When he was helping to run a rural credit union as a 22-year-old Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon, recalls Assistant Secretary of State Christopher R. Hill, he won gestures of thanks and assent after telling several hundred customers why they should fire their miscreant board of directors. It was the mid-’70s and Hill was only four years removed from the playing fields of Moses Brown School, fresh out of college, and set up a world away from home in Little Compton with a Suzuki 125 dirt bike, and a nifty hand-cranked Italian adding machine. “I thought I understood everything,” Hill said recently. When he asked the workers gathered on a hillside of a tea plantation to elect a reform slate, they overwhelmingly rejected his advice and kept the bad board in charge of the one-room credit union with the corrugated metal roof. Hill was perplexed, suddenly aware “that I didn’t really understand what was going on.” It was a priceless lesson about the need for modesty and humility in understanding a foreign culture, said Hill, more than five years into one of the toughest jobs of his diplomatic career, the negotiations over the nuclear-weapons program of a culture that is so far from the global mainstream that it defies easy understanding. Christopher R. Hill, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs and former U.S. ambassador to South Korea, served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Cameroon.
Christopher R. Hill is the voice of America in talks with North Korea
WASHINGTON — When he was helping to run a rural credit union as a 22-year-old Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon, recalls Assistant Secretary of State Christopher R. Hill, he won gestures of thanks and assent after telling several hundred customers why they should fire their miscreant board of directors.
It was the mid-’70s and Hill was only four years removed from the playing fields of Moses Brown School, fresh out of college, and set up a world away from home in Little Compton with a Suzuki 125 dirt bike, and a nifty hand-cranked Italian adding machine. “I thought I understood everything,” Hill said recently.
When he asked the workers gathered on a hillside of a tea plantation to elect a reform slate, they overwhelmingly rejected his advice and kept the bad board in charge of the one-room credit union with the corrugated metal roof. Hill was perplexed, suddenly aware “that I didn’t really understand what was going on.”
It was a priceless lesson about the need for modesty and humility in understanding a foreign culture, said Hill, more than five years into one of the toughest jobs of his diplomatic career, the negotiations over the nuclear-weapons program of a culture that is so far from the global mainstream that it defies easy understanding.
The assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs joked recently that he’s more like the assistant secretary for North Korea, so all-consuming are the so-called “six-party talks” — negotiations between the United States, Russia, China, Japan and the two Koreas that are aimed at ending North Korea’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.
Hill is a key figure at a moment of some suspense over prospects for a landmark agreement during the remaining months of President Bush’s administration. The decision rests with the North Korean regime of Kim Jong Il, Hill suggested strongly in a speech to the Atlantic Council of the United States and in an interview just before he departed for a visit to South Korea.
He spoke during the last week of March, an eventful time for the six-party talks — a shadowy slow-moving drama that rarely makes the front pages despite the huge stakes for the United States and for Asia, a region of growing consequence in world affairs.
Several of the big players exchanged hard words, North Korea took some potentially ominous actions, and Hill warned that “time is wasting” for ensuring that the strategically vital Korean peninsula remains free of nuclear arms.
“I can assure you this six-party process offers no refuge for those in need of instant gratification. It’s taken a long time. We’re dealing with a country that does not value transparency, a country that seems to have shortages of everything except time,” Hill said.
He spoke as a diplomat who has experience with conspicuous success and failure on the world stage.
Hill’s father was a Foreign Service officer, so Hill traveled extensively as a child. The family bought a house in Little Compton when he was in fifth grade (after U.S. diplomats were expelled from Haiti), and Chris spent much of the next two school years in grammar school there. He attended Moses Brown as a boarding student, starring on the lacrosse team, and went on to major in economics at Bowdoin College, in Maine.
“Like most kids graduating college I had no idea what I wanted to do,” Hill said, “so I decided to join the Peace Corps and maybe be a little more adventurous than my dad. He went to Africa in 1974 and took the Foreign Service exam while still serving there.”
The younger Hill served earlier in his career in Belgrade, Warsaw, and Seoul, among other posts. He has served a fellowship on Capitol Hill and a stint as a senior officer in the National Security Council under former President Bill Clinton. He also served during the 1990s as ambassador to Macedonia and as a special envoy to war-wracked Kosovo. Before taking his current position, he served under Mr. Bush as ambassador to Poland and to South Korea.
Hill was part of the team that forged the Bosnia peace settlement — a success possible, he said, because the Bosnians, Serbs and Croats “were all ready to settle.” But as special envoy to Kosovo, he said, he met with diplomatic failure “because the Serbs were not ready to relinquish their stranglehold on Kosovo, so we ended up in a NATO bombing campaign.”
Hill said his approach to that gloomy situation was “like a lot of things in life: you’ve got to do everything you can do” in order to be satisfied “that you have left no stone unturned, that you have really tried.”
Hill leaves no doubt that success is far more pleasant than failure, but — with the six-party talks at a moment of high tension and apparent impasse — he projects a sense of being prepared for either outcome with North Korea.
After more than four years of talks, the process yielded important progress last summer, when North Korea agreed to dismantle a reactor in Yongbin that made weapons-grade plutonium. U.S. inspectors were allowed to come in last fall and oversee disassembly, a step that Hill says has convinced him that some forces in North Korea are serious about keeping it shut down for good.
At the same time, from the U.S. point of view, North Korea produced a statement of its nuclear weapons that fell short of the agreed-upon standard of completeness and accuracy — especially in regard to U.S. assertions of secret programs to produce another weapons material, enriched uranium, and to help Syria obtain nuclear-weapons technology.
Without a complete account, the United States, Japan and South Korea have insisted, the talks cannot move to the final phase, in which North Korea would relinquish its weapons-grade materials and move to a treaty.
Tensions have increased since South Korea’s new, conservative president, Lee Myung-bak, has tied agricultural aid to better progress from North Korea on the nuclear front.
During the last week of March, North Korea responded by expelling South Korean officials from a manufacturing complex that South Korea had helped establish and employs more than 20,000 North Koreans. North Korea also test-launched some sea-based conventional weapons in what some analysts interpreted as a show of displeasure at South Korea. North Korea’s foreign ministry also accused the United States of creating “fictions” about its nuclear ambitions.
Hill spoke that same week as he prepared for meetings with South Korean officials in Seoul and North Korean officials in Jakarta, Indonesia. That journey ended without conclusive results when Hill returned to Washington last week. His emphasis has been on the necessity of hewing to the six-nations framework if the goal of North Korea’s nuclear renunciation is to be reached. If nothing else, he said, the talks have ensured that it will be difficult and time-consuming to restart the plutonium-producing nuclear plant.
Hill also argued that the very exercise of formal discussions among the six nations carries rich prospective byproducts — quite aside from the hoped-for end to any threat posed by a nuclear-armed North Korea willing to trade nuclear know-how to other potential enemies.
That bonus lies in “getting these countries together into sharing a sense of community,” Hill said. China’s role in the talks may have opened the door to fruitful U.S.-China dealings in other areas, he said. “We’ve worked diplomatically with them shoulder to shoulder. We haven’t done this sort of thing before with China,” Hill said, arguing for a long game played at more than one level. He noted the growth of China’s submarine navy and importance of the U.S. deterrent embodied in Southeastern New England’s nuclear-submarine industry. “We have a very big fleet in Pearl Harbor” and must “remain engaged” militarily in East Asia, Hill said.
But at the same time, “we’re very much engaged in trade — our exports are growing dramatically in that part of the world,” he said. Asia is an increasingly important part of the world for the United States, he said. As for China, he said, “at some point we have to figure out a way to deal with 1.3 billion people, and I think the six-party process has been a good one for that.”
jmulligan@belo-dc.com
