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Japan-DPRK summit: Hijacked
agenda?
By Axel Berkofsky
Japan and North Korea are getting back to the
negotiation table. But there are indications that Uncle
Sam might be lurking under the table, in spirit at
least.
North Korea and Japan recently agreed to
reopen talks on normalizing diplomatic relations, and
have set up a meeting in Kuala Lumpur on October 30.
This will put Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi
once again ahead of the skeptics and North Korea-bashers
in his country.
"No change. As scheduled. We
will resume the normalization talks in October," Koizumi
told the press recently, brushing aside growing calls in
Japan to probe into the issue of abductions of Japanese
nationals more thoroughly before huddling with the "axis
of evil" founding member North Korea.
Under
normal circumstances, the bilateral talks would have
been held in Tokyo soon after the September 17 summit
meeting in Pyongyang between Koizumi and North Korean
leader Kim Jong-il. But what is "normal" when talking to
North Korea? The original plans to meet in the Japanese
capital were changed after the sharp public backlash in
Japan that following North Korea's admission that eight
of 13 Japanese nationals abducted by the Democratic
People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) in the 1970s and 1980s
seem to have died under mysterious circumstances.
The revelations on the fate of abducted Japanese
confirmed to the country's public that North Korea is
indeed a terrorist state, leaving Koizumi with the
challenging task to move on with normalization talks,
come home with more information on the kidnapped
Japanese and reassure the United States that there will
be no more North Korean missile tests and sales.
While the prime minister thinks he is up to the
job of appeasing the communist state, the US seems to
believe that the issues on the agenda of the diplomatic
mission are too many to be handled by junior alliance
partner Japan alone.
Prior to the planned
October 30 talks, the leaders of Japan, South Korea and
the United States will therefore get together to
coordinate their policy toward North Korea, with Seoul
and Washington reportedly providing the Japanese
government with "good advice" when dealing with the
"rogue state".
The announcement of this
trilateral meeting comes as a surprise, since Koizumi
and his cabinet members are already busy stepping in
front of the press on a daily basis elaborating in
detail Japan's positions on the procedures of
normalization talks.
Koizumi himself limits his
comments on the US initiative to calling the trilateral
meeting a "routine procedure", while political
commentators suspect that the US administration of
President George W Bush will in fact use the trilateral
meeting to dictate to Japan its own the priorities and
issues for its ally's bilateral talks with North Korea.
The US initiative to check on Japan's agenda
comes at a time when Japan seemed to have graduated from
concerned bystander to successful negotiation partner,
possibly putting Japan in the uncomfortable position of
playing the mediator between US hardline positions and
North Korean opposition to US interference.
US
advice on how to deal with North Korea, however, might
not necessarily be overly helpful, since James Kelly, US
assistant secretary of state for East Asia, returned
pretty much empty-handed from a recent diplomatic
mission in the DPRK. Although Kelly himself called his
trip "useful", commentators agree that his diplomatic
"achievement" was mainly limited to handing North Korea
a list of US demands that the Pyongyang government is
likely to toss on the pile of previous US demands.
Whether Japan will be "assigned" the job to make
up for the US diplomatic failure remains yet to seen,
although a recent US request urging Koizumi to pressure
North Korea over security issues such as its alleged
development of nuclear weapons shows that Washington
indeed wants to have a say on what is talked about in
Malaysia.
While Koizumi's right hand, Chief
Cabinet Secretary Fukuda, is reportedly "unaware" of
such a US request, the critics are beginning to suspect
that Washington's hardline positions toward Pyongyang
are leaving the United States vulnerable to losing
influence on the Korean peninsula now that Japan and
South Korea are beginning to develop relationships with
North Korea that go beyond belligerent rhetoric and
military clashes in the Pacific.
Although Japan
and the United States share the common interest of
checking North Korea's missile program and suspected
plutonium production, Japan's strategy to appease North
Korea might go beyond the US hardline
"take-it-or-leave-it" approach, as Chris Hughes, senior
research fellow and expert on Japanese security policy
at the Center for Regionalization and Globalization at
the University of Warwick in England, suspects. "The
problem for Japan is that it may think that inside the
Bush administration there is the strong belief that
however much the US and its allies negotiate with North
Korea, it will never give up its weapons of mass
destruction unless forced to, as it is a rogue state and
by definition cannot do so," Hughes said.
North
Korea, it seems, remains unimpressed by US pessimism and
is ready to talk about anything with Japan these days as
long as Japanese economic and food aid is in the offing.
Economic aid, however, is not on Japan's agenda just
yet, as the government is under pressure from its public
and the United States not to promise economic and food
assistance until the DPRK commits itself to stop its
missile development program and plutonium production.
North Korea is starving, running out of time and
money and on a roll showing its goodwill to Japan's
policy-makers. In a surprise move changing one of the
fundamentals of North Korea's infamous foreign-policy
strategy, the country announced it will disband its
department responsible for spy-ship operations in
Japanese waters. The initiative was announced shortly
after the Japanese government's conclusions that the
suspicious vessel that sank in the East China Sea last
December after exchanging fire with the Japanese Coast
Guard was a DPRK spy ship.
Although the Japanese
military and coast guard are skeptical about North
Korea's unexpected charm offensive to stop spying on
Japan, the initiative could optimistically put an end to
ill-fated attempts at disguising war vessels as fishing
boats and intruding into Japanese and South Korean
territorial waters every once in a while.
North
Korea's initiatives to win a wealthy friend, however,
went even further when Pyongyang agreed to let another
Japanese fact-finding team into the DPRK next month to
find out about the fate of the kidnapped Japanese.
While North Korea is busy getting rid of its
regional bully image, which held Japanese and South
Korean rice shipments back for too long, Japan and North
Korea are getting down to work preparing the Kuala
Lumpur meeting's agenda and seem to be getting along
just fine.
Both countries not only agree on the
issues to talk about but also on ways to avoid
confrontation when the going gets rough. Japan for its
part is showing remarkable diplomatic skills by
suggesting that separate panels be set up to deal with
the issues on the table. One panel will deal with the
cases of the kidnapped Japanese while talks on security
issues, such as North Korea's missile program, are held
in a different panel. The normalization talks would be
held separately from the abduction and missile issues,
giving an opportunity to get down to less problematic
and technical formalities to establish diplomatic
relations.
So far, so good. The issue of
kidnapped Japanese citizens, however, will remain the
most important issue of the talks as far as the Japanese
public is concerned even now that the remaining five
Japanese, who reportedly spent most of their time giving
Japanese language lessons to North Korean spies,
returned to Tokyo on Tuesday for a brief visit.
In fact, normalization talks with North Korea
are very likely to become even more difficult to sell to
the Japanese public now that the truth is out, Hughes
suspects.
"Koizumi got more than what he
bargained for when North Korea was so forthcoming on the
abduction issue. He expected some acknowledgement from
North Korea that it had been involved and a promise to
investigate, not a list of dead people." Hughes believes
that Koizumi's efforts to squeeze the whole truth out
the North Korean regime might have done more harm than
good.
It's certainly North Korea's call now to
walk along the path of reconciliation. But Koizumi might
want to urge his allies in Washington not to spoil the
party just yet and to give North Korea some more time to
turn from "evil-doer" to "peace-loving nation".
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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