Briefing from UNGA

(7:30 p.m. EDT)

MR. MCCORMACK: Okay. I’ll just read you a brief statement about Iraq passing the election law. I know you already have something from the White House, but this is from me.

We congratulate the Iraqi parliament for passing the provincial elections law today. The law passed with overwhelming support, which reflects a spirit of consensus and demonstrates the strength of Iraq’s democratic institutions and its full commitment to the democratic process. The regular holding of free and fair elections is a critical element of any successful democracy and Iraq is developing this democratic norm. Much work remains, but today’s positive step in Iraq’s political evolution is another clear sign of democratic progress in this important region.

With that, I’ll just take your questions. I think Dan talked to you a lot about the Secretary’s meetings with European officials as well as with Foreign Minister Lavrov. I’m happy to try to follow up in any way that you want on that, or any other topic.

Lambros –

QUESTION: Yes. Mr. McCormack –

MR. MCCORMACK: – batting first.

QUESTION: Do you know when the Secretary –

QUESTION: (Inaudible.)

QUESTION: No, I know – when – what time the Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice going to meet the Greek Foreign Minister Dora Bakoyannis tomorrow?

MR. MCCORMACK: Is it on the schedule? I don’t think it’s on the schedule.

MR. DUGUID: The schedule has to be – hasn’t been released yet.

MR. MCCORMACK: Yeah, we’ll let you know if there’s any particular meeting. I mean, she was – the Secretary was in this – these transatlantic luncheons today. I don’t know if the Foreign Minister was there or not.

QUESTION: Okay. Will be one-on-one tomorrow (inaudible). I would like to confirm –

MR. MCCORMACK: I don’t – I honestly, Lambros, I don’t have the schedule.

QUESTION: But do you know if she’s going to meet the Skopjean Foreign Minister Antonio Milososki or the President of Skopje –

MR. MCCORMACK: The Macedonian Foreign Minister?

QUESTION: – Branko Crvenkovski?

MR. MCCORMACK: You know, Lambros, we’ll keep you up to date on the schedule. I just – I don’t have it in front of me right now.

QUESTION: Can you tell us about –

MR. MCCORMACK: Yeah.

QUESTION: – whether Rice plans to stay here tomorrow instead of going back to D.C. and then –

MR. MCCORMACK: She does.

QUESTION: – explain why that decision was made?

MR. MCCORMACK: She just took a look at her schedule. The fact that we have had intensive consultations with Indian officials over the past couple of weeks, nearly constant communication, I would say, about the civilian nuclear deal, that she felt as though it was for her best to stay up here. Of course, Deputy Secretary Negroponte, who has been deeply involved in this issue as well, can represent the State Department at meetings at the White House.

QUESTION: Does it represent in any way her confidence or lack of confidence?

MR. MCCORMACK: Oh, no. Please – no, please don’t, in any way, interpret it as that. Like I said, this is an issue that she has really been quite seized with over the past month in a very intensive way. As a matter of fact, I know that she was making calls to Capitol Hill from New York today about this issue. So it should in no way be read as a diminution in her level of effort to try get this passed.

QUESTION: Could you – last point – describe her level of confidence in getting this passed?

MR. MCCORMACK: We’re working with the Congress. We take this step by step. We’re going to do everything we can to help the Congress in terms of information, briefings, phone calls, whatever we need to do so that they can move this forward through both houses. I know it’s a busy time on the calendar up there, but this is a very important step for American foreign policy and national security.

QUESTION: Still on India –

MR. MCCORMACK: Yeah.

QUESTION: – if (inaudible). When was the last time she had telephone contact – she called members of Congress about the India nuclear –

MR. MCCORMACK: Just today.

QUESTION: Yeah – I mean before today, I’m sorry.

MR. MCCORMACK: I can’t tell you. I’m – it seems like it’s almost every other day or every few days she’s involved in a phone call up to the Hill.

QUESTION: Was there any particular impetus for the calls today? I mean, it is – it did pass the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday.

MR. MCCORMACK: Right.

QUESTION: It seems to be moving forward. What’s the problem?

MR. MCCORMACK: Just – it’s good to stay – no, it – just because you have a phone call doesn’t mean there’s a problem. What it means is she wants to stay in close contact with members of Congress, answer any questions, get their assessment of where we stand in the process. It’s just good politics, I guess you could say, to keep open lines of communication on this.

QUESTION: On North Korea?

MR. MCCORMACK: Yeah.

QUESTION: Could you tell us about the bilateral meeting with (inaudible) and Vice (inaudible)?

MR. MCCORMACK: I don’t – I haven’t talked to Chris. I don’t have any information about his meetings.

Mr. Shanker, how are you?

QUESTION: On Pakistan, may I ask a question?

MR. MCCORMACK: Sure, please.

QUESTION: It came up earlier but we didn’t really get an answer. Senators on the Armed Service Committee, Webb and Levin, are asking what the international legal rationale approving U.S. cross-border strikes on the sovereign Pakistani territory. Pentagon and military officials say that’s the State Department’s job. Do you know whether such a specific and equal decision has been made? If so, is it straight Article 51 self-defense? Is it some other legal rationale that allows us to act militarily on the sovereign issue of a country with whom we’re not at war?

MR. MCCORMACK: I’ve seen a lot of these news reports about such raids taking place. And I have adopted a strict policy of not offering any comment on them or any – any other questions associated with these reports, so I’m just – I don’t have any comment for you.

QUESTION: Libya.

MR. MCCORMACK: Yeah.

QUESTION: The Senate Foreign Relations Committee had a hearing today on Gene Cretz’s nomination as ambassador to Libya, and Senator Lautenberg said afterwards that he’s going to maintain his hold on that nomination. Any news about the funding for the settlement fund, and any comment on Gene Cretz on the nomination and –

MR. MCCORMACK: Well, we’d like to see the nomination move forward. I think anybody who came to us – came with us to Tripoli saw that this is a relationship that is changing and evolving. There’s certainly work to be done, but it has come a long way, even just in the past few years. Libya still has obligations that it needs to meet. We expect that they will. We have been assured that they will. And as you’ve heard from us before, you know, written into the law, you know, unless Libya fulfills its obligations there, they won’t receive certain benefits under the law.

So all of that is to say that Libya has pledged that it would fulfill these obligations and we expect that they will. I don’t know that we have – I confess this is not an issue I have checked in on in the past day or so since we’ve been up here in New York. We’ll – I’ll see if we have any more granularity.

QUESTION: The nomination or the –

QUESTION: Probably – you’d probably hear from –

MR. MCCORMACK: The – about the money question.

QUESTION: But you probably have heard if –

MR. MCCORMACK: I would hope that – you know, I would hope that the NEA Bureau would tell me. This is a large bureaucracy and sometimes information flow isn’t the best.

QUESTION: But before the – before you came up –

MR. MCCORMACK: Yeah.

QUESTION: – to UNGA, had any money gone in the account yet? I mean, it was just one –

MR. MCCORMACK: No.

QUESTION: Not a penny?

MR. MCCORMACK: No. I would expect that it would all – all the funds would be transferred in short order once –

QUESTION: Any idea where that money is coming from yet?

MR. MCCORMACK: You know, I don’t – ask the Libyans. They’re the ones –

QUESTION: Have you approached the oil companies?

MR. MCCORMACK: They’re the ones responsible for the deposits.

QUESTION: Have you approached oil companies?

MR. MCCORMACK: The Libyans are the ones responsible for funding this.

QUESTION: I thought – are you responsible for funding some of it, too?

MR. MCCORMACK: The United States is not allocating any appropriated funds.

QUESTION: I understand. That’s the line that you’ve sown, but aren’t you looking for – I mean, the Libyan stuff – look, where does the money that’s going to go to pay the Libyan victims – are the Libyans supposed to come up with that, too?

MR. MCCORMACK: There are no allocated funds from the U.S. Government.

Kirit.

QUESTION: Just back on Rice’s schedule tomorrow, is there –

MR. MCCORMACK: Which I don’t have in front of me.

QUESTION: Well, but the fact of her decision to stay in New York, is there a reason that she said she needed to be here as opposed to being in Washington?

MR. MCCORMACK: Look, you make these decisions every day about how to allocate time and effort and energy. She’s dedicating a lot of time and effort and energy to getting the India civ-nuke deal passed, and she made the call that she had other meetings that she was going to participate in here. And like I said, Deputy Secretary Negroponte is going to be representing the State Department at the White House.

QUESTION: What are those meetings she’s staying here for? I mean, she’s got –

MR. MCCORMACK: I’ll – we’ll print the schedule for you and we’ll put it out soon.

QUESTION: Is anything significant? I’m just trying to get a sense of what’s –

MR. MCCORMACK: No, it’s rearranging the schedule.

Yeah.

QUESTION: On North Korea, the next week seems to be pretty critical because, as you know, the North Koreans announced today and told the IAEA that next week they’re going to bring in nuclear material to the reprocessing center, presumably to start reprocessing it. So, basically, over this next week – and you’re meeting with the other five parties here and everything – are you expecting some type of joint statement over the next few days to try and stop this action? Are you going to just try to do it individually talking with the North Koreans? How do you expect the next week to proceed?

MR. MCCORMACK: What I expect is that we’ll maintain open lines of communication not only with all of our partners in this process but also the North Koreans to make it clear to them that this would be an unfortunate step that they would take and certainly only serve to isolate them further. There certainly is a way to move this process forward. It’s still open to them. It’s open to all the members of the Six-Party process: work on a verification regime, approve it. This is nothing that is more onerous than has been agreed to by other countries in the international system. This is the standard issue verification regime. It may be a bit more difficult for the North Koreans to see that given the nature of their society and the nature of their regime, but they also have to understand that it’s important that this be approved to move the process forward. And we’ll see what happens.

QUESTION: If they do take this step next week and bring the material into the processing center, will there still be a way forward at that point?

MR. MCCORMACK: Look, we’ll deal with the facts as they are before us. The facts are that they are now taking – they are taking steps to get them to the point of operationally reversing what they have done, meaning restarting the reprocessing facility or starting the reactor. They haven’t done either of those things yet. And Secretary Rice, just in her conversation with Foreign Minister Lavrov, last night with the Chinese Foreign Minister – or the night before with the Chinese Foreign Minister, and that same day talking to the South Koreans, we’re trying to use all points of leverage here and encouraging the other members to use all the leverage that they have to get North Korea to reverse this, I guess, microtrend that we’ve seen evolve over the past several weeks.

QUESTION: But it doesn't seem to be working, though. I mean, just keeping on moving forward and --

MR. MCCORMACK: Well, look, there’s always –

QUESTION: And just on the verification regime –

MR. MCCORMACK: This has always been a binary choice. And as we said, either way, you know, whether it’s a negative pathway or a positive pathway, it’s all about choices and it’s all about decisions and judgment and cost-benefit analysis. And you know, the North Koreans are involved in that process and they will have to make their own judgments. They will have to make their own cost-benefit analyses. We don’t need to talk about it, but on the negative side of the ledger, there are still Security Council resolutions, there are still actions that are at the disposal of the other members of the Six-Party Talks. Nobody wants to go down that pathway.
We all want to go down the positive pathway of denuclearization and where that leads. But there is that other pathway that’s available to countries that are still out there.

QUESTION: Does the U.S. Government have a clear picture of who’s in charge after the reports of (inaudible)?

MR. MCCORMACK: Well, you know, the decision-making process in North Korea is a bit of a black box, I think, to anybody, even those countries that are closest to North Korea. But you know, clearly there’s been a coincidence between this, as I said, microtrend and these reports of – about Kim Jong-il’s health. I can’t definitively draw A-to-B conclusions for you about that.

But one thing we can measure are the outputs. The outputs we have been seeing have not been the ones that we want to see or other members of the Six-Party Talks want to see. Those should be reversed, need to be reversed, if the process is going to move forward, whoever is involved in the decision-making process in North Korea.

QUESTION: Can I follow up?

MR. MCCORMACK: Yes, ma’am.

QUESTION: Do you still characterize this situation as that they are still in the second phase?

MR. MCCORMACK: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Lambros.

QUESTION: Yes, one more question. Could you please check for me if Secretary Rice is going to meet the Cypriot Foreign Minister Markos Kyprianou?

MR. MCCORMACK: We’ll put out the schedule for you guys.

QUESTION: Thank you.

MODERATOR: We’ve been making it at about 11 o’clock at night.

MR. MCCORMACK: Okay?

QUESTION: Thank you.

MR. MCCORMACK: All right. Thanks, guys.

2008/779

Released on September 24, 2008

Updates | Frequent Questions | Contact Us | Email this Page | Subject Index | Search
The Office of Electronic Information, Bureau of Public Affairs, manages this site as a portal for information from the U.S. State Department. External links to other Internet sites should not be construed as an endorsement of the views or privacy policies contained therein.
About state.gov | Privacy Notice | FOIA | Copyright Information | Other U.S. Government Information

Published by the U.S. Department of State Website at http://www.state.gov maintained by the Bureau of Public Affairs.