BEIJING - With South Korean media turning
on under pressure President Lee Myung-bak as the
country marks one year since the sinking of the
corvette Cheonan, a headline-grabbing
summit with the North Korea's Dear Leader would
offer a potentially fast route to easing tensions.
South Korean media outlets for days made
headlines over the tragedy, in which 46 sailors
died and for which North Korea has been blamed,
piling the pressure on Lee.
Lee has been
widely praised for his economic achievements since
taking charge in 2008. South Korea, the world's
14th largest economy, became the first country
among the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and
Development to make its way out of the economic
meltdown.
Last year, the South Korean
economy expanded by 6.2%, an impressive feat for a
"developed country", although South Koreans
themselves still feel shy of using that term as a
recently industrialized country. The world
recognized it by giving Seoul the right to host
the Group of 20 meetings of global leaders at the
end of last year.
However, Lee has had
setbacks too - and on North Korea too, the country
with the biggest "outside influence" on South
Korea.
Although last year's two tragedies
of the sinking of the Cheonan and the
shelling on the South's Yeonpyeong Island could be
conveniently blamed on North Korea's provocations
- and South Korean polls show people's support for
Lee's hardline approach to North Korea - deep down
in his heart, Lee may feel that his presidential
legacy is drifting. He is due to stand down in
February 2013.
A deterioration of
inter-Korean relations is not a simple matter in
South Korea - a quarter of the population have
family members in the North. While most South
Koreans hate North Korea, many of them have
sympathy toward their naughty northern neighbor.
This has always been a useful political tool in
South Korean politics.
Lee may already
have qualms about how history will remember him.
Besides, his immediate two predecessor, Kim
Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, held summits with North
Korean leader Kim Jong-il, in 2000 and 2007,
respectively.
Kim Jong-il is a rare
commodity in international politics. Very few
outside world leaders actually have had a chance
to meet him personally. When they did, they made
instant international headlines, just like former
US president Bill Clinton, who visited Pyongyang
in a rescue mission to secure the release of two
American journalists.
The Dear Leader's
health is also failing. Lee may not want Clinton's
photo-op with Kim Jong-il to become the last
picture Kim takes with a top foreign leader.
That's why the speculation over a possible
inter-Korean summit doesn't die easily, despite
the fact that inter-Korean ties are their lowest
point since the Korean War in the early 1950s. The
two Koreas even came close to war last November
over the North's shelling of Yeonpyeong Island.
"My understanding is that North Korea is
very much interested in a summit," said Shin
Gi-wook, director of The Walter H Shorenstein
Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford
University, in a phone interview. "The South has
some interest. But the Lee Myung-bak
administration's stance is that it won't make it
an occasion to provide massive economic aid to the
North, as seen in the two previous liberal
administrations. So, Lee can meet with Kim
Jong-il, but Lee won't promise Kim ahead of the
summit how much aid the South will provide to the
North."
Lee Su-seok of the Institute for
National Security Strategy, a state think-tank in
Seoul, is more pessimistic. "I know there are some
expectations for a summit. But I don't think the
timing is right. The Lee government is maintaining
the position that the North should first apologize
for the sinking of the Cheonan."
Analysts believe Pyongyang attaches a
cardinal importance to keeping face and is
unlikely to offer an apology. With that, some
expect that the current inter-Korean tension and
deadlock will continue. Others believe Lee will
find a way to persuade his hardline domestic
constituency to accept a summit.
Nobody in
South Korea claims to able to read Lee's
intentions. What makes predicting the summit
difficult is that inter-Korean relations have a
track record of unpredictability, with plenty of
mutual mistrust and suspicion. For example, the
late North's leader and founder of the nation, Kim
Il-sung, once launched a charm offensive toward
the South while at the same time dispatching a
team of special forces to the South in a failed
attempt to assassinate the South's then president
Park Chung-hee.
"I think we should wait
and see for a while to see where things go from
here," said Yang Moo-jin, an expert on North Korea
at Seoul's University of North Korean Studies. "A
summit may be possible. But the real problem is
that the Lee Myung-bak administration lacks a will
to take advantage of the summit diplomacy to
improve the inter-Korean relationship. In fact,
Lee's repeated mentioning of his willingness to
meet with Kim Jong-il may be just a lip service
for domestic audience. If he is really interested
in exploring such a possibility, he would have
formed a task team to do research. So, I think the
idea for the summit is very elusive."
In
fact, some observers see Lee as the South Korean
version of George W Bush, the former US president.
Just like Bush, Lee is a fundamentalist Christian
and tends to see Kim Jong-il as an evil man, they
said. According to this perspective, Lee doesn't
see North Korea as a dialogue partner, but a
target for collapse. They argue that Lee is
religiously driven and harbors hatred toward North
Korea.
The WikiLeaks diplomatic cables
showed that the Lee administration was comfortable
with its current hardline posture toward North
Korea and was likely to maintain that posture
until Lee stepped down.
Paik Hak-soon, a long-time North Korea watcher at the Sejong Institute, a think tank in Seoul, believes Lee is playing domestic
politics with his frequent mentioning of the
summit, while in fact, Lee prefers not to engage
North Korea, hoping it will collapse either by
worsening food crisis or domestic upheaval, as
seen in the Middle East. "If you are serious about
holding a summit, you work behind the scenes until
you make official announcement. So far, the Lee
administration leaked the news to the media to
give the impression that it was also working for
the summit. It's all lip service for domestic
consumption to save face. Lee is actually thinking
about the collapse of North Korea."
Moon
Chung-in, a political science professor at Yonsei
University, who had the rare experience of
participating in both of the inter-Korean summits
as a negotiation coach for the South's presidents,
characterizes Lee as a "practical" person who
could hold a summit if he wanted. The real
challenge, says Moon, is South Korea's
conservative camp - Lee's main political
constituency - that wants Lee to continue to take
hardline posture toward North Korea.
"The
current inter-Korean relations deadlock is very
serious. The issue of the Cheonan, for
example, won't be resolved through military talks.
It would take a summit to find a solution. Lee
Myung-bak and Kim Jong-il, as top decision-makers,
should talk to each other face to face. That would
work. I think Lee still has time. But the problem
is his conservative domestic audience. So, it
won't be an easy task," said Moon.
Sunny Lee
(sleethenational@gmail.com) is a Seoul-born
columnist and journalist; he has degrees from the
US and China.
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