SEOUL - North Korea is playing a new kind of bargaining game in the
confrontation with South Korea and the United States. It is holding hostages
for ransom under the guise of criminal charges in hopes of extracting even more
concessions from both countries.
For the American audience, the victims are a pair of female television
journalists, one Chinese-American, the other Korean-American, grabbed by North
Korean soldiers along the Tumen River border with China on March 17. North
Korea on Friday said it had confirmed "the crimes committed" by the two, Laura
Ling and Euna Lee of Current TV, half-owned by the former US vice president Al
Gore, and is ready to bring them to trial.
The wording of the news report, carried by Pyongyang's Korean
Central News Agency, had ominous overtones. A "competent organ" - presumably
the North's pervasive security apparatus - was said to have completed its
"investigation". All preliminary to an event that is sure to provide real
theater even if no foreigner beside the accused will be in whatever passes for
a courtroom in Pyongyang.
The inference was that Ling and Lee had admitted, if not been forced to
confess, the unspecified "hostile acts" that North Korea said weeks ago they
were committing when picked up on the border. It's no secret that they were
reporting on defectors escaping human-rights abuses - a taboo topic in North
Korea. From there, North Korean security officials should have no trouble
building an espionage case.
The trial of Ling and Lee is emblematic of North Korean strategy on a much
larger scale. The obvious goal is to draw the United States into dialogue, and
a renewed promise of billions of dollars in aid. Another target for North Korea
is the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), the US-spurred effort to get
nations to join in blocking shipments of nuclear materiel and technology as
well as any long-range missiles to deliver them.
It was very much with PSI in mind that North Korean negotiators summoned South
Korean officials earlier this week to the first North-South dialogue in more
than a year. It took place in the industrial complex at Kaesong, 60 kilometers
north of Seoul and just above the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas.
The South Koreans balked, unsuccessfully, about having to meet the North
Koreans inside the North's administration building rather than in the
relatively neutral complex headquarters. Then, in a 22-minute confrontation,
the North Koreans asked for far more money from the 100 or so South Korean
companies that employ 40,000 North Korean workers in the complex. As a
corollary to that demand, they also repeated the "warning" issued the day
before, that South Korea would be considered to have made a "declaration of
war" if made good on its promise to the Americans to join PSI.
At the same time, the North Koreans refused to respond at all to South Korean
demands to see a South Korean engineer arrested on March 30. He has been
accused of insulting the North during a conversation with a North Korean
waitress. In effect they are holding the engineer, a middle-aged man who works
for Hyundai Asan - the company that built the zone - for ransom in the same
spirit in which they are holding the American journalists.
Every South Korean official one encounters, whether on the Blue House staff of
President Lee Myung-bak or at the Foreign Ministry or the Unification Ministry,
declares that South Korea's position is irrevocable, that South Korea will join
PSI.
Tactically if not strategically, however, South Korean leaders are playing a
waiting game - possibly using PSI as a threat to North Korea in response to its
threats against the South. They also seem to hope that pressure from others is
going to help before the crisis deepens.
The latest reason for delay appears to be the visit to Seoul this weekend of
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who is arriving from Pyongyang where he
has seen top leaders, possibly including Kim Jong-il.
Lavrov himself cautioned not to "expect any immediate breakthroughs" after
seeing North Korea's Foreign Minister Pak Ui-chun, but he is assumed to have
suggested that a return to dialogue would be a good idea. "We should not yield
to emotions," he was quoted as saying by the Russian news agency ITAR-TASS.
"Hopefully, we will be able to overcome this crisis."
This kind of diplomacy may assert Russia's historic interest in the Korean
Peninsula as a counterweight to China's overwhelming influence, but how much
either side wants to help is far from clear.
Despite China's interest in hosting six-party talks, in which the North has
said it will "never again" participate, China has contributed to a sense of
confidence among North Korean strategists that they can get away with
frightening the world. The refusal of China, the North's ally from Korean War
days onward, to support any effective response in the United Nations or
elsewhere, underlines China's growing support of the North over the past few
years.
Far from discouraging North Korea, China since 2004 has vastly increased its
level of economic and other aid. Just as Chinese "volunteers" saved North Korea
from takeover by American and South Korean forces in the "coldest winter" of
1950-1951, and then waged the bloodiest battles of the war along where the
shooting finally stopped in July 1953, so China has come to the rescue while
the starving country plunges billions into nukes, missiles and space
exploration.
As tensions increase on the Korean Peninsula, Chinese policy-makers need, or
believe they need, to stand ever closer to North Korea in a "big brother" act
that is sure to deepen divisions and confrontation.
China now provides the North with US$1.5 billion in aid a year, nearly four
times as much as the $400 million it gave in 2004. North Korea has a favorable
trade balance with China, and multi-millions more in goods and cash flow
beneath the books in traffic across the long Yalu River border to the west and
the much shorter (but shallower and easily traversed on foot) Tumen River in
the northeast.
"The North Koreans know they have the Chinese in their pocket," Scott Snyder, a
North Korea expert with the Asia Foundation, remarked at the American
Enterprise Institute in Washington.
But why? The answer lies in China's desire to assert its historic hegemony over
the entire Korean Peninsula - and its influence in northeast Asia. It's also
possible the Chinese fear that diminished aid to North Korea would hasten the
collapse of the regime, bring about a flood of refugees across the borders and
destabilize the peninsula to the point of chaos with a bloody and unpredictable
outcome.
Nick Eberstadt, a long-time analyst of Korean problems with the American
Enterprise Institute, cites the danger of an "explosion of Chinese subsidies".
The most frightening aspect of North Korean advances in nuclear and missile
technology is the threat it poses not just to its neighbors - and enemies - but
to the world at large.
Bruce Bechtol, a former US Marine in Korea and now a professor at the Marine
Corps University in Quantico, Virginia, warned of rapid strides made by North
Korea while the United States was pressing six-party talks to get the North to
abandon the program. Under the circumstances, ransom for the two journalists -
and for the Hyundai Asan engineer - might gain their release but accomplish
little else.
"The North Koreans are advancing their capabilities and are proliferating that
to the Iranians," he said. He believes, "No matter how much we paid to the
North Koreans, they would still build the missiles and proliferate them."
Journalist Donald Kirk has been covering Korea - and the confrontation of
forces in Northeast Asia - for more than 30 years.
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