Lee
dealt out of high-stakes Korean
game By Donald Kirk
SEOUL - North Korea's promise to give up
or at least suspend its nuclear program clearly
forces the end of the seemingly tough policies
enunciated by South Korean President Lee Myung-bak
after he took office four years ago.
No
way can Lee appear as the strong leader who
reversed a decade of the "Sunshine" policy of
reconciliation first enunciated by Kim Dae-jung,
the president who flew to Pyongyang to meet Kim
Jong-il for the first North-South Korean summit in
June 2000, and won the Nobel Peace Prize six
months later.
On Thursday, Washington and
Pyongyang announced that North Korea had agreed to
suspend nuclear weapons tests, uranium enrichment
and long-range missile launches and submit to
international
monitoring, all in return for US food aid.
With the South Korean opposition gaining
strength while Lee's popularity sags perilously
low, the immediate priority for Lee and his
"ruling" party was simply to save face after the
US and North Korea simultaneously presented their
deal to the outside world. In that spirit, the
foreign ministry said North Korea had "agreed to
implement the pre-steps" called for by South Korea
"in an effort to create an environment conducive
toward resumption of six-party talks," last held
in Beijing in December 2008.
That choice
of words made plain the view that North Korea's
suspension of tests of nukes and missiles was less
than a "breakthrough" - the word of choice in the
global media - considering that the North could
resume them any time. From a practical view, the
provision under which the International Atomic
Energy Agency can send inspectors back to the
Yongbyon nuclear complex may be more significant
since they'll then know what North Korea is really
doing on its nuclear program and how far it's gone
toward producing a warhead ready for use.
The agreement to halt firing of long-range
missiles is meaningless, since South Korea is
within easy range of short and mid-range missiles,
which North Korea produces for export. North Korea
has test-fired only two long-range Taepodong
missiles, first in August 1998 and again in April
2009 shortly before exploding its second
underground nuclear device in May 2009.
The next question is likely to be whether
the US will go for removal of sanctions imposed
after those missile and nuclear tests. South
Korea's government is not expected to favor their
removal and will be hard pressed to decide whether
to resume food aid, shipped in massive quantities
to North Korea before Lee Myung-bak took office in
February 2008.
Worries about the declining
popularity of Lee's government means he's got to
forget about the approach that helped to make him
popular at the time of his landslide victory over
a liberal foe in December 2007. The ruling party,
which holds a majority of seats in the National
Assembly, has even changed its name from Hanara,
Grand National, to Saenuri, New Frontier.
Certainly the announcement from the White
House and the State Department seemed to bear out
the view that South Korea was basically left out
of the deal. The agreement calls for the US to
send 240,000 tons of food in the form of
"nutritional" stuff for kids and expectant
mothers, not rice and grain for military food
rations. The US doesn't like the deal referred
to as food-for-nukes, preferring everyone to
believe the fantasy that handouts are
"humanitarian," nothing to do with the nuclear
issue. In return, however, the North is to shut
down its nuclear facilities and forswears any
intention of testing nuclear devices - or
long-range missiles that in theory could carry
them to targets as distant as the US west coast.
The South Korean government, briefed on
the deal last weekend by the US envoy on Korea,
Glyn Davies, after he had spent two days in talks
in Beijing with North Korea's long-time envoy, Kim
Kye-gwan, stressed the need for North Korea to
"resolve the nuclear issue in a complete,
verifiable and irreversible manner".
The
use of that phrase suggested that President Lee
would like to stick to his guns amid mounting
criticism for his inability after four years in
office to get North Korea to back down at all.
Far from getting North Korea to tone down,
Lee has had to wait and watch in frustration as
North Korean rhetoric has escalated to fever
pitch. The North has refused to talk to South
Korea - and, in 2010, staged two bloody incidents
in the Yellow Sea. The North continues to deny
torpedoing a South Korean navy corvette, killing
46 sailors, and claims that its shelling of
Yeonpyeong Island, killing two marines and two
civilians, was retaliation for the South's marines
firing first.
Lee ordered much improved
defenses and promised to strike back if the North
attacked again, but his failure to get anywhere
vis-a-vis the North puts his policies to a severe
test in National Assembly elections in April and
then in the next election for president in
December.
Differences between
conservatives and liberals and leftists are clear
from the remarks of two of South Korea's most
powerful women as they confront one another in
bitter disagreement over North Korea's nuclear
program.
One of them Park Geun-hye, leader
of the conservative party, declared bluntly,
"North Korea's possession of nuclear weapons will
not be tolerated" while stressing "unequivocally
that military provocation cannot be tolerated
under any circumstances".
Park's arch-foe,
Han Myong-sook, leader of the opposition
Democratic United Party, at the same conference
blamed the "hardline stance" of President Lee for
having "reduced the role of the Korean government
to that of a bystander in the resolution of the
North Korean nuclear issue."
Under Korea's
"democracy constitution," adopted at the height of
massive demonstrations against military rule in
June 1987, Lee cannot run for a second term. Park,
daughter of the long-ruling South Korean dictator
Park Chung-hee, who was assassinated by his
intelligence chief in October 1979, is expected to
be the ruling party's candidate for president.
Park Geun-hye, who turned 60 this month,
visited North Korea nine years ago and met the
North's leader Kim Jong-il. Since Kim's death in
December, however, she's been the target of
criticism for having displayed what the ruling
party paper Rodong Sinmun called "the dictatorial
spirit" of her father.
As the US and North
Korea announced the deal for getting the North to
give up its nukes, she and Han Myeong-sook, the
Democratic United Party leader, offered their
opposing views at a conference on nuclear security
issues.
Park said North Korea was
"insisting that possession of a nuclear arsenal
was the greatest achievement" of Kim Jong-il and
that "it would be very difficult to convince North
Korea to give up its nuclear weapons."
Park acknowledged that much depended on
the outlook of the new North Korean "supreme
leader," Kim Jong-eun, third son and heir of Kim
Jong-il.
"The new leadership in North
Korea is standing at a critical crossroads," she
said. "They have to make a decision whether they
will pursue a policy of coexistence and
cooperation with the international community
including South Korea."
As far as Han
Myong-seok is concerned, though, Lee bears the
blame for a policy that "has failed miserably".
She called for a return to the engagement policies
initiated by Kim Dae-jung, who was president from
1998 to 2003, and Kim's successor, Roh Moo-hyun,
the president from 2003 to 2008.
Both Kim
Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun died in 2009 - Roh in a
suicide leap during an investigation of
corruption, Kim of natural causes in a hospital
here surrounded by his family. The former remain a
revered figure while Roh, who met Kim Jong-il at
the only other North-South summit in October 2007,
is regaining retrospective respect.
Han,
who is 68, won a reputation as liberal if not a
leftist while serving as prime minister under Roh
and then lost narrowly for mayor of Seoul in 2008.
At the nuclear conference, Han shocked
some observers by appearing to blame the South as
well as the North for the shelling by North Korean
gunners of Yeonpyeong Island while neglecting to
mention the sinking of the Cheonan.
"During the past four years of the Lee
government, shells have showered the two Koreas as
they bombarded one another," she said. That's a
view that conflicts with South Korean claims that
North Korea fired during military exercises in
which South Korean forces carefully fired in the
opposite direction from the North.
Han
promised that her Democratic United Party, if it
takes power, "will start improving relations
between the two Koreas with the aim of resolving
the North Korean nuclear issue".
Park
instead proposes a "Korean Peninsula
Trust-Building Process." The idea is to encourage
North Korea to build trust with South Korea and
other neighboring countries as a responsible
member of the international community - a stance
that clearly holds North Korea responsible for the
decades-long nuclear crisis on the Korean
peninsula.
Donald Kirk, a
long-time journalist in Asia, is author of
Korea Betrayed: Kim Dae Jung and Sunshine.
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