|
 |
 |
|
There is a Yiddish expression for someone who mischievously minds other people’s business: a cooking spoon that [among bad chefs] dips into too many pots, spoiling the cuisine. That’s the category for Swedish PM Goran Persson’s announcement of a European Union “initiative” to see what can be done stimulate the Korean peace process.
The Scandinavians, with their modern hi-tech civilization and their [not always successful] neutrality have appointed themselves international mediators par excellence. That it doesn’t often succeed — like the ill-fated Olslo Peace process in the Mideast where the Norwegians made an end run around American mediation and further embittered the parties — doesn’t seem to faze.
The situation in Korea couldn’t be more complicated. A half-century of bloody war and division has created two entities. Time was when many [not the least the Swedish socialists] thought North Korea’s was the senior partner. Today North Korea is dwarfed by South Korea, perhaps the best example of how a preindustrial society can blossom from colonialism into representative government and market economics.
But North Korea remains hopelessly retrograde. A Western journalist’s recent account of TV broadcasts seen from neighboring China sounds like little has changed since I visited there more than a decade ago with a group of U.S. academics, military, and journalists to have a frank discussion. We didn’t. I was fascinated, locked up in my hotel room, to watch TV, then only the comings and goings of Kim Il Sung, the Great Leader.
Now, apparently, the only TV change is that his son, the Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, is the “star”. But much has changed outside the tube: one of the worst modern famines has wiped out tens of thousands of people. We may never know how many died [as we do not know in Mao’s man-made famine]. Young Kim gestures toward moving toward new goals, implying in a recent semi-secret trip to Shanghai that he was studying Chinese methods. But always the same question for any totalitarian government: can it change without falling apart. The debris of two dozen Communist regimes across Eurasia suggests no.
Still, North Korea poured capital into weaponry to make itself an international menace. Not only has its missile development — based despite protestations of self-reliance on Soviet and Chinese help — permitted Pyongyang to lob a threatening lump of steel over Japan into the Pacific, but they are aiding and abetting weapons proliferation in Iran, Pakistan, and perhaps Iraq. Their nuclear program — presumably halted in a shaky agreement with the U.S. and Japan, brokered by China — eventually could produce weapons.
That all this is in the hands of a government about whose inner workings less is known than perhaps anywhere is not reassuring. The Clinton Administration pushed a negotiating strategy for a supposed halt in missile and nuclear development in exchange for economic help. But was such a stategy valid given past actions — Pyongyang murdered South Korean cabinet members in a third country, constantly infiltrated saboteurs/assassins, kidnapped Koreans, initiated violent incidents on the Demilitarized Zone [while tunneling under it] with U.S./South Korean forces, etc.?
But in the post-Soviet, post-Mao world, some thought it a risk worth taking. South Korea’s President Kim Dae Jung, a victim of Seoul’s earlier authoritarian regime, has been willing to overlook transparency. He came to Washington this month to persuade the new American president that policy was correct. Dubya has his doubts, wants a review, wants to cool a process, which seemed to many to have picked up too much speed on a track with too many sharp curves. There are many in Tokyo, a very interested party, who think so too.
Kim went home without the trophy he needed to quiet his own critics in South Korea. He has now appointed as new foreign minister Han Seung Soo, former ambassador to Washington, and “notorious” for his friendship
with the Americans. The dialogue would go on, and with Japan, which must be an equal partner [even though many South Koreans cannot forget the long decades of brutal Japanese colonial rule]. And with China, to whom many South Koreans look for a policy of accommodation — needing as it does South Korea as a trading partner. Beijing, too, has apparently reestablished its special relationship with Pyongyang. And many South Koreans, always worried about a real or perceived competition with Japan, look to China as another dancing partner in an eventual scenario for a powerful, united Korea.
All sides, for the most part, agree that some kind of American presence in the area will be an important balance wheel if and when a reunited Korea emerges.
But the Europeans have little to contribute to this dialogue. One can only hope that Persson will remain the tall, quiet, silent man from the North, the role conventional wisdom has assigned the Swedes.
Sol W. Sanders is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International.
He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.