Koreas have something to cheer
about By Donald Kirk
SEOUL - Schoolchildren danced, an
orchestra played and hundreds in a carefully
vetted audience waved Korean flags as President
Roh Moo-hyun, his wife and ministers ascended the
stage set up beside the modern railroad station
and customs building in Paju just south of the
demilitarized zone (DMZ) between the two Koreas.
The homecoming on Thursday provided a
triumphant finale to three days of talks in the
North Korean capital of Pyongyang, just
two
hours to the north by road, between Roh and North
Korean leader Kim Jong-il. Roh's convoy of
limousines, buses and supply vehicles had taken
its time getting to the border, Roh wanting to
spend two or three hours looking over the special
economic zone at Kaesong, just above the DMZ,
while anticipation mounted among well-wishers
waiting patiently in the cool evening air.
The cheers hailing the South Korean
president and an entourage that included some of
his closest cronies and several of the country's
top business leaders suggested nothing but
confidence in the language of a final joint
statement in which South and North agreed "to
resolve the issue of unification on their own
initiative" and "transform inter-Korean relations
into ties of mutual respect and trust". The
inter-Korean summit, as far as Roh and his
advisers were concerned, could only be seen as a
dramatic step in the quest for inter-Korean
reconciliation.
For all the bold words,
though, influential Koreans are responding with
somewhat jaded views to a deal that carries
promises they've been hearing, one way or another,
for years. Even as Kim Jong-il and Roh were
clinking glasses of red wine in Pyongyang after
signing the agreement, analysts wondered how,
whether or when they would turn the hopes held up
by the declaration into reality.
One
common complaint is that the statement echoes a
"basic agreement" of 1992 in which the North and
South promised peace and reconciliation, only to
descend into vituperative rhetoric and military
escalation while doing little to ease tensions.
The latest agreement "leaves a lot of
things unanswered", says Han Sung-joo, a former
foreign minister and former ambassador to the US,
now acting president of Korea University. "They
worked very hard to make it appear as a lot. It
seems the North Koreans have succeeded in putting
in a lot of words they would have liked." Han
believes, however, that Kim Jong-il may have
yielded to South Korean pressure in signing off on
a sentence citing what is called simply "the
nuclear issue" - a delicate reference to North
Korea's program for building nuclear warheads.
One day after North Korea agreed to
disable critical facilities at its main nuclear
complex by the end of the year, Kim and Roh
managed to come to terms on the sentence, "With
regard to the nuclear issue on the Korean
Peninsula, the South and the North have agreed to
work together to implement smoothly" [agreements
reached at six-party talks for North Korea to give
up its nuclear program].
Roh, talking on
all four South Korean TV networks at the
welcoming, expressed pride in getting Kim to
accept inclusion of the nuclear reference, however
abstruse, in their joint statement. The
implication was that Kim would just as soon have
banned his nuclear program from discussion at the
summit.
Roh had to admit, though, he was
unsuccessful in a passing effort at raising the
issue of 480 or so South Korean abductees, mostly
fishermen, whose boats strayed into North Korean
waters, who are still held in the North along with
prisoners from the Korean War. Nor did he begin to
get through the barriers to talk about North
Korea's terrible record on human rights when he
cautiously talked of overcoming cultural
differences.
The reference to the nuclear
agreement, moreover, is carefully included in the
same paragraph in which the two profess "the need
to end the current armistice regime" - a reference
to the armistice that ended the Korean War in July
1953 - and "build a permanent peace regime" - a
reference to a peace treaty that North Korea hopes
will replace the armistice.
Mention of a
peace treaty provides a reminder of the unscripted
exchange between President George W Bush and Roh
at a photo opportunity in last month's gathering
in Sydney of leaders of the Asia-Pacific Economic
Cooperation grouping, at which Roh pressed Bush to
endorse the idea of a treaty. Bush responded by
saying US support for a treaty would come after
North Korea had verifiably abandoned its nuclear
program.
Although North Korea moved a step
closer to that goal this week, talks on a peace
treaty are bound to be lengthy and controversial.
They are not likely to begin until the US has
rewarded North Korean compliance on disabling its
nuclear complex by moving simultaneously to take
North Korea off its list of terrorist nations.
The fact that South Korea never signed the
original armistice is bound to complicate any
moves toward a treaty. The declaration holds out
the possibility of three-sided talks, including
presumably China, the US and North Korea, but not
South Korea.
Nor is there any certainty
that Roh's successor will want to fulfill all the
terms of the agreement. Lee Myung-bak, the
conservative candidate in the December
presidential election, was careful to endorse the
idea of a summit but to chastise Roh for not
having been tough enough on the nuclear issue.
Although anything could happen between now and
December, Lee leads all the polls while Roh's
splintered party has yet to select a candidate.
Lee, a former businessman, is likely to
want to pursue commercial deals for trade and
investment but has said he believes Roh has given
away too much while getting little in return.
Under the circumstances, he's not expected to want
to jettison the armistice - or the alliance with
the US - behind which South Korea has grown into
an economic power while the North has descended
into economic ruin.
"A peace treaty
depends on how you replace the armistice," says
Lee Song-min, professor at Yonsei University's
Graduate School of International Studies. One
critical factor, he notes, will be the role of the
remaining 29,500 US troops in Korea - and whether
they should stay or leave after ratification of
the treaty.
Lee's main complaint about the
joint declaration, however, is that it may include
a number of promises on which neither side will
deliver in the end. "There's nothing in the
statement that's etched in stone," he says.
"They've set up a complex road map, but it's all
contingent on a series of meetings."
The
most important of these undoubtedly will come next
month when the statement calls for the defense
ministers of the two Koreas to meet in Pyongyang
to begin to settle one of the most controversial
issues between North and South - that of "the
Northern Limit Line" set by the United Nations
Command in the Yellow Sea beneath which North
Korean fishing boats are banned. North Korea has
challenged the line in bloody battles in 1999 and
2002 in which sailors on both sides were killed.
The agreement says the two sides have
agreed to designate "a joint fishing area" to
avoid "accidental clashes". The two defense
ministers will also talk about "military
confidence-building measures" to make the joint
fishing area "a peace area".
South Korea
denies, however, that it will be necessary to
revise the Northern Limit Line, as demanded by
North Korea. All that will happen, say South
Korean negotiators, is that the South Korea will
open the controversial waters to North Korean
fishing boats.
Revision of the Northern
Limit Line - bitterly opposed by South Korean
conservatives, including many military officers -
has the potential for opening up the Haeju
Peninsula that juts west from North Korea into the
Yellow Sea and opening up new trading routes into
South as well as North Korea.
The peace
zone, says, the agreement, will promote
"establishment of a special economic zone,
utilization of Haeju harbor, passage of civilian
vessels via direct routes to Haeju and joint use
of the Han River estuary" - that is, the mouth of
the Han River, which runs south through Seoul.
Equally important, in the view of many
observers, are promises to open up newly
constructed rail routes between North and South
Korea to regular traffic beyond the one-time-only
runs that formally opened the routes earlier this
year.
A pledge to send a joint North-South
cheering squad to China for the Beijing Summer
Olympics next year accompanies the promise to
repair the railroad all the way up the map of
North Korea to the Chinese border. The railroad is
notorious for its shaky roadbed and antiquated
equipment but has the potential to serve as a
vital trading route for goods moving from South
Korea through China and Russia to Europe.
While skeptics ask whether it will be
possible to fulfill the promises in the agreement,
advocates of North-South rapprochement are clearly
delighted by the results of the summit, the first
since Roh's predecessor, Kim Dae-jung, flew to
Pyongyang for the initial North-South summit in
June 2000.
"Primarily it's great
progress," says Paik Hak-soon at the Sejong
Institute, which often advises the government on
critical policy matters. "It's what we were all
hoping for."
Journalist Donald
Kirk has been covering Korea - and the
confrontation of forces in Northeast Asia - for
more than 30 years.
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