NEW YORK - South Korea appears on a collision course with the United States
over growing sentiment among American officials in favor of talks with North
Korea in the hope of somehow dragging the North back to six-nation talks on its
nuclear weapons.
The White House and State Department have already reached a consensus that
there's no harm in beginning the bilateral dialogue that North Korea has long
wanted - but only if the US nuclear envoy, Stephen Bosworth, can use such talks
to persuade the North to return to multilateral talks that the North has vowed
to spurn.
The US consent to bilateral talks as an opening gambit represents a triumph for
the diplomatic strategy of North Korea's ailing but still active leader Kim
Jong-il. He conveyed his own
message of reconciliation through former US president Bill Clinton when Clinton
visited in early August on an "unofficial mission" to pick up the two women
from Al Gore's Current TV network who'd been held for 140 days after North
Korean soldiers captured them filming along the Tumen River border with China.
Presumably, US President Barack Obama assented to the bilateral dialogue after
Clinton briefed him on the three hours and 17 minutes that he spent with Kim
Jong-il. Bill, mingling his public and personal lives, no doubt also thoroughly
briefed his wife, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who had been saying, in
effect, six-party talks or no talks at all.
Now, however, the US is clearly wary of upsetting South Korean leaders after
Bosworth briefed them in Seoul on his notion of chatting with the North
Koreans. The South's President Lee Myung-bak and his Unification Minister, Hyun
In-taek, have been saying, warily, that, sure, they don't mind if the US does
whatever it can to speed up the process, but North Korea had better give up its
nukes first - and forget about bypassing South Korea on the way.
South Korea's suspicion that the whole idea of bilateral dialogue is North
Korea's way of simply attempting to gain recognition of its status as a nuclear
power worries US diplomats. They don't want to appear to be cold-shouldering
their South Korean ally while kowtowing to Kim Jong-il for a bilateral process
that's likely to nowhere fast.
Washington, however, also is dealing with conflicting views from South Korea
from foes of the current government.
Chung Dong-young, who ran for president against Lee in December 2007 and lost
badly, is calling for Obama to invite Kim Jong-il to Washington in accordance
with Obama's stated willingness during his campaign a year ago to meet any
foreign leader.
Korea is now at "a crossroads between moving toward peace and falling into a
crisis that would continue an unstable deadlock", Chung warned in remarks that
he planned to make on Friday at the National Press Club in Washington.
"We should seize this new opportunity of dialogue offered by Pyongyang," said
Chung, a National Assembly member who served as unification minister under
Lee's left-leaning predecessor, Roh Moo-hyun. It was vital, he said, to know
the North's "real intentions".
Against this background, the State Department has engaged in a delicate dance
in which officials are acknowledging that North Korea has indeed invited
Bosworth, but that first it's necessary to chat "with our multilateral
partners". The stalled six-party talks included the two Koreas, the US, China,
Japan and Russia.
So far, the invitation remains unanswered while diplomats try to allay the
qualms not only of the South Koreans but also the Japanese.
The sensitivities of the latter are especially important as Japan makes the
transition to governance under the Democratic Party of Japan. The question is
whether new Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama will be more inclined than his
predecessors from the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party to reconcile with
North Korea.
Japanese sensitivities about North Korea, as analysts have often noted, are
rooted deep in the history of Japanese-Korean conflict and Japanese colonial
rule - and may transcend what would appear to be a momentous change in
leadership.
Hatoyama's stated desire for greater diplomatic independence from the United
States only complicates matters as US and Japanese diplomats feel their way
along and the Americans worry about appearing to pressure him on any aspect of
the US-Japanese alliance.
The ambivalent US position may explain why Senator John Kerry, chairman of the
US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is also said to be considering a North
Korean invitation. The word, as spread by Yonhap, the South Korean news agency,
was that Kerry would go to Pyongyang on an "exploratory" mission, but one of
his aides later told Yonhap he had no such plans.
Kerry signaled his uncertainty by failing to appear at a Korean Peninsula Peace
Forum in the US Capitol building at which an array of speakers, most of them
from the liberal Korean reconciliation movement, urged bilateral dialogue to
bring about a peace treaty formally ending the Korean War in place of the truce
signed by the US, North Korea and China in July 1953. (Rhee Syngman, then
president of South Korea, refused to agree to the truce, which he said made
permanent the division of the Korean Peninsula.)
Kerry was listed as host of the forum, but more or less delegated that duty to
the committee's East Asia specialist, Frank Januzzi, who also advises the White
House on Korean policy. Januzzi at the forum sought to avoid controversy,
talking up both multilateral and bilateral talks, saying "we need both" and it
"will require the efforts of many parties to bring about lasting solutions". He
was emphatic, though, on the need for South Korean assent, calling it
"inconceivable that the US could negotiate successfully with North Korea
without the full support of our South Korean allies".
Others at the forum were far more outspoken, harking back to the "Sunshine"
policy of reconciliation initiated by the late Kim Dae-jung during his
presidency from 1998 to 2003.
Park Won-soon, executive director of the Hope Institute of South Korea, charged
the Lee Myung-bak government "just took steps to reverse the course of national
reconciliation and cooperation in Korea". He called on the Lee government to
"seize the opportunity newly created" by Bill Clinton and "the North Korean
leadership for resuming dialogue and cooperation" and urged the US government
"to take bold initiatives in their Korea policy".
The best way, said Park, would be for the US to transform the armistice "into a
permanent peace arrangement". Otherwise, he warned, "North Korea's
'provocations' may continue."
Another speaker at the forum, Paik Nak-chung, a retired professor at Seoul
National University, called for "step-by-step unification going through an
intermediate stage of confederation or loose union of two separate states" - a
vague format often advocated by Kim Dae-jung. "Strong and wise leadership by
President Obama, his administration and the Congress and people of the United
States will be essential," he said.
Joel Wit, a former State Department official, now at Columbia University, cited
the need "to meet with the North Koreans to figure where we're going". He
called for broad talks on a wide range of topics rather than what he said were
the "technical discussions" in which Christopher Hill, nuclear envoy in the
presidency of George W Bush, promoted the six-party talks in which North Korea
in 2007 signed two agreements for giving up its nuclear program.
"It may take a few meetings or a few months," he said. "I wouldn't be fixated
on when's the next meeting of six-party talks."
South Korea's Unification Minister Hyun was doubtful about recent North Korean
moves toward reconciliation beginning with Clinton's visit to Pyongyang. "North
Korea is rewinding inter-Korean relations to how they were a year-and-a-half
ago," he told a seminar in Seoul. "Toward the US, it is demanding dialogue. The
North appears to be seeking improved relations with Japan's new government as
well. Nonetheless, said Hyun, "North Korea has not shown, at least as of now,
any fundamental change in its attitude."
Journalist Donald Kirk has been covering Korea - and the confrontation of
forces in Northeast Asia - for more than 30 years.
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