A hard-to-reach summit for the Koreas By Donald Kirk
SEOUL - You would have to believe in miracles to think that the leaders of
North and South Korea will ever meet to talk about the North's nuclear weapons
program.
Improbable though such a meeting might seem, there's so much talk about talks
these days that no one is saying it will never happen. North Korea is edging
toward six-party negotiations, and who's to say these would not be a precursor
for another inter-Korean summit?
That's the talk here, as United Nations undersecretary general for political
affairs Lynn Pascoe winds up a four-day visit to Pyongyang. It's all part of
the drive to bring North Korea back to
the table in Beijing for the six-party talks on its nuclear program for the
first time since December 2008.
Pascoe didn't get to see Dear Leader Kim Jong-il, but he did meet North Korea's
titular head of state Kim Yong-nam, while North Korea's nuclear envoy Kim
Kye-gwan was in Beijing seeing China's chief envoy Wu Dawei. Earlier in the
week, Kim Jong-il himself condescended to receive Wang Jiarui, head of the
Chinese Communist Party's international department, proof positive that the
Dear Leader may agree to China's hosting another gathering of envoys from the
two Koreas, Japan, Russia and the United States.
Pascoe's visit to Pyongyang may be critical since he is an American former
ambassador to Indonesia who has led a long career as a diplomat. Technically,
Pascoe these days talks on behalf of United Nations secretary general Ban
Ki-moon, a Korean whose soft diplomacy as foreign minister for the late South
Korean president Kim Dae-jung ingratiated him to the North Koreans. Pascoe is
also seen, however, as representing the United States, and it's not surprising
that the latest word in Seoul is that Kim Kye-gwan is going to Washington in
March for still more talks.
If a face-saving deal is in the offing, though, the question remains whose face
will be saved - and what if anything will North Korea be willing to yield. We
may not really know until or unless Kim Jong-il agrees, perhaps after six-party
talks, as he hangs on to failing health, to see South Korea's conservative
President Lee Myung-bak. Lee's policies seem the antithesis of all that Kim
Dae-jung espoused when he enunciated his Sunshine policy of engagement 12 years
ago.
There is, of course, no clear sign that Kim Jong-il has any intention of
receiving Lee - or, far less likely, coming down to Seoul to see him. All we
know for sure is that the Dear Leader's propagandists are not insulting Lee as
much as a year ago and North Korea is more interested in talking than a few
months ago.
The trouble is that all North Korea wants to talk about is wringing money out
of South Korea. The reason for talks about the Kaesong industrial complex, just
above the line between the two Koreas about 64 kilometers north of Seoul, is to
see how to make the South Korean factories there work more efficiently - and
also to get them to pay more for the 40,000 North Korean workers, none of whom
ever sees the salaries they are supposed to receive.
And the reason for talking about resuming tours to Mount Kumkang, the cluster
of granitic peaks above the eastern end of the line, is that they brought huge
sums into North Korean coffers. No way, however, will North Korea countenance a
joint investigation of the tragedy in which a North Korean soldier shot and
killed a South Korean woman in July 2008 as she wandered outside the tourist
zone to look at the sunrise - the reason Lee stopped the tours. Basically,
North Korea wants to dictate the terms for discussing these ventures.
Disagreements over the Kaesong and Kumkang zones, however, are secondary
compared to the overwhelming problem of security issues on the Korean
Peninsula.
North Korea does not want to talk to South Korea about anything to do with
security. North Korean policy for years has been to try to define the South as
an inferior vassal of the United States. This attitude means North Korea will
exclude South Korea from any discussion of its nuclear program. The best South
Korea can expect is to join in six-party talks on North Korea's nukes when and
if they resume. And even if the six parties do meet again, North Korea would
not want South Korea to play an active part. The serious talking would happen
"on the sidelines", as US diplomats put it, with a peace treaty to replace the
Korean War armistice at the top of the agenda.
Lee has said that North Korea would have to be willing to talk about its
nuclear program in any inter-Korean summit. He has also said that he would
raise the topic of the thousands of South Koreans whom the North has held as
slave labor ever since the Korean War in the early 1950s and the hundreds of
South Korean fishermen whom the North has captured when their boats strayed in
or near North Korean waters.
Lee might even raise the topic that North Korea wants above all to avoid - the
regime's egregious human-rights violations.
Kim Jong-il does not want to hear about such matters. North Korea's nukes,
North Korea's forces above the demilitarized zone, human rights for North
Korea's citizens and the return of South Koreans held in the North did not come
up at all in the two previous summits between Kim Jong-il and South Korean
presidents, in June 2000 when he received Kim Dae-jung and again in October
2007 when he received Roh Moo-hyun.
Times, however, have changed. Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, left-leaning
advocates of reconciliation, passed away last year.
North Korea now is paying the price, in the form of UN Security Council
sanctions for testing a long-range missile last April and a nuclear device last
May. North Korea, moreover, is suffering from hunger and disease approaching
the level of the great famine of the 1990s. Under these circumstances, Kim
Jong-il, sick and anxious to keep his regime afloat in a time of transition,
may yet agree to an inter-Korean summit at which all topics are on the table.
Lee, however, has imposed one more condition that makes a summit all the more
unlikely. He is not willing to secretly send hundreds of millions of dollars to
North Korea, as did Kim Dae-jung for the sake of such a meeting.
Considering that restraint, a skeptic not long ago might have relegated the
chances of a summit to a miracle somewhere in the category of a second coming.
Who could imagine that the dictator whose propaganda machine last year blasted
Lee as a "traitor" and "lackey" of the Americans would ever agree to see him?
All that tends to make the notion of a Lee-Kim summit seem so far-fetched as to
be hardly worth considering.
Now, however, gossip about another North-South summit echoes through Seoul as
if it might actually happen this year. As the search for talks gains traction,
the odds of a North-South summit may seem long - but maybe worth taking on the
chance of a payoff in the end.
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