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| May 02, 2000 | atimes.com | ||
|  | The Koreas COMMENTARY US can help advance Korean reconciliation By KA Namkung and Leon V Sigal * NEW YORK -- The announcement that North Korea's reclusive leader, Kim Jong-il, will host a summit meeting is testament to South Korean President Kim Dae-jung's faith that cooperating with Pyongyang works. But if North-South talks are to defuse the Cold-War confrontation on the Korean Peninsula, the United States must do its part. It can begin by fulfilling its promise to ease sanctions on North Korea. Last September, North Korea agreed to suspend testing new missiles while it negotiated with the United States. The North was expected to send a high-level official to the United States to conduct the talks, thereby assuring that they receive equally high-level attention in Washington. In return, the United States announced that it would lift its 50-year embargo on the North under the Trading with the Enemy Act. North Korea has not conducted any missile tests since then, but the United States has yet to relax its sanctions. As a result, the talks have gone nowhere and a high-level visitor from North Korea has yet to come to Washington. Even worse, the North could soon resume preparations for missile tests. It does not take much imagination to find a way around this deadlock. Washington could agree to publish new regulations in the Federal Register easing sanctions under the Trading with the Enemy Act at the same time that the high-level North Korean official arrives for talks. Simultaneity has worked in the past to deal with mistrust. It can succeed now. Washington could also take North Korea off its list of terrorist states. Pyongyang has not committed a terrorist act in the past 15 years. In recognition of that fact, the Bush administration, in October 1990, dropped terrorism from its list of preconditions for talks with the North. The sticking point today is that Pyongyang still harbors a handful of aging Red Army members whom Japan holds responsible for acts of terror. Yet Pyongyang has said it will discuss repatriating them in the course of the normalization talks with Tokyo that recently resumed. The two sides could resolve the problem, perhaps by sending the suspects to a third country. That would remove any reason to maintain US anti-terrorism sanctions against Pyongyang. The Clinton administration is wary of taking these steps, fearing an outcry from Capitol Hill. That's where presidential candidates Al Gore and George W Bush come in. They could quietly urge their partisans in Congress to, if not support, at least mute their criticism of such a move. What's in it for them? Plenty. First of all, they wouldn't have to worry about a potential conflict in Korea during their first years in office. President Clinton faced just such a threat in June 1994. Secondly, they wouldn't have to worry about future North Korean missile tests. North Korean diplomats have said that it could agree in writing to a formal moratorium on missile tests during the high-level talks in Washington. Such an agreement could also put both sides on a path toward an eventual total ban on North Korean missile tests, production, exports, and deployments in the context of a peace agreement that promises an end to tensions on the peninsula. Finally, North Korea wants to end its lifelong enmity with the United States. Pyongyang sees a new relationship with Washington as the key to improving its relations with Seoul and defusing the military confrontation on the Korean Peninsula. North Koreans speak of Washington as serving as a ''harmonizer'' of relations between North and South. What they have in mind is not some Camp David-style meeting, where the United States mediates between former enemies, but something more subtly supportive of reconciliation between North and South Korea. These are substantial incentives for candidates Gore and Bush, and all Americans, to support the president's efforts to end the Cold War in Korea. *K.A. Namkung, president of Namkung Associates, has been to Pyongyang on numerous occasions. Leon V. Sigal is director of the Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project at the Social Science Research Council. (This article was distributed by The Global Beat Syndicate, a service of New York University's Center for War, Peace, and the News Media. (c) 2000 New York University. All Rights Reserved. For more information on Global Beat, check out http://www.nyu.edu/globalbeat) | |||||||||
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