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A SENSE OF ASIA

Pyongyang's clock ticks louder


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By Sol Sanders
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

Sol W. Sanders

July 8, 2002

Other regional crises are capturing the headlines but Korean events are building toward a crunch..

The Bush Administration has broken off bilateral talks with Pyongyang. President Bush had been outspokenly skeptical of Pyongyang's bona fides, and dismissive of what purported to be Clinton Administration agreements to halt development of weapons of mass destruction. Reports suggest elaborate North Korean subterfuge including underground installations permit continuance of these efforts with Pyongyang refusing effective international inspection.

Washington's action followed an unprovoked attack and losses to South Korea from a North Korean warship along the ill-defined the Yellow Sea boundary.

Only instructions Ñ now apparently amended Ñ by Seoul not to respond to North Korean provocations short of an all-out attack prevented extended hostilities. These rules of engagement were part of President Kim Dae Jung's languishing "sunshine policy" of attempted concessions and conciliation with the North.

Meanwhile, the Japanese are going ahead to raise a North Korean warship which was either sunk or scuttled during an engagement with Japanese Self-Defense Forces in June. The Japanese want more information on the disguised fishing vessel. Tokyo has the precedent of an earlier North Korean clandestine craft Ñ some remodeled Japanese fishing vessels that have found their way into North Korea. In the earlier episode the Japanese discovered weaponry the West had not known existed in the North Korean arsenal including a minisubmarine, obviously intended for continued infiltration into the South. American space reconnaissance has shown, too, that despite public Chinese condemnation of the latest clash, these craft worked from "a mother ship" provisioned in Shanghai.

The question now is whether this new generation of infiltrators may not carry surface to air missiles or other weapons that could create new and unexpected incidents. It was the unexpected North Korean missile launch over Japan into the Pacific that tripped a more determined Japanese approach to the whole North Korean question. The raising of the sunken vessel is going forward in waters claimed by China after Beijing withdrew earlier protests in the face of an uncharacteristic tough Tokyo insistence. The Japanese suspect these infiltrators are continuing a campaign of spying on US bases, smuggling agents into Japan's large ethnic Korean community, and drug trafficking.

Basking in the heady joint Japan-South Korea sponsorship of the soccer world cup and Seoul's success, Kim Dae Jung was visiting Japan when the incident occurred. Seoul-Tokyo relations, always volatile, have been on the upswing as a result of the sports collaboration, some Japanese concessions on the World War II guilt question, and Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi's proposal for a Japan-Korea free trade zone. But despite the failure of Kim's special envoy to achieve progress during his trip to Pyongyang in July, and the Yellow Sea exchange, Kim told the Japanese he is going to continue his conciliation policy as his presidency winds down in December. Although his party and hand-chosen successor has been doing better in the polls, Pyongyang's confrontational policies are boosting the conservatives' [and Washington's] lackluster conservative candidate to succeed Kim next year and reverse the accomodational line.

Meanwhile, coordination of US-South Korean policy is at a nadir to be exploited by Pyongyang.

For Washington, there are wider strategic concerns: North Korea Ñ despite its desperate economic situation including a multiyear government-induced famine Ñ is a principle source of missile, and perhaps nuclear, proliferation. [There are also reports of Pyongyang assistance to a growing Nepal insurgency on the India-Tibetan Chinese border.] A debate inside the mysterious Pyongyang leadership during the past few months appears to have increased the military's power and continued its virtual monopoly on resources. North Korean hitech exports, including the possibility of a new longer range No Dong missile which could threaten Hawaii, Alaska and Western US continental targets, have gone to the pariah states of Iran, Syria, and Libya. Now there are reports Pyongyang is negotiating with Egypt. That would mean Ñ as the bureaucrats say: money is fungible Ñ that the U.S. $2 -billion annual aid program to Cairo could be helping pay North Korean development costs. Hardliners both in Washington, Seoul and Tokyo have long argued that food gifts have been diverted and, in effect, strengthened the military.

Still, contradictorily there is a continuing and well organized defection campaign smuggling North Koreas through the large ethnic Korean population of northwestern China. The numbers of North Koreans who have jumped embassy walls to seek sanctuary and eventually been permitted to leave for South Korea by Chinese authorities is small Ñ nothing like the flood from East Germany through Czechoslovakia that precipitated the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communist East Germany. Still it suggests that for all its seeming monolith, the regime could be unstable Ñ a frightening conjecture, with its army in forward deployment against the U.S. "trip wire" force of 35,000 along the Demilitarized Zone that separates North from South.

Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@comcast.net), 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.

July 8, 2002

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