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Sunday, October 07, 2007

Koreas look down tricky road to peace

By Charles J. Hanley

On a July morning a lifetime ago, two generals, one in American khaki, the other in North Korean drab, strode into a makeshift building in a no-man's-land, took their seats at separate tables and signed the papers put before them. They left after just 12 minutes, without a handshake, without a word.

The papers said it all: The warring armies would cease fire that night "in the interest of stopping the Korean conflict, with its great toil of suffering and bloodshed."

The armistice agreement signed in 1953 at Panmunjom, Korea, did stop the fighting, but it didn't start the peace. Now the last generations to remember the "great toil" may see their war truly come to an end, if the two Koreas achieve the peace settlement proposed last week by their leaders.

The vision of two nations at peace — with normal trade, comings and goings, diplomatic ties — falls short of reunification, Koreans' vision of two nations made one. And ending a 54-year-old war-on-hold will mean negotiating through a diplomatic and political thicket grown denser by the decade, and remaking the face of a fortress peninsula.

But a peace treaty is a necessary step toward finally moving beyond the all-devouring 1950-53 war, a conflict that left the two Koreas a wasteland of bombed-out towns and cities, downed bridges, severed rail lines, flattened factories and schools, with millions of homeless, destitute people. Possibly 4 million people perished in the war, scholars estimate. The U.S. military suffered more than 33,000 battle deaths.

In subsequent decades of dictatorship, and then 20 years of democracy, capitalist South Korea rebuilt itself as an economic powerhouse. The northern Democratic People's Republic, meanwhile, became an ever more tightly controlled, impoverished, at times famine-afflicted one-party state.

Through it all, the armistice has largely held, and held within it the seeds of diplomatic trouble, of unanswered questions.

Does peace demand a separate treaty between North and South Korea, along with a broader agreement incorporating their two main wartime allies, China and the United States? What about the 15 other belligerents, nations from Belgium to the Philippines that sent small fighting units to Korea at U.S. behest?

Add this complication: South Korea never signed the armistice, since its then-President Syngman Rhee had hoped to fight on. The northerners consequently maintained they would make peace only with America. Washington, for its part, long contended it, too, hadn't signed the cease-fire — that its generals represented the U.N. command of 17 fighting nations, not the U.S. government.

Korea scholar Selig S. Harrison said such tricky issues were "kicked down the road for later diplomacy" in last week's vague statements at the Pyongyang meeting between South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.

"The United States has not ever formally said we would be a signatory to a peace treaty," noted Harrison, of Washington's Center for International Policy. But, he said, "It's clear China has to be a signatory, and it's clear the U.S. has to be a signatory for North Korea to go along with this whole process."

The prospect of peace talks raises other, ground-level questions, on a peninsula weighed down by 2 million troops facing each other across a hair-trigger front line, the 2.5-mile-wide demilitarized zone, or DMZ.

A major reduction and redeployment of armed forces would be expected to accompany a peace treaty, and that would be a costly operation. "With huge armies confronting each other, the logistics of actually ending the armistice are very difficult," said Korean War historian Bruce Cumings, a University of Chicago Asian specialist.

And what about the remaining front-line U.S. force in South Korea, 28,000 troops? The bitter legacy of hot and cold wars suggests the North Koreans would demand a U.S. withdrawal as part of any peace. But Cumings cautions against such assumptions.

"The North Koreans told (former South Korean President) Kim Dae-jung and Noh privately they would live with a situation where U.S. troops remain south of the DMZ," Cumings said. The reason: The U.S. would offer a "balance" to the historic Chinese and Japanese influence over Korea.

What's more certain is that peace won't be possible unless North Korea dismantles its nuclear weapons program. That goal looked closer last week with announcement of a major agreement in six-nation disarmament talks.

Much less certain is when Korea, divided by U.S.-Soviet fiat in 1945, might become one nation again.

Pyongyang's Communist leaders resist relinquishing their repressive power, and China is assumed to prefer keeping the communist buffer on its northeast. In 2000, in his opening to the north, former South Korean President Kim de-emphasized talk of one nation, in favor of "confederation."

And at last week's summit, "it's very significant they didn't play up the issue of reunification," Harrison said.

"Reunification is probably another 20 to 25 years away," added Cumings.

Both veteran analysts focused instead on what Cumings called the "unanticipated" substance of north-south economic deals announced last week: a joint fishing zone; a new joint industrial park in the north; joint shipbuilding; an agreement to ship southern rail freight through North Korea to China.

Those are the deals that build trust and may help change Korea after a half-century of no war, no peace.

"North Korea and South Korea are rapidly moving toward reconciliation," Harrison said. ◦

Thursday, September 27, 2007

Summit between North and South Korea

GLIDING across the border in a 30-limousine convoy, Roh Moo-hyun, South Korea's president, will on October 2nd visit Pyongyang and meet North Korea's capo, Kim Jong Il, for three days of talks. It is only the second summit between the two sides since their estrangement in a civil war over half a century ago.

The first, seven years ago, was between Mr Kim and Mr Roh's predecessor, Kim Dae-jung, who launched a “sunshine policy” towards the North. The meeting generated euphoria among South Koreans and won their president a Nobel peace prize, but produced little else. Kim Jong Il never came to Seoul, as he promised he would. Relations deteriorated between North Korea and the United States, South Korea's protector. And last year the North tested a nuclear bomb, to the region's dismay. As for the summit itself, it later transpired it was bought with cash passed under the table to the Dear Leader.

Mr Roh knows things have changed. The national mood towards reconciliation is subdued, even sceptical. Lacking Kim Dae-jung's charisma, his own political authority is at rock-bottom, after an ineffective presidency; he stands down at the end of the year. The only constant is that the summit's agenda is whatever Mr Kim decides it will be, and that he is not letting on: so, as one of Mr Roh's advisers delicately puts it, the summit is “open-ended”.

While dampening expectations, Mr Roh clearly hopes for a breakthrough in one or more of three areas: in reducing tensions and furthering peace on the Korean peninsula; deeper economic co-operation with the benighted North; and reconciliation of the many thorny issues—such as the tens of thousands of families separated since the Korean war—that might bring the distant goal of unification a tad closer. Above anything, Mr Roh appears to want to come home waving a scrap of paper with “peace” written on it.

Hawks, particularly in America, say that Mr Roh's ambitions risk running ahead of the “six-party” process in which America, China, Japan, Russia and South Korea are hoping to get North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions. Too much offered by the South might lead the North to hope for aid without scrapping its nuclear programmes. It is not certain that Mr Roh will even bring up the nuclear issue with Mr Kim. Meanwhile, say some of Mr Roh's critics, peace with the North is a matter for all the former combatants of the Korean war, China and America included.

Mr Roh's men deny there is any risk. The president's hopes for economic co-operation and reconciliation are being entertained only because of progress on denuclearisation, they say; in July, North Korea closed its Soviet-era reactor at Yongbyon and has since promised to declare and disable all its programmes by the end of the year. They argue that it will do the liberal Mr Roh no favours if he returns with a deal that is unacceptable to his successor as president (the clear favourite is Lee Myung-bak, whose right-wing Grand National Party has a harder line towards North Korea). As for economic co-operation, says a close adviser, it has been far too one-sided to date, with North Korea simply taking South Korean money, fuel-oil and rice, much of which finds its way to the armed forces. From now on, the South expects much more—starting with the chance to invest in the North's rich mineral resources and cheap labour. To press home the point, two-dozen business executives will accompany Mr Roh.

Some expect the North to go surprisingly far. Chung-in Moon of Yonsei University, an architect of the “sunshine policy”, argues that decrepit North Korea is on the brink of opening up just as China did three decades ago, because Kim Jong Il recognises that his legitimacy now rests on future prosperity.

But outside help is hard to imagine without progress on the nuclear issue. The United States classes North Korea as an enemy; it also brands the country as a state sponsor of terrorism. Both hobble North Korea's ability to trade. America offers to lift these curses in return for a real disablement of North Korea's nuclear capabilities.

On September 27th the six-party talks reconvened in Beijing. Their outlook was clouded by a mysterious recent Israeli air strike at a Syrian target that some claimed was a North Korea-assisted nuclear facility. North Korea vigorously denies this and American diplomats say they have seen no intelligence confirming it. Negotiators, wanting nothing to distract North Korea from a timetable for denuclearisation, are inclined to gloss over the matter. For the timetable, as it is, involves some quite devilish details.

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Monday, July 16, 2007

Pyongyangology

WHAT does the world really know about the regime of Kim Jong Il, which appears ready to yield to foreign pressure and bribes to close down the reactor at Yongbyon that has provided enough material for a handful of nuclear devices? The answer, despite defectors' tales and the best efforts of Western intelligence agencies, diplomats and academics, is still: much less than the known unknowns. That Mr Kim runs a vile regime is not in doubt, with North Korea's 20m-odd people the victims of backwardness, malnutrition and political repression. Yet so secretly does it conduct its affairs that speculation is easier than analysis.

Some known knowns. Since the mid-1990s North Korea's unique brand of Stalinism—even more horrifying than those tried elsewhere—has entered a process of slow disintegration. Famine during the 1990s is reckoned to have killed perhaps a tenth of the population. Only with difficulty can survivors still believe in the long-promised socialist paradise, or find fresh reservoirs of gratitude for Mr Kim.

Foreigners living in Pyongyang report a change in attitudes. Once in awe of authority, people now defy it. They break petty rules: sitting on the moving rail of the escalator; smoking beneath no-smoking signs; and blocking traffic by selling furniture in the streets, to the frustration of the white-gloved traffic ladies. More seditious still, people are breaking the seal on their radios that keeps them tuned only to the state frequency.

Another measure of changing attitudes: in bus queues or at sweet-potato stands, people are readier to chat to foreigners than they were just a few years ago. Signs of petty capitalism and informal markets, once unheard of, are everywhere. Crime is on the rise too, and where there are black markets, mafia-type protection rackets probably follow. Chinese lorry-drivers complain of highway banditry, as gangs jump on to the back of slow-moving lorries and pull off goods.

Despite Stalinism's decay, Andrei Lankov of South Korea's Kookmin University suggests that the regime, which during the famine may have faced collapse or military rebellion, now actually feels more sure of itself. It has restricted the operations of foreign aid organisations. And it has largely recentralised the distribution of food and other essentials, after the system broke down during the famine. So all the rewards in the form of cash and commodities that North Korea expects to reap from its nuclear diplomacy could easily be used to reinforce the command economy, and buy loyalty.

In recent months a crackdown has taken place along the porous border with China. The law is once again being rigorously applied to North Koreans caught crossing illegally. The punishment is five years in prison camp. There is little sign that the gulag is any less brutal: a report by Christian Solidarity Worldwide, a human-rights group, pieced together what is known from defectors' accounts and satellite imagery. It put the prison population at 200,000, with 500,000-1m having died there over the years.

As for the elite, what little is known suggests a regime riven by bickering. It appears to have problems filling government posts: the job of foreign minister has been open for months. In April the prime minister was replaced by Kim Yong Il, who analysts suspect may be more hardline. Political advisers from the army seem again to have growing influence. For a while after the six-nation agreement in February on North Korea's denuclearisation, the usual officials in military uniform suddenly stopped accompanying Mr Kim in public; Mr Kim also visited relatively few military sites compared with civilian ones. The uniforms are now back.
In May Mr Kim himself stopped appearing in public, prompting speculation about his health, with rumours of diabetes and heart problems. His health is perhaps the regime's most closely guarded secret, so all this is pure conjecture. But it is known that he is 66 and was once a heavy smoker and drinker.

If Mr Kim was frail, he has bounced back, appearing this week with China's foreign minister. Still, inevitable gossip has been fanned about succession in this communist dynasty. Mr Kim's two younger sons, in their 20s, have started appearing in public with their father for the first time since their mother died in 2004. Mr Kim's eldest son (by an earlier mistress), Kim Jong Nam, 36, had been written off as a potential successor after the embarrassment of being caught entering Japan with a fake passport to visit Tokyo's Disneyland. He has recently been living in Macau, but this year popped back for his father's birthday. Some of the fuss that North Korea made in the six-party talks about funds frozen in a Macau bank may have been for his benefit.

South Korean analysts, in particular, predict a collective leadership after Mr Kim's death, and the regime's indefinite continuation. But an orderly succession cannot be taken for granted. And if the regime were suddenly to collapse, one cast-iron certainty is that the countries that would have to deal with the mess—chiefly South Korea, the United States and China—are wholly ill-prepared.

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