At least he didn't call him 'Dear
Leader' By Donald Kirk
SEOUL - Don't call him "North Korea's
leader". Call him "Chairman" - or "Dear Chairman".
That seems to be the first lesson in
etiquette that President George W Bush was
persuaded to follow when he acquiesced to
suggestions that he personally sign a letter to
Kim Jong-il appealing to him to come clean on all
he's got going in nuclear weapons program by the
end of the year.
Kim comes by the
"chairman" title as chairman of North Korea's
National Defense Commission,
the wellspring of his "military first" policy that
leaves no doubt the armed forces, under his
control, hold ultimate power over the Workers'
Party, of which Kim is general secretary.
The decision for Bush to address him as
"Chairman" rather than "Excellency" or the simple
"Mr" alone symbolizes the climb-down from the hard
line that Bush had made the hallmark of his policy
on North Korea for the first two or three years of
his presidency.
Does anyone remember
"CVID" - "complete, verifiable, irreversible
dismantlement" of the entire North Korean nuclear
program? And what about North Korea's record on
human rights, which the White House once held up
as so deplorable as to justify refusal to talk
directly to the North Koreans?
Now, it
seems, US special envoy Christopher Hill, who flew
to North Korea on Monday with the letter in hand,
will not be the only American official designated
to talk to the North Koreans. Could it be that
Bush is warming up for a summit with Kim Jong-il
as the crowning achievement of the whole process
of getting North Korea to abandon its nukes?
Certainly, Kim Jong-il would love such a
display of obeisance, just as he had hoped that
Bush's predecessor, Bill Clinton, would make it to
Pyongyang in the last couple of months of his
presidency before Bush's inauguration in January
2001.
Hold on, though. While South Korea's
President Roh Moo-hyun talks gamely of bringing
the leaders of the US, the two Koreas and China
together for a grand summit at which they sign off
on a peace treaty formally ending the Korean War,
the US may still want to go a little slow.
Bush's letter, concocted during Hill's
recent visit to Seoul before he went to Pyongyang,
uses the same exact phrase that South Korea's
Foreign Minister Song Min-soon has bandied about
warning that fulfillment of the agreement for
North Korea to give up its nukes is "at a critical
juncture".
The end of this year, Bush
reminds Kim Jong-il, is the deadline everyone had
agreed on for North Korea to list its whole
nuclear inventory - not just the reactor and
reprocessing stuff they've got at the Yongbyon
complex but "all nuclear facilities, materials and
programs". That means, the US still wants to know
about North Korea's program for developing
warheads with highly enriched uranium, separately
and secretly from the plutonium that everyone
knows about at Yongbyon, and also wants to know
what North Korea has been doing to "proliferate"
its nuclear expertise elsewhere, notably to Syria
and Iran.
The rewards for North Korea, as
far as the Americans are concerned, are completely
clear. If only Kim Jong-il will come through as
desired, the US will surely remove the North from
its list of countries sponsoring terrorism, will
take away the embargo on most forms of trade with
North Korea, will even normalize diplomatic
relations and asset to a peace treaty.
That's a tempting bait, as Hill has been
saying for months and reinforced here in talks
with South Korea's chief nuclear envoy, Chun
Yung-woo, as well as Foreign Minister Song. It was
during those talks, according to the Blue House,
the center of presidential power in Seoul, that
Hill agreed to recommend a personal letter, signed
by Bush, to Kim Jong-il.
Roh's spokesman,
Cheon Ho-seon, revealed the letter was the central
topic of Hill's visit to Seoul, saying Hill wasn't
carrying "a Bush letter" when he got here on
November 29. It was "while discussing the
settlement of the North Korean nuclear issue"
before Hill left for Pyongyang that he and the
South Koreans "came to consider a letter" from
Bush to Kim.
Finally, said Yonhap, the
South Korean news agency, reporting on Cheon's
remarks, Hill asked Washington for the letter
"after concluding that denuclearization of North
Korea and the normalization of North Korea-US
relations would be an effective means of
persuading the North Korean leader".
Now
the question is whether the ruse will work.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who had to
relay the letter to the White House, is spreading
the word that the end-of-the-year deadline may be
meaningless. On her way to a North Atlantic Treaty
Organization meeting in Brussels, she said she was
"not too concerned" about the deadline in view of
the "monumental effort" needed "to get all this
done by the end of the year".
Still, she
said, everything was "on track".
In fact,
as the whole history of negotiations on North
Korea's nukes suggests, deadlines are only made to
be broken. Who cares - or remembers - that North
Korea was supposed to have shut down its reactor
at Yongbyon two months after the signing of the
agreement on February 13 under which North Korea
agreed to disable and then dismantle everything?
Other deadline - and priorities - appear
to count for far more in both Pyongyang and
Washington.
The first is the presidential
election in South Korea on December 19 in which
the conservative Lee Myung-bak (M B Lee) remains
the front-runner. He is not expected to turn the
clock back on the agreements reached in the past
decade of liberal and leftist leadership in South
Korea, but he's likely to insist on a "review" of
policy that could slow down current efforts to
come to hard-and-fast terms on economic agreements
between South and North Korea on the basis of the
statement signed jointly by Roh and Kim Jong-il in
their summit in early October.
North Korea
faces the decision of whether to see if M B Lee
really wins - or whether, in an unlikely fluke,
the far-rightist independent Lee Hoi-chang or the
pro-government "progressive", Chung Dong-young, is
capable of an upset. Chung, promising to enlarge
on the legacy of Roh and Roh's predecessor, Kim
Dae-jung, who initiated the Sunshine policy, would
obviously be North Korea's favorite.
In
the cauldron of bitter South Korean politics,
moreover, anything can happen. M B Lee canceled
campaign appearances on Friday after an unknown
assailant attacked two soldiers, killing one of
them while stealing a rifle, a grenade and some
ammunition. Security surrounding M B Lee was
increased while Lee Hoi-chang was advised to wear
a flak jacket for all appearances.
The
other priority for North Korea to consider, of
course, is the US presidential election in
November of next year. The sense has long been
that Bush hopes to leave a "legacy" of success in
Korea in the 13 months left before he steps down
in January 2009. The obvious strategy for North
Korea is at least to give an appearance of
adherence to the nuclear agreement in return for
fulfillment of its other demands.
Prospects for real success, though, range
from uncertain to unlikely. North Korea this week
balked at South Korea demands for easing access to
the Kaesong economic zone, right across the line
between the two Koreas, 60 kilometers north of
Seoul. Right now all cargo must move on trucks
rather than the newly completed rail line. South
Korean companies in the zone do not have normal
Internet facilities, and South Korean staff
members have to go through a half-day customs
process every time they cross the line to get to
their offices.
None of which, though, is
dampening South Korea's enthusiasm for providing
food and other support for North Korea. The
government has just agreed to send another 50,000
tons of corn to the North despite the claims of
refugees that little of the aid actually trickles
down to people outside the armed forces, the
Workers' Party and the government.
M B
Lee, appealing to conservatives who may form a
majority of the electorate, has said North Korea
must first give up its nuclear program as a
prerequisite for the huge influx of energy aid
promised in the nuclear agreement. He may also
want to hold back on food - a threat that hints at
more ups and downs while Kim Jong-il tries to
decide how to respond to Bush's letter.
There's no doubt, though, that Kim is
interested. The best evidence was that Pyongyang's
Korean Central News Agency was the first to report
that Bush had sent him a letter - even though KCNA
revealed none of its contents.
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.)
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