Renewed urgency to rein in North
Korea By Donald Kirk
SEOUL - The United States ambassador to
South Korea, Alexander Vershbow, corrected himself
at once in remarks at a glittering dinner this
week attended by some of the South's leading
business people and diplomats.
"If," he
began, "no, when," he interjected hastily, "the
efforts of [US nuclear envoy] Chris Hill finally
bear fruit," the newly opened Korea Center of the
Asia Society in New York "will be one of the ties
that helps to bring it about".
Vershbow
was talking about the prospects for persuading
North Korea finally to come up with a complete
list of its nuclear inventory and get on with the
next phase of disabling and dismantling its entire
nuclear program.
Just what the richly
financed Asia Society, with the support of
an
array
of huge Korean and American corporations, can do
may not be clear, but one thing is certain. In a
firestorm of the stormiest rhetoric to emanate
from Pyongyang in more than 10 years, neither the
US nor South Korea is giving up on bringing the
North to terms.
Though a miracle of
diplomacy may be needed to make that happen,
Americans and South Koreans far prefer to talk in
terms of "when" rather than "if" when it comes to
following through on nuclear agreements carved out
last year in six-nation talks in Beijing.
Could North Korea's latest threats, to
turn South Korea "to ashes", really be serious? Do
the North Koreans mean it when they talk about "an
advance pre-emptive attack" to counter any notion
of "a pre-emptive attack" from the South. And are
they really thinking of another bloody shootout in
the West or Yellow Sea when they accuse South
Korean ships of "a brigandish act" of entering
their waters in defense of the "northern limit
line" that the North refuses to recognize?
As far as the Americans and South Koreans
are concerned, at least publicly, they've heard it
all before - maybe not lately, but in the not too
distant past. In the face of all rhetoric, they're
still turning the other cheek in hope that what
they view as North Korean trash talk will fade
after just a few more diplomatic tete-a-tetes.
In that spirit, Hill again is looking for
a meeting with the North Korean nuclear envoy, Kim
Kye-gwan, with whom he says he managed to lay out
specific, if "confidential", ideas when they met
in Geneva last month.
They didn't make
"all the progress" hoped for, says Hill, but he
likes to think the process may be at a turning
point, about to come to a happy conclusion. The
mood is infectious, at least among South Koreans
in Seoul and in Washington. They're saying Hill,
at present in Southeast Asia, will likely meet Kim
next week somewhere in the region for what may be
the climactic round.
"We're cautiously
optimistic about a breakthrough," is the spin the
Foreign Ministry put on the prospects for
something really happening after a week of threats
and insults from Pyongyang, including the first
direct attack on newly elected President Lee
Myung-bak himself.
While South Koreans
were counting the number of times Lee was called
"a traitor" and "an imposter" by Pyongyang's
Korean Central News Agency, Lee said such talk was
"undesirable" and asked the North "to come to the
dialogue table with a more sincere attitude". In
the meantime, said Lee, he did not "expect the
situation to deteriorate further".
Against
all signs to the contrary from Pyongyang, Hill,
while passing through Seoul, spread the word that
"we're at a point where I think we can make
progress in the near future" and predicted, "We
will be able to get through this."
He made
those remarks at the same Asia Society dinner at
which Vershbow came out with his Freudian "if, no
when", remark, but there was no overt sign of any
differences between them. US officials denied that
Vershbow will be leaving his post a few months
early after having been somewhat less optimistic
than Hill, who outranks him as assistant secretary
of state for East Asia and the Pacific.
Hill made light of the North Korean
rhetoric, finding common cause between the US and
South Korea as brothers who have had to endure
similarly worded barbs from Pyongyang.
"It's becoming kind of a fraternity of
nations that's been attacked by the North
Koreans," he said, but he believed "very firmly
there's no way threats of this kind will have any
impact in the future". Indeed, he went on, "As we
go forward, we should do so with a renewed sense
of confidence." After all, he reminded his
sympathetic audience, "Everyone gets insulted by
these people."
If the chances of a real
breakthrough appeared slim, however, he did convey
the need for a happy ending in a region that
suffered through some of the worst wars of the
past century, "We need to build a sense of
community so some of those terrible things that
happened in the 20th century not be repeated in
the 21st century."
Although wars in Europe
and the Chinese mainland may have cost more lives,
Hill's words also had immediate relevance in South
Korea in a society in which fears of a second
Korean war are never far below the surface. The
sense is growing that some kind of crisis may be
inevitable - though North Korea's charge that
"South Korea's conservative regime is driving the
North-South relations to confrontation and
catastrophe" has had little real impact.
The test of real response in the South to
such words will come next week when voters go to
the polls to vote for 245 members of South Korea's
National Assembly - the remainder of the total of
299 seats to be appointed on a proportional basis
by political parties depending on how many seats
they win at the polls.
Lee Hong-goo, a
former ambassador who was prime minister 20 years
ago when North Korea promised to turn the South
into "a sea of fire", was not impressed by the
verbiage. "I don't think there will be a big
impact on the election," he said. "The Korean
public is not very astonished when North Korea
makes a threat." His greatest concern is that
voters are so apathetic that turnout will be low.
Candidates from Lee's Grand National Party
are expected to win at least 150 seats at the
polls, giving the party the authority to appoint
more than half of those allotted on a proportional
basis - and a solid assembly majority. At the same
time, North Korea's economic concerns may be
enough to keep the war of words escalating into
something more alarming.
A report in the
South by Hankyoreh, a left-leaning newspaper that
is often critical of conservative policy, said
North Korea was asking China for a large infusion
of emergency food aid after holding back on its
usual annual request for humanitarian aid from the
South.
At stake is the all-important issue
of face and pride. North Korea in its latest
rhetoric has spurned the help that Lee has
promised. Lee's demands for "reciprocity",
including release of kidnapped fishermen and
Korean War prisoners and verification that the
North has given up its nukes, are clearly viewed
in Pyongyang as nothing short of insulting.
The North would prefer, if current reports
are accurate, to go through more hunger, to the
point of cutting down the food provided even to
the elite of Pyongyang, rather than ask the South
for more aid at this stage.
But will the
Chinese come to the rescue, as they did with
troops in the Korean War when US-led forces were
rushing to the Yalu River, about to declare a
victory, before the Chinese drove them back to the
South?
In a precarious stage in the
bargaining, Hill repeated a mantra that he has
said a number of times in recent weeks. "We're
running out of time here," he said. "We don't have
all day."
But what's the deadline, and
when will time run out? To that question, neither
the Americans nor the South Koreans have an
answer.
Journalist Donald
Kirk has been covering Korea - and the
confrontation of forces in Northeast Asia - for
more than 30 years. (Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing .)
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