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Friday, August 27, 2010     GET REAL

Carter’s peace mission rewarded only with hostage release as Kim heads to China

By Donald Kirk

SEOUL — Kim Jong-Il could hardly have come up with a better excuse for snubbing former United States President Jimmy Carter and wife Rosalynn just as they were expected to meet the Dear Leader on a mission to Pyongyang to rescue a beleaguered American.

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In the early hours of Thursday, Kim was reported to be off on his private armored train across the border into China’s Jilin province — on his way to his second meeting with Chinese leaders in four months.

As he headed for North Korea, Carter might well have thought he was traveling in the footsteps of another former Democratic Party president from a southern state, Bill Clinton. Kim feted Clinton for three hours in August last year before sending him packing on his private jet, accompanied by two female American television journalists whose release he had secured.


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Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter shakes hands with North Korea's Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Kim Kye Gwan, at the airport in Pyongyang on Aug. 25.     Xinhua
Kim’s snub to Carter appears all the more extraordinary in the light of his visit on his first day in Jilin to the same middle school that his late father, Great Leader Kim Il-Sung, attended for three years in the late 1920s when it was a magnet for left-leaning teachers. He spent a whole night in a luxury hotel in Jilin city before his 40-vehicle entourage made its way to the large industrial city of Changchun and the meeting with President Hu Jintao.

No, Kim could not have skipped receiving Carter just because his departure had been scheduled well in advance. Jimmy, Rosalynn and their strictly unofficial entourage all arrived on Wednesday afternoon, many hours before Kim’s departure. They were greeted at the airport by North Korea’s chief nuclear envoy, Kim Kye-Gwan, given flowers by a young girl and whisked off to a meeting with North Korea’s second-highest leader, Kim Yong-Nam.

If all that appeared like a prelude to a seance with Kim Jong-Il, however, clearly certain realities made Carter’s visit quite different from that of Bill Clinton. For one thing, tensions are just too high on and around the Korean Peninsula in the aftermath of the sinking of the South Korean navy vessel the Cheonan in March and ongoing war games by US and South Korean forces with an emphasis on destroying North Korean submarines like the midget sub that fired that the torpedo that split the Cheonan in two with a loss of 46 young sailors.

Better, according to this reasoning, for Carter to have had an earful about North Korea’s eagerness to return to six-party talks, which it’s been boycotting since December 2008, along with the proviso that the US and the UN Security Council first have to do away with the sanctions imposed after North Korea’s long-range missile test in April 2009 and its second nuclear test six weeks later.

After all that’s happened in the past few months, the message that Carter will be delivering directly to President Barack Obama will no doubt be considerably stronger than whatever Clinton told him about North Korea’s eagerness for reconciliation. Kim Yong-Nam and others have been making the point all the more clear with warnings that the Korean peninsula is ”on the brink of war” — a rhetorical flourish, to be sure, but still pretty tough language.

If there is any compensation prize for Carter’s failure to see Kim Jong-Il, that has to be the release of the American teacher-preacher, Aijalon Gomes, who wandered ”illegally” into North Korea from China in January and has been held as a prisoner ever since. Just as Clinton’s jet whisked the two TV women off to California, so Carter’s jet flew Gomes back home to Boston after a misadventure in which the North Korean media said he attempted to commit suicide in prison.

A North Korean court sentenced him in April to eight years and a $600,000 fine — a relatively small price to pay for freedom for one whose could have fared much worse for having dared to enter North Korea with a letter urging Kim Jong-Il to stop human-rights abuses and resign.

While the Carters, Gomes and Carter’s entourage waited to climb on the plane and return home as arranged, much greater interest focused on whatever Kim Jong-Il was up to in China. The question was whether the Chinese had demanded his presence, as the leader of a land that has become a virtual Chinese dependency, or whether he had demanded a full-dress audience with Chinese leaders to make some points of his own.

Three topics were likely to have been at the top of the agenda. Not necessarily in order of importance, the first would be North Korea’s urgent need for aid in a time of worsening economic problems. Reports differ on whether the North again is easing up restraints on private markets or is restricting trade as before, but no one doubts the North is descending into a trough of economic hardship exacerbated by recent flooding along the Yalu River border.

The second reason would be to impress on the Chinese the rise of Kim Jong-Il’s third son, Kim Jong-Un, as the heir presumptive to the hereditary throne that Kim Jong-Il inherited from Kim Il- Sung in July 1994. The younger Kim, still in his 20s, is expected to be anointed, more or less, at an unusual Workers’ Party meeting in Pyongyang next month. Already units of the armed forces are massing around the capital, not to fend off the American attack that the North’s rhetoricians love to talk about but to put on a show of armed might as evidence of the power of the Kim dynasty before or during the party meeting.

Yet another reason is that Kim Jong-Il may need special medical attention in Beijing. A team of Chinese specialists has recently been tending him in Pyongyang, and a pair of French physicians were also said to have been on hand. Still, the man is on dialysis three times a week, survived a stroke in August 2008, and is also believed to suffer a number of other unspecified ailments.

For Carter, though, Kim Jong-Il’s departure still had to be a special disappointment. It was little more than 16 years ago, in June 1994, that Carter chatted with Kim Il-Sung on a boat in the Daedong River. The meeting, in the middle of what’s now remembered as “the first nuclear crisis”, was historic. The Great Leader said he would be open to giving up his nuclear program and even to a meeting with Kim Young-Sam, then South Korea’s president, in exchange for nuclear energy reactors.

The atmosphere of goodwill evaporated after Kim’s death three weeks later. Soon North Korea was blasting Kim Young-Sam for refusing to send condolences over the passing of the man who had ordered the invasion of South Korea in 1950.

Tensions ratcheted up that summer until U.S. and North Korean negotiators signed the Geneva framework agreement in October 1994 in which North Korea agreed to shut down its reactor in return for two lightwater nuclear energy reactors. Carter has taken much of the credit for the Geneva framework even though the agreement ultimately failed and the reactors were never built after North Korea eight years later, in October 2002, was revealed to have an entirely separate program for enriching uranium.

Carter, as a man of peace, no doubt hoped to turn the trick again. By leaving when he did, Kim Jong-Il gave the impression that Carter’s visit was a sideshow. For Carter, the rescue of an imprisoned America was not a dramatic cover for serious talks but a face-saving gesture. There would be no quiet exchange of words, no end to dangers that have escalated beyond the ability of an 85-year-old man to settle with a pleasant conversation on the river.



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