Korea: The sun shines
regardless By Aidan
Foster-Carter
For South Korea, as for all
North Korea's interlocutors, dealing with
Pyongyang during the first quarter of 2007 was -
in a cliche beloved of British soccer commentators
- "a game of two halves". When the new year began,
and well into February, most official contacts
remained suspended in the wake of last year's twin
shocks: the North's missile launches in July,
followed by its nuclear test in October.
Yet even then there were hopes of an early
thaw amid visibly energetic efforts to breathe
life into the six-party talks after their
resumed session in December
ended in failure. On February 13, after appearing
close to collapse over North Korea's large energy
demands, this on-off forum finally produced an
agreement that - if imperfect - nonetheless looked
more comprehensive and detailed than many
observers had dared to hope after more than three
years of getting nowhere much.
While it
remains to be seen whether the North will meet the
tight and specific deadlines laid down in the
February 13 accord, the immediate effect was to
create both an atmosphere of cautious optimism and
a flurry of activity. South Korea, which under
President Roh Moo-hyun remains committed to the
Sunshine Policy - rebranded as "Peace and
Prosperity" - of engaging North Korea pioneered by
his predecessor Kim Dae-jung, lost no time in
reactivating the various channels that had been on
ice for half a year.
As the first quarter
ended, ministerial and other talks had already
resumed, with much more to follow. But even as
many in Seoul celebrate an early spring, caution
is in order. Dealing with North Korea has never
been smooth, and the deal could yet run into
problems: for instance, if Pyongyang misses
deadlines, or argues over interpretations and
commitments.
Why seek a summit? On the inter-Korean front specifically, there
are at least two concerns. The immediate one is
that a beleaguered Roh, a lame duck leader in his
final year (his term ends in February 2008), and
the ruling - albeit collapsing - Uri Party may
seek a second inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang to
boost their position, even though Kim Jong-il
appears to have no plans to come to Seoul, as he
was supposed to in return for former president Kim
Dae-jung's visit to North Korea in June 2000.
Besides typically letting the North off the hook
of genuine reciprocity, it is hard to see what of
substance such a gesture could achieve.
Second, even a fresh summit is unlikely to
bolster the Uri Party ratings enough to dent the
conservative opposition Grand National Party's
(GNP's)huge lead in opinion polls. While anything
can happen in South Korean politics, the two
upcoming elections - the December 19 presidential
and the April 2008 National Assembly elections -
look set to return the political right to power in
Seoul, ending a decade of center-left rule.
While a GNP government would still pursue
engagement, it would certainly demand more
reciprocity from North Korea - whose media
regularly and roundly abuse the GNP as pro-US
flunkies and traitors. All this suggests that any
new burst of Sunshine this year may prove
shortlived, with 2008 portending at the very least
a chilly and possibly prolonged eclipse.
Marking time Even before the
February 13 breakthrough, by no means had all
inter-Korean contact ceased. Official aid remained
suspended, but South Korean non-governmental
organizations (NGOs)continued to help the North
with medical supplies, food and more. In
mid-January, doctors from the two Koreas began
working side-by-side for the first time, in a
small NGO-run hospital in the North's Gaesong
industrial complex.
Nor did South local
authorities feel bound by the central government's
aid freeze. In early February, the island province
of Jeju, which has long cherished its autonomy,
sent more of its tangerines and carrots to the
North, as it has been doing since 1998. The
carrots may also serve as a metaphor: these days,
few in the South now wield the stick.
Semi-official contacts continued too.
As
is now usual, the two Koreas marched together in
the opening ceremony of the Sixth Winter Asian
Games in Changchun, China but went on to compete
separately. North television reportedly omitted to
mention the joint march. But talks toward fielding
a joint team for the 2008 Beijing Olympics remain
stalemated: the South wants athletes picked on
merit; the North demands equal numbers.
Nor did official contact wholly cease. On
January 24, Unification Minister Lee Jae-joung led
a 100-strong Southern delegation on a visit to the
Gaesong industrial complex. They were also allowed
to tour Gaesong city, an historic ancient capital,
the first Southern group to do so since Pyongyang
banned this last July, in reprisal for Seoul's
suspension of aid.
The Gaesong industrial
park, controversially never subject to sanctions,
continued normal operations throughout the
quarter. On February 20, the South's Unification
Ministry (MOU)said it will resume expansion of the
complex, suspended last September as tensions
rose,and lease a further 1.6 square kilometers of
land in the zone to Southern firms by mid-April.
Business apart, Gaesong has also become an
ever more popular destination for politicians from
the South's ruling but beleaguered Uri Party, to
show their commitment to detente.
Two
incidents (or non-incidents) in January were a
reminder of real progress in at least one area. It
is less than five years since the two Koreas'
navies fought a brief but fierce and fatal battle
in a disputed border zone. In earlier decades,
South fishermen venturing too close to the border
risked being seized by the North, never to return.
Seoul reckons some 434 are still held in the
North.
Today, Korean seas are calm, and
incidents that in the past would have escalated
are swiftly defused. On Christmas day, a solo
South fisherman deliberately sailed his squid boat
into Northern waters; alcohol was rumored. On
January 12, the North returned the man and ship,
without fuss.
Five days later the South
vessel Heonseong-ho returned to its home
port of Gunsan with a cargo of sand from Haeju in
the North, two days after colliding with a North
fishing boat in Northern waters. Though four of
its fishermen were missing, Pyongyang did not read
the riot act; it simply asked for Seoul's
cooperation in searching.
Six-party
deal unblocks bilaterals, too As the
examples above illustrate, rightly or wrongly
Seoul hardly let the North's nuclear test cast a
shadow on ongoing inter-Korean cooperation at the
grassroots. So naturally, once the six-party talks
achieved their breakthrough, the South moved
swiftly to reinstate the formal channels of
dialogue suspended for the past half-year,
starting with ministerial talks - the 20th since
the June, 2000, summit, and the first since last
July's unhappy session in Busan - held in
Pyongyang from February 27 to March 2.
That meeting produced a six-point
statement that, like the new six-party accord, was
encouragingly specific in setting dates and
deadlines for a range of further events. (By
contrast, too many earlier agreements were often
vague on timelines, allowing Pyongyang to
temporize and backslide - and for it to be hailed
as progress if the North merely agreed to show up
to a meeting. Such bad habits are now, one must
hope, a thing of the past.)
Family
reunions resume One area resumed is
reunions of separated families. A fifth videolink
session was held on March 27-29, with the 15th
face-to-face reunions to follow at Mt Kumgang in
early May. Construction of a permanent reunion
center at Mt Kumgang, halted since last July, was
to resume on March 21.
It remains to be
seen whether the nature and pace of these events
will evolve from the present pitiful charades into
more genuine and lasting encounters. So far the
scale and frequency of reunions, even when not
interrupted, is grossly inadequate. At the present
rate, most of these now elderly folk, separated
from their kin for over half a century, will die
before ever having a chance to meet.
Even
for the lucky few who get this opportunity -
selected by lot in the South, but seemingly by
privilege in the North - this is for one time
only, much of it in the glare of the cameras as if
in a reality TV show. Tears flow as well they
might, since thereafter those so briefly reunited
are not allowed even to write, telephone or
e-mail, much less visit.
Besides, the
stylized setting of the Mt Kumgang resort is no
substitute for the visits to hometowns and
ancestral graves, which Korean custom and
tradition dictate. If the North's rulers had an
ounce of humanitarian spirit, they would ease
these cruel and indefensible restrictions
forthwith.
Abductees: A thornier
issue Not unrelatedly, on April 10-12 an
eighth round of Red Cross talks will inter alia
tackle the thorny issue of "persons whose fate is
unknown during or after the 1950-53 Korean War".
This phrase is code for some 542 Southern
prisoners of war (POWs) still held in the North,
and 485 (mainly fishermen) seized since 1953.
Pyongyang denies holding anyone involuntarily, but
in recent years a few have escaped to tell their
grim stories.
For its part, Seoul had been
hesitant to raise this issue - in marked contrast
to Japan, for whom a far smaller number of
abductions are its top policy priority with the
North. This is obviously a delicate area. But if
Kim Jong-il could bravely manage a personal
admission and apology - if not the whole truth,
unfortunately - for the North's past kidnappings
from Japan, then it is not clear why the South
should settle for less and allow over a thousand
of its aging citizens to remain prisoners of the
North.
The true number may be far higher,
since this excludes thousands - estimates run as
high as 84,000 - of South Korean civilians taken
North during 1950-51 when the North Korean Army
overran much of the South. How bright, really, is
a "Sunshine" that ignores or glosses over such
crimes?
Yet unlike in Japan, for some
reason this is not a matter that greatly exercises
public opinion in South Korea. Similarly, the now
10,000 Northern defectors who have braved huge
odds to find sanctuary in the South all too often
face prejudice and lack of interest in their
plight - or even criticism as "anti-unification"
for speaking ill of Kim Jong-il.
In this,
what critics regard as the South government's
oddly twisted stance in fact reflects its
citizens' equally curious posture; the three
monkeys of fable come to mind. Things may be
different if next year the conservative opposition
is voted back into power.
Economy and
aid: Not yet? Turning to the less tricky
area of economic cooperation, it was agreed to
hold the 13th economic cooperation promotion
committee (ECPC) meeting in Pyongyang on April
18-21. The North reportedly wanted it sooner, but
the South initially insisted on waiting until
after the 60-day deadline (from February 13) in
the six-party accord for Pyongyang to shut its
nuclear facilities at Yongbyon, as a key test of
its commitment to genuine compliance.
This
is presumably why the Pyongyang joint statement
did not mention aid. North Korea apparently asked
for 400,000 tons of rice and 300,000 tons of
fertilizer, as it has received in most recent
years until 2006; it repeated the latter demand on
March 7. Seoul then, it seems, retreated; the same
day, South Vice Unification Minister Shin Eon-sang
said that fertilizer deliveries (which are
time-sensitive), worth $115 million, would begin
later in March.
By early April, Shin was
ready to delink rice aid as well from nuclear
compliance and offer it unconditionally, as
described below. Actual shipments resumed on March
28, when a ship bearing 6,500 tons of fertilizer,
60,000 blankets, disinfectant to combat foot and
mouth disease, and other items headed North from
the southern port of Yeosu.
A South
parastatal does its own deals As of early
April, it looked ever more likely that the April
14 deadline to shut Yongbyon may be postponed, due
to technical difficulties in resolving the Banco
Delta Asia issue (Editors note: It was postponed
as of April 18). That would let the ECPC meeting
off the hook in terms of its further non-aid
agenda of economic cooperation.
Before
everything got put on ice last July, the main
focus was on a barter deal where the South would
supply raw materials for very basic needs -
clothing, soap, etc - in exchange for unspecified
mineral rights. This sounds straightforward, but
progress had been slow; the North reportedly
wanted the raw materials as aid, while the South
insisted on a formal linkage to mining investments
as a quid pro quo.
Yet here again, neither
this dispute nor the half-year freeze on official
contacts impeded direct business dealings. One in
particular, KoRes (Korea Resources Corp), has long
been quietly doing deals in the North. The latest,
reported on is for feasibility and environmental
studies on zinc and magnesite mines - among Asia's
largest - in Hamgyong province in the North's
northeast.
Already KoRes has two ventures
with the North firm Samcholli: one for lead and
zinc and the other for graphite at Yongho, just
north of the DMZ. In the latter KoRes is providing
machinery and equipment; annual sales of 10,000
tons of graphite to South Korea are envisaged.
Peace train? Another crux for
Seoul is Pyongyang's persistent refusal thus far
to put two reconnected cross-border railways into
actual use. The track has long been ready, but
test runs have been repeatedly postponed. The
March 2 accord says these will take place by late
June, subject to a security guarantee; yet
working-level talks in Gaesong on March 14-15 got
nowhere.
With parallel trans-demilitarized
zone (DMZ)roads now in active use - albeit
unidirectional: of course, no North Koreans come
South except the odd official for talks - it is
not clear why even the most paranoid of hawks,
having already allowed the front line to become a
front door, should object to one form of
locomotion more than another.
If the
trains do finally run, this will renew hopes for
the "iron silk road" - a rail link from Pusan to
Paris, or even Portugal - dear to Kim Dae-jung and
at least some in Moscow. But for this to be
realized would require modernizing the North's
decrepit rail network. It is unclear who would pay
for that, or whether a regime that rebuffed the
late Chung Ju-yung's hopes to run a gas pipeline
from Siberia to Seoul is yet ready for the far
more intrusive prospect of South freight trains
transiting its carefully guarded territory.
A week after the six-party accord was
reached, the MOU issued its policy goals for the
year. For the first time these include arms
control measures, such as a direct telephone line
between defense chiefs and confidence-building
steps such as exchanges of military personnel.
One lives in hope, but hitherto the North
has always refused invitations to observe regular
joint South-US exercises, which it criticizes
every year in hackneyed phrases as though these
routine war games represented a real threat of
invasion. Thus of late, daily diatribes in the
Pyongyang media have warned that the hardy
perennial RSOI and Foal Eagle exercises – the
latter dating back to 1962 - which began March 25
are "very dangerous provocations" that risk
jeopardizing the six-party agreement.
Pyongyang has also been consistently
reluctant to discuss significant security issues
with Seoul. Southern hopes were high when the
North defense minister came to Seoul in September
2000, soon after the Pyongyang summit. Vice
Marshal Kim Il-chol visited the Blue House in
uniform, and even reportedly saluted Kim Dae-jung.
But he would only discuss railways; and no return
visit was allowed.
In recent years,
lower-level military talks have inaugurated naval
radio communications and dismantled border
propaganda, but have yet to address major
underlying security issues. Were the North stance
to change, this would be a major and welcome shift
of strategy toward taking the South seriously as a
dialogue partner in this most fundamental area,
instead of treating it as a mere junior partner of
the US and a cash cow.
Sunshine as
axiom? Overall, since the six-party
breakthrough (if such it prove) it has been back
to full steam ahead for the Sunshine Policy; as if
Pyongyang's missile and nuclear tests were a
tiresome inconvenience, rather than a brazen slap
in the face to all Seoul's olive branches. While
it would be churlish for a foreigner to begrudge
Koreans any genuine steps on the road to
reunifying their sundered land, sentimentality is
not enough.
The almost unseemly haste with
which Seoul rushed to resume Sunshine suggests
this has become - at least for the current
government - an axiom and article of faith, rather
than a cool-headed targeted policy with clear
goals, to be revised or fine-tuned with constant
ongoing appraisal of whether its objectives are
actually being met. Are they? Is there genuine
reciprocity here?
Secret contacts last
October admitted A particular risk, in an
election year, is of Nordpolitik being abused for
partisan purposes - as distinct from the right of
parties to offer voters a choice on this as on
other policies. After months of rumors and
official denials, it is now confirmed that South
Korea held secret talks with the North last
autumn.
On October 20, just days after the
nuclear test, two close aides of Roh - Ahn
Hee-jeong, who served a year in jail for taking
illicit funds for Roh's election campaign but now
holds no official post, and Representative Lee
Hwa-young of the ruling Uri Party, met in Beijing
with Ri Ho-nam, said to be a councilor of the
North's National Economic Cooperation Federation.
Only on March 29 did the Blue House
finally admit that this meeting took place. A day
later Unification Minister Lee Jae-joung told a
skeptical press conference that he did not deem
this illegal, even though it is far from clear
whether the law and procedures for inter-Korean
contacts were followed.
According to the
Seoul daily Donga Ilbo - no friend to Roh
Moo-hyun, admittedly - one month later Suh Hoon,
in charge of North Korea strategy and intelligence
at the South's National Intelligence Service
(NIS), also met Ri in Dandong, China some time
between November 19-23, 2006.
Suh denies
any such meeting, but Lee Hwa-young confirmed it,
adding that the NIS was not keen to get involved.
The feeling seems mutual: Gwon O-hong, a
businessman go-between for Ahn's Beijing contact,
in a written memorandum quoted Ri as saying: "When
Suh comes, tell him I have nothing to say or hear,
so go back as soon as possible and save hotel
fees."
Inter-Korean back channels as such
are nothing new. Their full history, over at least
36 years, would make a fascinating read; someone
should write it. (Who now recalls that 20 years
ago, Park Chul-un, the then dictator Chun
Doo-hwan's secretary for political affairs, had a
direct hotline on his desk to Han Si-hae, a vice
director of the central committee of the North's
ruling Workers Party of Korea (WPK), later to be
the North's ambassador to the UN?
According to Don Oberdorfer's invaluable
The Two Koreas, Park and Han not only spoke
often but met no less than 42 times during 1985-91
in many places: Pyongyang and Seoul, Mt Paektu,
Jeju island, Panmunjom, Singapore, and elsewhere.
While all this was secret and bore few fruits, the
new "authorized version" in both Koreas that dates
contacts as starting only with Sunshine and the
2000 summit is profoundly misleading.)
Back channels have their precedents and
uses. The NIS - an agency deeply conflicted
nowadays about its role re the North - may have
been coy this time; yet its predecessor, the
dreaded Korean Central Intelligence Agency, used
to keep up its own contacts with Pyongyang - not
always telling its nominal political masters. Each
case must be judged on its merits, but in this
case one must share the NIS's reservations.
What on earth did Roh think he was up to,
just days after the North had tested a nuke? The
official line is that this was to sniff out a
rumored Northern offer of fresh talks, and whether
the source was reliable. Both proved elusive, so
the channel was shut down after a month. Even if
that is true, the timing seems gauche.
Political judgment aside, what of the
legalities? Should the latest revival of
inter-Korean ties turn sour, the next South
government may well act as Roh did against Park
Jie-won, Kim Dae-jung's former presidential chief
of staff and a key player in the Sunshine Policy,
who served over three years in jail for illegal
contacts with the North (admittedly money was
involved) until freed under one of the South's
regular presidential pardons on February 9.
A summit in Gaesong? Also
playing politics is Chung Dong-young, a former
unification minister who once met Kim Jong-il, and
ex-head of the ruling but now imploding Uri Party.
After lying low for several months, Chung has
resurfaced in hopes of reviving what once seemed a
plausible bid to be South Korea's next president -
although like all Uri wannabes, he languishes in
single figures in opinion polls.
On March
28, Chung visited the Gaesong zone, with two other
key former unification ministers: Lim Dong-won,
eminence grise of the Sunshine Policy under Kim
Dae-jung (albeit later convicted of breaking the
law by secretly sending money to Pyongyang as an
inducement), and Park Jae-kyu, now an influential
academic.
Before his trip, Chung made
headlines by proposing Gaesong as a good venue for
a new inter-Korean summit, both for its "political
and economic significance" and convenience: the
two leaders could get there and back within a day.
That sounds like a brief encounter, for a meeting
that Chung claims is "not a matter of choice but
of necessity" to achieve a permanent peace regime
on the peninsula.
Sounding a nationalist
note that will grow as December's presidential
election draws nearer, Chung asked: "Should we
just be looking at the United States or China?
With our fate at stake, naturally we should take
the helm." Fine rhetoric, but unfortunately
Pyongyang's predilection for making a nuclear and
wider nuisance of itself, on a regional and even
global scale, has so multilateralized the North
Korean question that Seoul can no longer thus
claim ownership of it.
Many hands are on
this tiller, and not all have confidence in
whatever map Seoul's helmsmen are steering by.
Rice aid, regardless As April
progressed, all eyes were on the laudably precise
but now pressing schedule laid out in the
six-party joint statement. With a publicly
expressed skepticism that itself might be said to
tacitly license Pyongyang to prevaricate, the
continuing tangle over the Banco Delta Asia funds
issue prompted growing anxiety as to whether the
North would in fact fulfill its undertaking to
shut its Yongbyon reactor by mid-April.
But some parties seem less anxious than
others. On April 5, Vice Unification Minister Shin
Eon-sang said that in any case the South will
"give rice to the North as scheduled" - the usual
400,000 tons as requested, presumably, costing
over $200 million at the South's inflated domestic
prices - after the bilateral ECPC economic talks
set for April 18-21 in Pyongyang.
As
noted, the timing of that meeting - the North
pressed for an earlier date - had been seen as
building in conditionality: no closure, no rice.
No longer, apparently: Shin now insists that "the
momentum for inter-Korean development should not
be lost".
Arguably it was wrong in the
first place for Seoul to breach international
norms and suspend humanitarian food aid rather
than business projects like the Gaesong and
Kumgang zones in retaliation for Pyongyang's
missile tests last July. On March 28, the UN World
Food Program (WFP) warned that "millions of people
[will] go hungry" in North Korea in the current
pre-harvest lean season, unless donors delink food
aid from nuclear concerns and help plug a food gap
of about 1 million tons, 20% of the North's total
needs.
Yet after the far greater threat of
October's nuclear test, this is a major u-turn for
Seoul. As he celebrates Sun's Day - his late
father Kim Il-sung's birthday - with the usual
pomp on April 15, Kim Jong-il could be forgiven
for concluding, as he watches the continuing
disarray among the other five parties, that in
practice he can do pretty much what and when he
pleases, with no serious fear of reprisal from any
quarter.
He may also infer that South
Korea in particular is happy to remain a
unilateral cash cow for his regime, and that he
has but to snap his fingers for a naive and
politically desperate Roh to come running for a
second inter-Korean summit - any place, any time.
This cannot be a healthy basis for successful
future diplomacy, whether bilateral or
multilateral.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
