SEOUL - The big question on the opening
Tuesday of the North-South Korean summit in
Pyongyang was whether or not North Korean leader
Kim Jong-il would condescend to welcome South
Korean President Roh Moo-hyun in person, or
whether he would delegate that ceremonial chore to
his much lower-ranking No 2.
Actually,
second-ranking Kim Young-nam, who as chairman of
the presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly is
titular head of state, was the first to receive
Roh, standing beside him in an open
limousine as they waved at the
crowds on the way to the red carpet stretched
across the wide avenue in front of the cultural
hall in the heart of the North Korean capital.
Minutes before, Kim Jong-il answered the
question as pool television, live from Pyongyang,
caught him getting out of the back seat of his own
black limo, walking around an honor guard and
standing at the end of the carpet. Television
anchors and correspondents were appropriately
impressed. In Hong Kong, a pair of CNN anchors
spoke in hushed voices, as if they were right
there, fearful of interrupting an event they
repeatedly called "historic" as they began
referring to Kim Jong-il by one of his favorite
and oldest titles, "Dear Leader".
The dear
one's appearance, in the olive-drab outfit that he
wears to promote his image as a man of the people
in contrast to the suits around him, provided the
great moment of drama in a day in which all went
according to script, so much so as to convince
many TV watchers in South Korea that the whole
event was strictly for show.
Kim Jong-il
looked almost diffident as he waited for his guest
to pull up, then shook hands and smiled formally -
a warm enough greeting but not quite the hug that
he had bestowed on Roh's predecessor, Kim
Dae-jung, on the latter's arrival in June 2000 for
the only other North-South Korean summit. The Dear
Leader's smile, moreover, quickly faded to a look
of polite seriousness - a harbinger, perhaps, of
hard talking ahead.
As they had for Kim
Dae-jung, the crowds cheered wildly, the women in
colorful hanbok or Korean dress, while a
band played a martial fanfare, soldiers preened at
rigid attention with swords drawn, and the two
leaders "inspected" a military honor guard. On the
long steps of the cultural hall, hundreds waved
long-stemmed pink and purple Kimjongilia flowers,
actually peonies cultivated in special hothouses
along with Kimilsungia, the enormous orchid
variety named for the Dear Leader's father, Kim
Il-sung, who passed on the mantle of power to his
son on his death in 1994.
Kim Jong-il's
decision to greet Roh personally probably came as
no surprise to senior members of Roh's entourage,
who had been telling reporters they certainly
hoped the summit would begin that way but could
not be certain. It was just a secret that they had
evidently agreed to keep in case, perhaps, the
North Korean host changed his mind and decided
that now was not the time to make one of his
extremely rare appearances on global television.
All in the game of keeping the secret,
Roh's aides noted. No one had been certain that
Kim Jong-il would meet Kim Dae-jung at the airport
on his arrival by air from Seoul seven years and
three months earlier.
The difference in
enthusiasm of the greetings for Roh and Kim
Dae-jung, however, was not necessarily
significant. What counted was that Kim Jong-il
gave the clear impression that the summit might be
more than show, more than a highly scripted affair
confined to platitudes about the need for
reconciliation, peace and economic cooperation.
Kim Jong-il, if the welcome he gave Roh
provided a clue, might even be willing to go
beyond the script and lay the basis for serious
deal-making, a negotiating process in which he has
a final chance of extracting whatever he can by
way of money and promises from the current
government before the election of a new South
Korean president on December 19. The winner is
likely to be the conservative Lee Myung-bak, who
describes Roh and his cronies as "leftist" and
obviously will not be so inclined toward
reconciliation as Roh, but may be bound by some of
the promises made this week in Pyongyang.
Until Kim got out of his limousine, the
day had gone entirely according to a script
highlighted by Roh's alighting from his limousine
with his wife, trailed by his delegation, and
walking across the line between the two Koreas as
the highway enters the town of Kaesong, about 60
kilometers north of Seoul.
Before stepping
across a broad yellow line painted for the
occasion across the road, Roh spoke in terms
reminiscent of the late US president Ronald
Reagan's telling then Soviet leader Mikhail
Gorbachev, "Tear down this wall," referring to the
Berlin Wall.
The line in the middle of the
4km-wide Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between the two
Koreas "is a wall that has divided the nation for
a half-century", said Roh. "This line will be
gradually erased and the wall will fall." His walk
across the line, he said, would be "an occasion to
remove the forbidden wall and move toward toward
peace and prosperity".
The words suggested
the emphasis on what South Korean officials have
been calling "a peace regime" that they want to
establish between the two Koreas. They also hinted
at the peace agreement - or peace treaty - that
North Korea has long advocated to replace the
armistice that ended the Korean War in 1953.
Talk of a peace agreement is likely to
provide the dominant theme of the summit, though
the nature of the peace is far from clear. The
summit, Roh's aides have said, will not devolve
into negotiations on North Korea's nuclear-weapons
program, which Roh has said depends on the outcome
of six-nation talks dedicated to that topic.
As he left the Blue House, the
presidential residence and office complex in
Seoul, Roh made clear that the nuclear issue would
not be totally ignored. A South-North agreement
could not resolve the issues of denuclearization
and a peace regime, he said, but "the
determination of the two Koreas is more crucial
than anything else".
Roh spoke at a moment
in which the nuclear issue remains far from
resolved. Six-party talks broke down in Beijing
last week with no clear agreement on when North
Korea will give up its entire program. US
officials have said privately that North Korea is
willing to disable some of its facilities but does
not want to jettison the dozen or so warheads it
has made with plutonium at their core - or even
acknowledge its highly enriched uranium program or
proliferation elsewhere.
In pursuit of a
peace regime, Pyongyang is expected to press
demands for Seoul to revise the Northern Limit
Line in the Yellow or West Sea below which North
Korean fishing boats are banned, to pursue the
concept of converting the DMZ into a vast park and
cross-border trading area - and to press ahead
with the idea of a North-South "economic
community" as a precursor to reunification.
Withdrawal of US troops inevitably would
be part of the bargain, but then the question
arises, what about North Korea's enormous military
establishment, 1.1 million troops, a high
percentage of them hovering just above the DMZ?
South Korean Defense Minister Kim Jang-soo is in
Roh's retinue, there to discuss "easing of
tensions", said a Unification Ministry official,
but neither he nor Roh is likely to call for a
reduction, or even pullback, of Northern forces.
The final question is how deeply the two
leaders are likely to go in discussing these
issues - and how far, if at all, Roh is willing to
go in pressing other concerns.
These
include North Korea's abysmal record of
human-rights abuses, in which several hundred
thousand people remain in concentration camps and
thousands have been executed in recent years. Yet
another issue is the abduction of 480 South
Koreans, mainly fishermen, whose boats have
strayed into Northern waters, and the fate of
South Korean soldiers held prisoner ever since the
Korean War.
Conservatives accuse Roh of
avoiding and covering up these issues while
showing a propensity to grant economic aid with
very little to show in return. A senior
Unification Ministry official said the government
is "very concerned about abductees and prisoners"
- and indeed about the issue of human rights - but
"we cannot say conclusively if it will come up"
during Roh's meetings with Kim Jong-il.
Journalist Donald Kirk has been
covering Korea - and the confrontation of forces
in Northeast Asia - for more than 30
years.
(Copyright 2007 Asia Times
Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us
about sales, syndication and republishing.)
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
