South Korea balks at hostage hard
line By Donald Kirk
WASHINGTON - The crisis of the Korean
hostages captured by Taliban forces in Afghanistan
hits South Korean leaders where they are most
vulnerable.
Seoul might have preferred not
to have sent troops to either Afghanistan or Iraq,
but did so under US pressure. As long as the
United States is keeping 29,000 troops in South
Korea, on guard against a perpetual threat from
the North, the Americans believed their Korean
friends could show their gratitude by joining the grand
alliance in the Middle East.
Now President Roh Moo-hyun, the
left-of-center leader whose policy of
rapprochement with North Korea has won only
reluctant US support, is caught between the need
to show firm resolve against a terrorist threat
and the desire to appease the Taliban, who have
already killed one of the hostages and are holding
22 others.
On Wednesday, the
bullet-riddled body of 42-year-old pastor Bae
Hyung-kyu was found in the Qarabagh district of
Ghazni province, where the South Koreans were
abducted on July 19.
The quickest way to
deal with the Taliban would be to arrange an
enormous payoff and speed up the withdrawal of
South Korea's 200 troops - medics and engineers -
from Afghanistan. That solution would be fine by
the same South Korean leftists who oppose the
dispatch of Koreans to the Middle East and who
have been calling for US troops to get out of
their country. But it is politically impossible.
While conservatives have been steadily
gaining strength in South Korea over the past two
or three years, Roh has to come across as a man of
firmness in the face of the enemy. That position
is all the more necessary considering that the
hostages are all members of a Christian
congregation that had gone to Afghanistan on a
do-good "volunteer" mission.
The prayers
of the Christians, many of them deeply
conservative and quite hostile toward the present
government, are echoed by statements from the Blue
House, the center of presidential power, decrying
the killing of Bae and warning of unstated
consequences for those "held responsible".
Suddenly, the South Korean government
finds itself attempting to negotiate with an enemy
far different from the North Koreans. The bottom
line, though, is the same - the Taliban hold
hostages and warn against killing them, while
North Korea, in the conservative view, holds the
South hostage while holding out the threat of a
nuclear war.
Through it all, the anti-Roh
media keep up a litany of complaints over how the
government is dealing with the hostage-takers.
Most recently, the government came under fire for
the "botched" deal to release eight of the 22.
Apparently the hostage-takers called off the
release after spying armored vehicles arriving at
the scene of the handover. The fear was that the
same vehicles could take off in hot pursuit of the
Taliban.
South Koreans find it easy to
dismiss the nuclear standoff as a matter of
secondary importance, remembered when the North
fires off a few missiles or tests a nuclear
warhead, but the hostage crisis is something else.
The possibility of imminent death of a
delegation that consists mostly of rather young
women dispensing medical aid is more personal and
compelling than the diplomatic maneuvering that
led to the signing of an agreement for North Korea
to get rid of its nukes and shut down its single,
worn-out 5-megawatt reactor.
If the Korean
War goes down in US history as "the forgotten
war", so the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula
is sublimated if not forgotten while South Koreans
focus on a rising stock market - and televised
images of the hostages as they gathered with
smiles of optimism before their bus was hijacked
last week.
The hostage issue is laden with
implications for the US-Korea alliance. Admiral
Timothy Keating, chief of the US Central Command,
responsible for the whole Asian region, did not
help much by saying his forces would be "quick to
respond" to a request for help from South Korea.
Exactly what could Americans do that they aren't
already doing to find the hostages?
For US
President George W Bush, though, a show of
willingness to help is the only option for an
unpopular administration that would prefer to
forget Korea while focusing on Iraq.
The
US administration over the past five years has
climbed down from the seemingly tough policy of
the early years when Bush, in his State of the
Union address of January 2002, included North
Korea in an "axis of evil" along with Iran and
Iraq. That remark - and other aspersions that he
cast on North Korean leader Kim Jong-il - provoked
an outcry in South Korea.
The US and South
Korean governments appeared on a collision course
in which astute diplomacy was needed on both sides
to bridge differences between a government in the
United States that wanted to prove its toughness
and one in South Korea in search of reconciliation
and North-South rapprochement. The hostage crisis
in Afghanistan raises some of the same familiar
issues.
US liberals have clearly driven
the neo-conservatives in the White House and
elsewhere in the administration into silence and
acquiescence. The most talkative hardliner, John
Bolton, who browbeat his critics as under
secretary of state for arms control and then as
ambassador to the United Nations, is now a voice
on the sidelines since the Senate refused to
approve his UN reappointment. He speaks from his
pulpit at a conservative think-tank, denouncing US
diplomatic efforts on North Korea, but no one
heeds his advice.
Bolton was a victim not
just of his own bullying style but also of his
incredible failure to perceive the mood in South
Korea. This correspondent vividly remembers a
couple of his visits to Seoul in which he paraded
in front of the media, confident that he had
persuaded senior South Korean officials to go
along with sanctioning the North in the UN and had
overcome differences between Washington and Seoul.
Now the issue is what the US is doing to
persuade South Korea to tough it out on the
hostages. US military people, of course, see the
taking of hostages as a tactic that cries out for
defiance.
Similarly, it could be argued
that no one should have been intimidated by the
North's missile tests and single underground
nuclear test. The test-firing of a long-range
Taepodong on July 4, 2006, was a failure, as seen
in the missile's descent into the waters off the
North Korean east coast soon after its launch, and
the nuclear test of last October 6 was so small as
to raise suspicions that it too had been a
failure.
The sad truth, moreover, is that
North Korea still holds the club of nukes and
missiles over the heads of negotiators, despite
the shutdown of the reactor at Yongbyon, and is
still capable of spinning out counterfeit US$100
bills - and currencies of other countries - on its
press in Pyongyang.
The reason the US has
not addressed these problems definitively is that
Bush could not risk a two-theater war - a conflict
on the Korean Peninsula at the same time as that
in Iraq. The liberal moderates have won out, and
the diplomatic drive to bring North Korea to its
senses goes on with full approval of Bush, though
probably not that of Vice President Dick Cheney,
the hardest hardliner.
Negotiations with
the extremist Taliban are considerably more
difficult, if only because no one knows quite who
they are and with whom to talk. Like Bush, Roh
cannot risk confrontation with an enemy on two
fronts - with North Korea on the Korean Peninsula
and with the Taliban in Afghanistan. If he appears
weak on North Korea, however, he may still want to
show resolve in Afghanistan and leave a legacy of
toughness against an enemy - not the North, but an
enemy nonetheless.
Journalist Donald
Kirk has been covering Korea - and the
confrontation of forces in Northeast Asia - for
more than 30 years. (Copyright 2007 Asia
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