Kim snubs Carter as realities intrude
By Donald Kirk
SEOUL - Kim Jong-il could hardly have come up with a better excuse for snubbing
former United States President Jimmy Carter and wife Rosalynn just as they were
expected to meet the Dear Leader on a mission to Pyongyang to rescue a
beleaguered American.
In the early hours of Thursday, Kim was reported to be off on his private
armored train across the border into China's Jilin province - on his way to his
second meeting with Chinese leaders in Beijing in four months.
As he headed for North Korea, Carter might well have thought he was traveling
in the footsteps of another former Democratic Party president from a southern
state, Bill Clinton. Kim feted Clinton for three hours in August last year
before sending him packing on his
private jet, accompanied by two female American television journalists whose
release he had secured.
Kim's snub to Carter appears all the more extraordinary in the light of a
report from Jilin province that the Dear Leader did have 20 minutes to spare to
visit the same middle school that his late father, Great Leader Kim Il-sung,
attended for three years in the late 1920s when it was a magnet for
left-leaning teachers.
No, Kim could not have skipped receiving Carter just because his departure had
been scheduled well in advance. Jimmy, Rosalynn and their strictly unofficial
entourage all arrived on Wednesday afternoon, many hours before Kim's
departure. They were greeted at the airport by North Korea's chief nuclear
envoy, Kim Kye-gwan, given flowers by a young girl and whisked off to a meeting
with North Korea's second-highest leader, Kim Yong-nam.
If all that appeared like a prelude to a seance with Kim Jong-il, however,
clearly certain realities are intruding that made Carter's visit quite
different from that of Bill Clinton. For one thing, in the view of North Korea
observers, tensions are just too high on and around the Korean Peninsula in the
aftermath of the sinking of the South Korean navy vessel the Cheonan in
March and ongoing war games by US and South Korean forces with an emphasis on
destroying North Korean submarines of the sort that investigators here blame
for firing the torpedo that split the Cheonan in two with a loss of 46
young sailors.
Better, according to this reasoning, for Carter to get an earful about North
Korea's eagerness to return to six-party talks, which it's been boycotting
since December 2008, along with the proviso that the US and the UN
Security Council first have to do away with the sanctions imposed after North
Korea's long-range missile test in April 2009 and its second nuclear test six
weeks later.
After all that's happened in the past few months, the message that Carter will
be delivering directly to President Barack Obama will no doubt be considerably
stronger than whatever Clinton told him about North Korea's eagerness for
reconciliation. Kim Yong-nam and others have been making the point all the more
clear with warnings that the Korean peninsula is ''on the brink of war'' - a
rhetorical flourish, to be sure, but still pretty tough language.
If there is any compensation prize for Carter's failure to see Kim Jong-il,
that has to be the release of the American teacher-preacher, Aijalon Gomes, who
wandered ''illegally'' into North Korea from China in January and has been held
as a prisoner ever since. Just as Clinton's jet whisked the two TV women off to
California, so Carter's jet came prepared to take Gomes back home to Boston
after a misadventure in which the North Korean media has said he attempted to
commit suicide while in prison.
A North Korean court sentenced him in April to eight years and a $700,000 fine
- a relatively small price to pay for freedom for one whose could have fared
much worse for having dared to enter North Korea with a letter urging Kim
Jong-il to stop human-rights abuses and resign.
While the Carters, Gomes and Carter's entourage waited to climb on the plane
and return home as arranged, much greater interest focused on whatever Kim
Jong-il was up to in China. The question was whether the Chinese had demanded
his presence, as the leader of a land that has become a virtual Chinese
dependency, or whether he had demanded a full-dress audience with Chinese
leaders to make some points of his own.
Three topics were likely to have been at the top of the agenda. Not necessarily
in order of importance, the first would be North Korea's urgent need for aid in
a time of worsening economic problems. Reports differ on whether the North
again is easing up restraints on private markets or is restricting trade as
before, but no one doubts the North is descending into a trough of economic
hardship exacerbated by recent flooding along the Yalu River border.
The second reason would be to impress on the Chinese the rise of Kim Jong-il's
third son, Kim Jong-eun, as the heir presumptive to the hereditary throne that
Kim Jong-il inherited from Kim Il-sung in July 1994. The younger Kim, still in
his 20s, is expected to be anointed, more or less, at an unusual Workers' Party
meeting in Pyongyang next month. Already units of the armed forces are massing
around the capital, not to fend off the American attack that the North's
rhetoricians love to talk about but to put on a show of armed might as evidence
of the power of the Kim dynasty before or during the party meeting.
Yet another reason is that Kim Jong-il may need special medical attention in
Beijing. A team of Chinese specialists has recently been tending him in
Pyongyang, and a pair of French physicians were also said to have been on hand.
Still, the man is on dialysis three times a week, survived a stroke in August
2008, and is also believed to suffer a number of other unspecified ailments.
For Carter, though, Kim Jong-il's departure still has to be a special
disappointment. It was little more than 16 years ago, in June 1994, that Carter
chatted with Kim Il-sung on a boat in the Daedong River. The meeting, in the
middle of what's now remembered as "the first nuclear crisis", was historic.
The Great Leader said he would be open to giving up his nuclear program and
even to a meeting with Kim Young-sam, then South Korea's president, in exchange
for nuclear energy reactors.
The atmosphere of goodwill evaporated after Kim's death three weeks later. Soon
North Korea was blasting Kim Young-sam for refusing to send condolences over
the passing of the man who had ordered the invasion of South Korea in 1950.
Tensions ratcheted up that summer until US and North Korean negotiators signed
the Geneva framework agreement in October 1994 in which North Korea agreed to
shut down its reactor in return for two lightwater nuclear energy reactors.
Carter has taken much of the credit for the Geneva framework even though the
agreement ultimately failed and the reactors were never built after North Korea
eight years later, in October 2002, was revealed to have an entirely separate
program for enriching uranium.
Carter, as a man of peace, no doubt hoped to turn the trick again. By leaving
when he did, Kim Jong-il gave the impression that Carter's visit was a
sideshow. For Carter, the rescue of an imprisoned America was not a dramatic
cover for serious talks but a face-saving gesture. There would be no quiet
exchange of words, no end to dangers that have escalated beyond the ability of
an 85-year-old man to settle with a pleasant conversation on the river.
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