US caught in ill winds over North Korea
By Donald Kirk
WASHINGTON - South Korea and the United States appear on a collision course on
basic points of policy regardless of who wins the American presidential
election on November 4.
The differences may be more pronounced if the dovish Democratic Senator Barack
Obama wins as expected than if the hardline Republican Senator John McCain
surprises the pollsters with an upset. Either way, South Korea and the US
remain far apart on issues ranging from North Korea to free trade.
Part of the problem is that Washington strategists and tacticians do not seem
to have grasped the significance of worsening
relations between North and South Korea.
Policymakers give an impression of having gotten the Korean issue out of the
way by dropping North Korea's name from the US list of state sponsors of
terrorism and by North Korea's show of adherence to its promise to go on
disabling all it has got at its nuclear complex at Yongbyon, 96 kilometers
north of Pyongyang.
The difficulty is that since Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yielded on
October 11 to North Korea's demands for removal from the odious terror list,
the North has been hurling ever-more vituperative epithets at South Korea's
President Lee Myung-bak and his conservative government.
Tempting though it is to dismiss North Korean rhetoric as sound and fury
signifying not a lot, the decibel level reached a new high this week. The
question is what to make of the North's warning that "the puppet authorities
had better bear in mind that the advanced pre-emptive strike of our own style
will reduce everything opposed to the nation and reunification to debris, not
just setting them on fire".
The immediate reason for such outrage is the insistence of South Korean
activists on their right to send up leaflets bad-mouthing the regime of the
North's Dear Leader Kim Jong-il. Besides decrying the absence of human rights
and the suffering inflicted on hundreds of thousands in prison camps, the
leaflets carry the news of Kim's illness, still a secret to most North Koreans.
Equally annoying to North Korean leaders, the balloons spread foreign currency
along with the leaflets. Foreign currency, completely banned in North Korea, as
are the leaflets, has only one practical purpose - to give would-be defectors
some means of supporting themselves if they decide to flee across the Yalu or
Tumen river borders to China.
South Korean authorities say they're powerless to stop activists from firing
the balloons aloft from positions in mountains south of the line between the
two Koreas. Just how many have finally landed in the North is not clear, but
it's obvious from the North's reaction that someone on the ground up there has
been picking them up and reading them.
The North Koreans are convinced that Lee, if not actually responsible for
sending up the balloons, could stop activists from firing off the leaflet-laden
balloons. In the decade of left-leaning rule that preceded Lee's inauguration
in February, both his predecessors, first Kim Dae-jung and then Roh Moo-hyun,
ordered the national police to block such provocations.
Now all the Unification Ministry and others say is that they can only ask the
leaflet people to please show some awareness of the sensitivities and knock it
off - a request that does nothing to stop activists from vowing to fire off
still more balloons. US officials, holding mixed views about such activity, say
nothing other than to ruminate privately on the impact of the ruckus on the
six-party talks on North Korea's nuclear program.
Lee also talks about six-party talks - but not in language that's going to
ingratiate himself with the North. Instead, he's calling for a "verification
protocol" - that is an agreement for North Korea to submit to systematic checks
as a means to guarantee compliance with its promises to shut down the Yongbyon
complex. He's not budging from that demand, as shown in the comment by a
government source that South Korea would ship 3,000 tons of steel pipe to North
Korea as promised after adoption of the protocol at the next six-party talks.
At this juncture, though, it's not clear when the six parties, China, the US,
Japan, Russia and the two Koreans - will hold their next talks, and it's still
less clear whether they'll come up with a verification protocol regardless of
whether the North is off the US terror list or not. Negotiators are sure to
raise topics that North Korea refuses to discuss, including its program for
developing enriched uranium at sites outside Yongbyon and its proliferation of
nuclear expertise to other countries, including possibly Syria, where Israeli
warplanes at suspected of having bombed a nuclear project more than a year ago.
Although South Korea does not respond with venomous vituperations to match the
noise from Pyongyang, Lee did not seem too interested in improving relations
when he named Kim Jong-il as one of three factors that were bad for South
Korea's image. Along with "labor-management conflict" and "illegal street
rallies", said Lee, as quoted by Yonhap, the South Korean news agency, Kim
Jong-il is holding down "the Republic of Korea's national brand value".
The Lee government has also upset North Korea by a fresh emphasis on human
rights in the North - a topic that the two previous presidents avoided for fear
of insulting North Korean leaders and destroying any chance of inter-Korean
reconciliation.
At Lee's urging, a human-rights commission is for the first time investigating
abuses in the North while a government-sponsored seminar highlights stories
from defectors describing public executions. Among the star speakers was the
United Nations' special rapporteur on human rights in North Korea, Vitit
Muntarbhorn, who said conditions in North Korea's prisons were "appalling".
Predictably, the whole show has inspired a torrent of North Korean insults -
"maniacs" and "US sycophants" rank high on the list of nasty names.
For US diplomats, the challenge is to get the six-party process moving again
despite the rhetoric, which also calls for banning Japan from the process.
North Korea is turned off by Japan's incessant insistence that North Korean
agents in the late 1970s and early 1980s kidnapped far more than the 13 people
the North has acknowledged as having spirited to the North from Japan.
The US also faces one other problem, that of getting Congress to ratify a
Korean-US free-trade agreement (FTA) that has the full support of both
President George W Bush and Lee. Obama, siding with workers for US motor
vehicle manufacturers, among others, has said flatly he opposes the FTA, and
the Democratic-controlled Congress is widely expected to reject it.
Lee's government has been pressing hard for approval of the agreement by the
South's sharply divided National Assembly as one of several major elements in a
program to buck up the South Korean economy, hard hit by the global financial
crisis.
An irony is that the FTA was negotiated during the administration of Lee's
predecessor, Roh Moo-hyun, whom Lee has frequently criticized for ineptitude in
financial matters. South Korean farmers, spurred by leftists, oppose the FTA if
anything more strongly than do American motor vehicle workers.
US diplomats cringe at the prospect of the FTA making it through the South
Korean assembly only to die in the US Congress. One of two scenarios, though,
may yet be possible. The first is that Congress could pass it after the US
presidential election but before the inauguration of the next president in
January.
The second is that Obama, once elected and inaugurated, no longer in immediate
need of the votes of workers, may temper his opposition - and go along with it
in the interests of relations with South Korea.
That done, the US could try to rev-up the six-party talks in hopes of getting
both Koreas to tone down the tough talk and get on with fulfillment of the
terms of the agreement on dismantlement of the North's nuclear program in
return for a vast infusion of badly needed aid.
Journalist Donald Kirk has been covering Korea - and the confrontation of
forces in Northeast Asia - for more than 30 years.
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