SEOUL - The shouts of aging war veterans in central Seoul provided a
counterpoint on Friday to the imprecations of luminaries at a forum focused on
a word that's come into academic and bureaucratic vogue in recent years, even
though no one is quite sure what it means.
The word is "paradigm", and that's what all the speakers were looking for at a
two-day conference held by South Korea's Unification Ministry. The search for
"Korea's New Paradigm", as the conference was called, had to do with honor,
face and revenge over a single episode, the sinking of the South Korean
corvette Cheonan on March 26 with a loss of 46 lives.
"Unless we know who did it, we cannot sit with North Korea at the
conference table," said Gong Ro-myung, a former foreign minister who now chairs
the Sejong Institute, a think-tank with close government contacts. "Unless they
take these measures - an apology and guarantees - we cannot deal with them."
The question of what to do about the sinking of the Cheonan consumes
Korea's leadership in the face of fears of an escalation of the incident as
well as, conversely, an aversion both at home and abroad to any serious
response at all.
Demonstrators who took to the streets of central Seoul on Friday near the
soaring statue of Admiral Yi Sun-shin, revered for turning back the marauding
Japanese with his iron-clad "turtle boats" in the late 16th century, had no
such doubts.
"The government should use every possible means to destroy Kim Jong-il's
terrorists," said slogans on banners and leaflets inveighing against "the
criminal leader" of North Korea. "We must take action against North Korea with
one voice. We are ready to fight. We are prepared for war."
At the forefront of the protesters was the newly founded "Association for
Mourning of Soldiers Who Died," a term that covers the sailors lost on the Cheonan
as well victims of other shootouts. Among these are the six who died when a
North Korean patrol boat fired on their patrol boat nearly eight years ago in
the same disputed West or Yellow Sea waters as the Cheonan incident.
Buddhist monks, political leaders and former defense officials joined the
protest, but there was one problem. All told, only about 1,000 demonstrators
showed up, most of them well beyond fighting age, many flaunting the ribbons
and decorations of bygone wars, including service with the Korean forces during
the Vietnam War. The protest marched through the broad avenue leading past
Admiral Yi's statue, towards the seated bronzed figure of Great King Sejong,
who ruled Korea for more than 30 years in the early 15th century, to the
Kyongbuk Palace of the Yi dynasty, but no one seemed at all interested in the
calls for action wafting from the mega-loud speakers of the protesters.
You had to visit the conference on "Korea's New Paradigm" to sense the concerns
of South Korea's leaders, who are strong on words but short on a consensus of
what to do about the warship's sinking. Through the fog of talk all that was
clear was that no one imagines North Korea is about to relinquish its nuclear
program and no one thinks negotiations are worth the effort - with the notable
exception of the Chinese.
The conference began on an appropriate note of bombast from the unification
minister, Hyun In-taek, who proclaimed the North Korean nuclear problem was
"shaking world peace", and "the most pressing problem on the global agenda". He
said it was "high time to create a new paradigm on the Korean peninsula".
That said, however, the talk ranged from the iniquities of the North Korean
regime to visions of "reunification" of the Korean peninsula.
Wendy Sherman, a former State Department official who visited Pyongyang in the
company of Madeleine Albright, secretary of state in the administration of
President Bill Clinton, had an optimistic outlook.
"I absolutely believe in my heart that unification will happen," she said.
"Change can come about because the people themselves catch the chance of
change. I believe in the human spirit and human heart, and this message will
reach North Korea."
Sherman spoke in part on the basis of the 12 hours that she and Albright spent
with Kim Jong-il before the 2000 presidential election, but she never exactly
explained why the rapport that they believed they had achieved so much broke
down quite quickly - and why the six-party nuclear talks conducted during the
presidency of Clinton's successor, George W Bush, also failed.
It was up to Colin Powell, Bush's first secretary of state, to introduce, a
note of realism. "North Korea becomes an historical anachronism," he said.
"North Korea has nothing to show for the past 60 years but tragedy." Indeed, he
saw what had appeared as a "gradual thaw in hostilities" between the two Koreas
during the era of South Korea's "Sunshine" policy of reconciliation as "a
poison pill to the North Korean leaders", who cringed when North Koreans were
exposed to the wonders of modern South Korea.
The question for Powell was not whether North Korea would collapse, but how and
under what circumstances. "Perhaps the collapse will be somewhere between these
extremes," that is, gradually or suddenly. Meanwhile, he saw North Korea
playing the nuclear card, "one daunting and most dangerous game" - "blackmail
to keep extracting aid".
As for "the incident with the ship, we should be clear", said Powell,
forecasting a familiar cycle. "It's unlikely the process [of nuclear talks]
will get started again," he said. "The finger is pointed at North Korea, they
will get mad all over again."
Victor Cha, who directed policy on Korea on the White House staff during the
Bush administration, was more specific - and pessimistic. "It is increasingly
clear", he said, "that true denuclearization cannot be achieved under the Kim
Jong-il regime". North Korea, he went on, remains "intent on becoming and
remaining a full-fledged nuclear state".
He had, however, a way out that seemed about as unlikely as any of the other
forecasts for a happy ending. "The true endgame for denuclearization, the
necessary precondition for achieving it, is unification," he said. "We will
never achieve a verifiable and irreversible end to the North's nuclear menace
until we have a reunified peninsula, free and at peace."
Cha's pessimism conflicted with the measured view of Yuan Jian, vice president
of the China Institute of International Studies, who defended North Korea's
calls for "action for action" and its "very real concern" about the US's
military threat and refusal to countenance trade. "Pressure," she said, could
turn North Korea "away from negotiations". Within the North, "there are
uncertainties".
The sinking of the Cheonan, though, undermined confidence in the
ambivalence of the Chinese approach. "North Korea's foreign policy pattern is
often synonymous with its provocation pattern," said Cha, criticizing a
"conditioned and circular response" that failed "to solve the longer-term
problem" of how to "ensure that tragedies like the Cheonan" do not
happen again.
The words of William Drennan, a former US Air Force pilot who flew cargo planes
during the Vietnam War, struck a responsive chord among some Koreans in high
places. "I don't know many people who vacation in North Korea," he said, but
Nicolae Ceausescu, the dictator of Romania before the anti-communist revolt,
had a villa there.
"They were lined up against a wall and shot," he said, recalling the execution
of Ceausescu and his wife Elena on Christmas Day, in 1989. "They can't keep
things forever."
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