုိရီးယားအေပၚ တုန္႔ၿပန္ခ်က္ကုိႏုိင္ငံတကာကလည္း သတိထားၿပီး ၾကိဳဆုိခဲ႔ေပမဲ႔၊ ဂ်ပန္ကေတာ႔ ေၿမာက္ကုိရီးယားကုိ အၾကမ္းဖက္ေသာ ႏုိင္ငံမ်ားစာရင္းကေန ပယ္ဖ်က္ ဖုိ႔ အေမရိကန္ရဲ႕ ေၿခလွမ္းကုိ လက္မခံဘဲ၊ ၁၉၇၀ ႏွင္႔ ၁၉၈၀ ကာလအတြင္း ဂ်ပန္လူမ်ိဳးေတြအေပၚ ေၿမာက္ကုိရီးယားက ၿပန္ေပးဆြဲခဲ႔မူ႔ကုိ မေၿဖရွင္းႏုိင္သ၍ ဒါကုိလက္ခံမွာမဟုတ္ဘူးလုိ႔ဆုိတယ္။

အေမရိကန္သမၼတ ေဂ်ာ႔ဘုရွ္က ေတာ႔ ဒီကိစၥကုိ မေမ႔ပါဘူးလုိ႔ဂတိၿပဳေၿပာၾကားသြားၿပီး၊ ဒီကိစၥ၊ လူ႔အခြင္႔အေရးခ်ိဳးေဖာက္မူ႔၊ ႏၷဴကလီးယား ၿပန္ပြားေစခဲ႔မူ႔ ႏွင္႔ လုံၿခံဳေရးေကာင္စီဆုံးၿဖတ္ခ်က္ေတြဟာ (၆) ႏုိင္ငံေဆြးေႏြး အေၿဖရွာမူ႔ ႏွင္႔ဆုံးၿဖတ္ခ်က္ေတြမွာ အဓိကအခန္းက႑က မွာဘဲ ဆက္လက္ရွိေနေၾကာင္း၊ ေၿမာက္ကုိရီးယား အစုိးရေပၚ အေမရိကန္ရဲ႕ သေဘာထားေတြ ဆုံးၿဖတ္ခ်က္ခ်ရာမွာ ဂ်ပန္အစုိးႏွင္႔အတူပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္ရြက္ သြားပါမယ္လုိ႔ ေၿပာဆုိသြားပါတယ္။

အေနာက္ႏုိင္ငံအစုိးရေတြကေတာ႔ ကုန္သြယ္ေရးပိတ္ဆုိ႔ထားမူ႔ကုိပယ္ဖ်က္ေပးၿခင္း၊ ဆက္လက္ထားရွိခ်င္းဟာ ေၿမာက္ကုိရီးယားအစုိးရရဲ႕ ေ႔ရွေလွ်ာက္လုပ္ေဆာင္ခ်က္ေပၚမွာသာ မူတည္ပါတယ္လုိ႔ဆုိတယ္။

တခ်ိဳ႕ကေတာ႔ ေၿမာက္ကုိရီးယားအစုိးရဟာ ဗီယက္နမ္အစုိးရရဲ႕လုပ္ေဆာင္ခ်က္ေတြကုိ အေတာ္ေလးအားက်ေနၿပီး၊ဗီယက္နမ္အစုိးရလုိ ႏုိင္ငံတကာႏွင္႔ၿပန္လည္ဆက္ဆံေရးေကာင္း
မြန္ေအာင္ ၿပန္လည္က်ိဳးစားလာဖြယ္ရွိတယ္လုိ႔ခန္႔မွန္းေနၾကပါတယ္။ တခ်ိဳ႕ကေတာ႔ ေခါင္းေဆာင္မႈ အာဏာရွင္ေတြမေၿပာင္းလဲဘဲ၊မၿဖစ္နုိင္ပါဘူးလုိ႔ဆုိတယ္။


Bush administration lifts North Korea sanctions


WASHINGTON - President Bush on Thursday lifted trade sanctions against North Korea and moved to remove it from the U.S. terrorism blacklist, a remarkable turnaround in policy toward the communist regime he once branded as part of an "axis of evil."

The announcement at the White House came after North Korea handed over a long-awaited accounting of its nuclear work to Chinese officials on Thursday, fulfilling a key step in the denuclearization process.

Bush called the declaration a positive step along a long road to get the nation to give up its nuclear weapons. Yet, he remained wary of the regime, which has lied about its nuclear work before. And North Korea's declaration, received six months late, falls short of what the administration once sought, leaving it open to criticism from those who want the U.S. to take an even tougher stance against the regime.

"We will trust you only to the extent you fulfill your promises," Bush said in the Rose Garden. "I'm pleased with the progress. I'm under no illusions. This is the first step. This isn't the end of the process. It is the beginning of the process."

To demonstrate that it is serious about foregoing its nuclear weapons, North Korea is planning the televised destruction of a 65-foot-tall cooling tower at its main nuclear reactor at Yongbyon. The cooling tower is a key element of the reactor, but blowing it up — with the world watching — has little practical meaning because the reactor has already been nearly disabled.

Specifically, Bush erased trade sanctions imposed on North Korea under the Trading With the Enemy Act, and notified Congress that, in 45 days, it intends to take North Korea off the State Department list of nations that sponsor terrorism.

"If North Korea continues to make the right choices it can repair its relationship with the international community ... If North Korea makes the wrong choices, the United States and its partners in the six-party talks will act accordingly," Bush said.

The declaration, about 60 pages of documentation, is the result of long-running negotiations the United States, Japan, South Korea, China and Russia have been having with Pyongyang. In the next 45 days — the congressionally mandated waiting period for removing North Korea from the terrorism list — the six parties will agree on how best to verify what the regime has declared. The North Koreans have said they will provide access to their facilities, including the reactor core and waste sites.

"They will make available documents, records, operating manuals and the like," said National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. "They've already made available over 19,000 documents. And that the six parties will have access to personnel involved in their nuclear programs."

U.S. officials said the declaration contains detailed data on the amount of plutonium North Korea produced during each of several rounds of production at a now-shuttered plutonium reactor. It is expected to total about 37 kilograms of plutonium — enough to make about a half-dozen bombs.

However, the declaration, which covers nuclear production dating back to 1986, does not contain detailed information about North Korea's suspected program of developing weapons fueled by enriched uranium.

It also does not provide a complete accounting of how it allegedly helped Syria build what senior U.S. intelligence officials say was a secret nuclear reactor meant to make plutonium, which can be used to make high-yield nuclear weapons. Israeli jets bombed the structure in the remote eastern desert of Syria in September 2007.

Hadley said that North Korea has "acknowledged in writing" that the U.S. and its negotiating partners have raised concerns about its enrichment activities and their suspected involvement with Syria. "They have not been out publicly denying, discounting these concerns," Hadley said, "so we're in a situation of not quite admitting, not denying but opening the door for us to be able to try to get greater clarity."

Sen. Joseph Biden Jr., D-Del., chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said it's critical to understand the nature and extent of North Korea's nuclear cooperation with Syria and any other countries. "Without clarity on these issues we cannot proceed with confidence to the next phase of the negotiations — the dismantlement of North Korea's nuclear facilities and the removal of any fissile material from the country," he said.

Hadley said U.S. action to ease sanctions was "relatively minor." By taking North Korea off the Trading With Enemies Act, the U.S. is removing licensing requirements for Americans who want to import goods from North Korea; provisions that affect Americans involved in shipping goods from other countries into North Korea; and some prohibitions on financial transfers by the North Korean government.

The president, however, signed an executive order on Thursday to keep two other prohibitions in place. These involve the interaction of Americans with ships flying the North Korean flag; and the freezing of certain kinds of assets first placed on hold in 2000.

The president, insisting that the U.S. was not giving North Korea a free ride, also said the U.S. action would have little impact on North Korea's financial and diplomatic isolation. "It will remain one of the most heavily sanctioned nations in the world," Bush said. All U.N. sanctions, for example, will remain in place.

Bush said the United States would monitor North Korea closely and "if they don't fulfill their promises, more restrictions will be placed on them."

Bush said that to end its isolation, North Korea must, for instance, dismantle all of its nuclear facilities and resolve outstanding questions on its highly enriched uranium and proliferation activities "and end these activities in a way that we can fully verify."

Bush thanked all members of the six-party talks, but singled out Japan. Tokyo has argued that the U.S. decision to remove North Korea from the list of terrorist nations should be linked to progress in solving North Korea's abduction of Japanese nationals in the 1970s and 1980s.

"The United States will never forget the abduction of Japanese citizens by the North Koreans," said Bush who called Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda on Wednesday to express U.S. concern about the issue. "We will continue to closely cooperate and coordinate with Japan and press North Korea to swiftly resolve the abduction issue."