By Andy Jackson

With the Bush administration's decision to remove North Korea from the State Department list of state sponsors of terrorism, it would be useful to review how a state gets off that list.

The last nation to be taken off the list was Libya in 2006.

To achieve that rescission, Libya had to go through several steps.

In 2003, it sent a letter to the United Nations Security Council stating that it would not ``engage in, attempt, or participate in any way whatever in the organization, financing or commission of terrorist acts.''

More importantly, it followed those words with actions. It accepted responsibility for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103, which killed 270 people, and agreed to pay $2.7 billion in compensation.

It started cutting ties with terrorist organizations even earlier, beginning with the 1999 expulsion of the Abu Nidal organization. In addition, it extradited terrorist suspects to Egypt, Yemen, and Jordan and sent two of its citizens to stand trial for the Pan Am 103 bombing.

Libya also agreed to abandon its weapons of mass destruction and long-range missile programs.

It was only after those steps and several years of cooperation between the Libyan and American governments that Libya was removed from the terror list in 2006.

The differences between the Libyan and North Korean cases are glaring, especially in light of the Bush administration's seeming eagerness to remove North Korea from the state sponsors of terrorism list without confirming that Pyongyang is no longer a state sponsor of terrorism.

North Korea has not accepted responsibility for the 1987 bombing of Korean Air Lines Flight 858, which killed all 115 on board. Pyongyang went as far as to accuse South Korea, Japan, the USA and Bahrain (where North Korean agents who were involved in the bombing were detained) for creating a ``false drama'' to frame North Korea.

North Korea has not accepted responsibility for the 1983 bombing in Rangoon, which killed 17 Koreans and four Burmese, including South Korean Foreign Minster Lee Beom-seok. The bomb narrowly missed killing President Chun Doo-hwan as well. Two of the North Korean agents involved in the bombing were captured by Burmese authorities.

While North Korea allowed five of the 13 Japanese citizens it has admitted to kidnapping (Japan claims at least 17 victims) to return to Japan in 2002, it has still not adequately addressed the fate of the other victims. It has also refused to extradite North Korean agents to stand trial for their suspected role in the kidnappings.

North Korea has also abducted roughly 500 South Korean citizens, according to South Korean government sources (and up to 3,790, according to unofficial sources). The list of abductees includes Kim Dong-shik, a South Korea citizen and U.S. resident with family in Illinois, who was kidnapped by North Korean agents in China in 2000 while he was trying to assist North Korean refugees.

North Korea still harbors four or five members of a nine-member Japanese Red Army team who hijacked a Japanese plane in 1970 and forced its crew to land it in North Korea. Those JRA members are alleged to have later assisted in the kidnapping of other Japanese citizens. One JRA member, Yoshimi Tanaka, was convicted in Japan in 2002 for his role in the hijacking.

North Korea's support of terrorism is hardly old news.

A 2000 report by Jane's Intelligence Review stated that stealthy speedboats operated by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) were armed with North Korean weapons and the boats themselves may be of North Korean design or manufacture. The report noted that LTTE, the world's best-financed insurgency organization, had approached a cash-starved North Korea about a multimillion-dollar arms deal in 1998.

Last year, Sri Lankan authorities seized ships bound for the LTTE. The ships contained weapons that North Korea had purchased on LTTE's behalf from a third party.

North Korea has also supported Hezbollah, which is on the State Department's list of terrorist organizations.

Moon Chung-in, a former advisor in the Roh Moo-hyun administration with access to secret intelligence files, noted in a 2007 article in the JoongAng Daily that North Korea had aided Hezbollah via Iran and Syria by providing the organization with components that improved the effectiveness of the missiles they used to attack Israel with in 2006.

A report prepared by the Congressional Research Office in December of 2007 states that North Korean officials had also trained members of Hezbollah in ``the development of extensive underground facilities for storing arms, food and medical installations.''

These cases illustrate that not only has North Korea refused to come clean on its past terrorist activities, it continues to harbor terrorists and provide support to terrorist organizations.

There are several steps that North Korea should take before it is removed from the state sponsors of terrorism list. Pyongyang should cooperate with investigations into the Rangoon and Korean Air bombings, stop providing a save haven for the Japanese Red Army, end support of Hezbollah and LTTE, and begin the process of giving a full account of all South Korean and Japanese abductees and returning any of those still alive.

By de-linking progress on terrorism-related issues from removal from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, Bush and the State Department would harm the list's legitimacy and damage relations with nations that have suffered at the hands of North Korean-supported terrorist organizations.

It may seem like a strange idea in Washington, but perhaps removing North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism should somehow be related to North Korea stopping its support of terrorism.

Andy Jackson teaches American government in the Lakeland College bridge program at Ansan College, Gyeonggi Province. He can be reached at andyinrok@lycos.com.