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| April 12, 2000 | atimes.com | ||
|  | The Koreas PYONGYANG WATCH: Clothing the emperor By Bradley Martin Being able to point to South Korea as an implacable enemy has been an essential element in the North Korean regime's control of its people. Thus it is significant that on Monday, practically on the eve of Thursday's South Korean National Assembly elections, Pyongyang blatantly endorsed the soft-line policy of South Korean President Kim Dae-jung. For whatever more may come of it, the timing more than suggests that Monday's mutual announcement of plans for a June summit in Pyongyang amounts first and foremost to a political endorsement of Kim's party and its "sunshine policy". The agreement for President Kim to meet North Korean Great Leader Kim Jong-il came in a Beijing session on Saturday, by which time Seoul observers were saying the election was too close to call. Clearly both sides hope the announcement will give Kim Dae-jung's Millenium Democratic Party the push it needs to achieve a majority in the national legislature so its policies can be continued. Alternatives to Kim Dae-jung's party would provide far more convincing bogeymen for the use of northern propagandists. The South's chief opposition Grand National Party is highly critical of Kim Dae-jung's use of aid to lure North Korea into shifting its emphasis from military preparations to economic reconstruction. "Keep it at home," opposition representatives repeatedly urge. "South Koreans need the help more." Of course the fact that North Korea at the moment has decided to endorse soft-line South Korean candidates doesn't mean it has said a permanent farewell to enmity and militarism. Long-time Pyongyang-watchers know that the northern leadership keeps various strategies for interim survival and ultimate victory going at once and shifts back and forth among them as it sees advantage in doing so. In this regard, note that the North's version of the announcement differed from the South's in saying Kim Dae-jung's visit to Pyongyang would be at his request, instead of at the invitation of Kim Jong-il. Enemies should not be made to look like sought-after guests. But the summit announcement almost certainly does mean that the North has looked over the possibilities for fixing its busted economy and realized that it can hardly be done without the participation of its estranged but filthy rich brethren south of the Demilitarized Zone. The giant Hyundai conglomerate, with its tour cruises from South Korea to the North's scenic Mt Kumgang, has given Pyongyang a scrumptuous sample of just how much help the South can provide if relations improve. And the basic strategy embodied in both Kim Dae-jung's sunshine policy and the South Korean-American-Japanese "Perry process", named after former US Defense Secretary William Perry, is to combine aid with credible assurances of domestic non-interference to hook Pyongyang on peaceful coexistence. The eventual goal is an end to the military threat Pyongyang poses to the South and, with its development of weapons of mass destruction, other parts of the world. The cynicism of South Korean opposition politicians is understandable enough. (And there clearly was a calculated risk that the announcement could backfire with voters, many of whom are also cynical.) After all, the two sides have gotten this far before only to see the summit fall through even before it happened. In 1994 former US President Jimmy Carter arranged for then South Korean President Kim Young-sam to meet then North Korean President Kim Il-sung. But then Kim Il-sung died, and his country retreated into mourning. Kim Young-sam buckled to domestic pressures, insulting the dead leader's successor son by refusing to send a delegation to mourn the "war criminal". End of summit plans. Many, many, many lesser initiatives have also come to naught over the decades. Is there anything different this time? There is, and that difference provides some grounds for hope that something may eventually come of the new initiative. The difference is that the North's economy, after years of famine caused by faulty policies combined with natural disasters, is in far worse shape both absolutely and relative to South Korea's than it was when earlier initiatives failed. No one in Pyongyang can be unaware that the economy has to be fixed. But Kim Jong-il keeps blaming fall guys at home, ministers and other high-level officials who try to use the Stalinist policies Kim inherited from his father. Predictably, they always fail. Some foreign intelligence sources believe that the current Great Leader's repeated executions and banishments of thus-failed high-level economic officials have begun to backfire, causing other officials to fear that they may be next - and to reflect upon where the blame really lies. Kim Jong-il is a dictator but perhaps he realizes that the elite circles just beneath him will not forever ignore the fact that the emperor, policy-wise, has no clothes. While it would be too much to expect him to leap into Chinese- or Vietnamese-style reform and opening, he may view this as a major opportunity to make some smaller changes and ensure his longer-term survival. (Special to Asia Times Online) | |||||||||
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