Pascoe didn't get to see Dear Leader Kim Jong-il, but he did meet North Korea's titular head of state Kim Yong-nam, while North Korea's nuclear envoy Kim Kye-gwan was in Beijing seeing China's chief envoy Wu Dawei. Earlier in the week, Kim Jong-il himself condescended to receive Wang Jiarui, head of the Chinese Communist Party's international department, proof positive that the Dear Leader may agree to China's hosting another gathering of envoys from the two Koreas, Japan, Russia and the United States.
Pascoe's visit to Pyongyang was critical since he is a former U.S. ambassador to Indonesia who has led a long career as a diplomat. Technically, Pascoe these days talks on behalf of United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon, a Korean whose soft diplomacy as foreign minister for the late South Korean president Kim Dae-jung ingratiated him to the North Koreans. Pascoe is also seen, however, as representing the United States, and it's not surprising that the latest word in Seoul is that Kim Kye-gwan wants to go to Washington in March for still more talks.
If a face-saving deal is in the offing, though, the question remains whose face will be saved — and what if anything will North Korea be willing to yield. We may not really know until or unless Kim Jong-il agrees, perhaps after six-party talks, as he hangs on to failing health, to see South Korea's conservative President Lee Myung-bak. Lee's policies seem the antithesis of all that Kim Dae-jung espoused when he enunciated his Sunshine policy of engagement 12 years ago.
There is, of course, no clear sign that Kim Jong-il has any intention of receiving Lee — or, far less likely, coming down to Seoul to see him. All we know for sure is that the Dear Leader's propagandists are not insulting Lee as much as a year ago and North Korea is more interested in talking than a few months ago.
The trouble is that all North Korea wants to talk about is wringing money out of South Korea. The reason for talks about the Kaesong industrial complex, just above the line between the two Koreas about 64 kilometers north of Seoul, is to see how to make the South Korean factories there work more efficiently — and also to get them to pay more for the 40,000 North Korean workers, none of whom ever sees the salaries they are supposed to receive.
And the reason for talking about resuming tours to Mount Kumkang, the cluster of granitic peaks above the eastern end of the line, is that they brought huge sums into North Korean coffers. No way, however, will North Korea countenance a joint investigation of the tragedy in which a North Korean soldier shot and killed a South Korean woman in July 2008 as she wandered outside the tourist zone to look at the sunrise — the reason Lee stopped the tours. Basically, North Korea wants to dictate the terms for discussing these ventures.
Disagreements over the Kaesong and Kumkang zones, however, are secondary compared to the overwhelming problem of security issues on the Korean Peninsula.
North Korea does not want to talk to South Korea about anything to do with security. North Korean policy for years has been to try to define the South as an inferior vassal of the United States. This attitude means North Korea will exclude South Korea from any discussion of its nuclear program. The best South Korea can expect is to join in six-party talks on North Korea's nukes when and if they resume. And even if the six parties do meet again, North Korea would not want South Korea to play an active part. The serious talking would happen "on the sidelines", as U.S. diplomats put it, with a peace treaty to replace the Korean War armistice at the top of the agenda.
Lee has said that North Korea would have to be willing to talk about its nuclear program in any inter-Korean summit. He has also said that he would raise the topic of the thousands of South Koreans whom the North has held as slave labor ever since the Korean War in the early 1950s and the hundreds of South Korean fishermen whom the North has captured when their boats strayed in or near North Korean waters.
Lee might even raise the topic that North Korea wants above all to avoid — the regime's egregious human-rights violations.
Kim Jong-il does not want to hear about such matters. North Korea's nukes, North Korea's forces above the demilitarized zone, human rights for North Korea's citizens and the return of South Koreans held in the North did not come up at all in the two previous summits between Kim Jong-il and South Korean presidents, in June 2000 when he received Kim Dae-jung and again in October 2007 when he received Roh Moo-hyun.
Times, however, have changed. Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, left-leaning advocates of reconciliation, passed away last year.
North Korea now is paying the price, in the form of UN Security Council sanctions for testing a long-range missile last April and a nuclear device last May. North Korea, moreover, is suffering from hunger and disease approaching the level of the great famine of the 1990s. Under these circumstances, Kim Jong-il, sick and anxious to keep his regime afloat in a time of transition, may yet agree to an inter-Korean summit at which all topics are on the table.
Lee, however, has imposed one more condition that makes a summit all the more unlikely. He is not willing to secretly send hundreds of millions of dollars to North Korea, as did Kim Dae-jung for the sake of such a meeting.
Considering that restraint, a skeptic not long ago might have relegated the chances of a summit to a miracle somewhere in the category of a second coming. Who could imagine that the dictator whose propaganda machine last year blasted Lee as a "traitor" and "lackey" of the Americans would ever agree to see him? All that tends to make the notion of a Lee-Kim summit seem so far-fetched as to be hardly worth considering.
Now, however, gossip about another North-South summit echoes through Seoul as if it might actually happen this year. As the search for talks gains traction, the odds of a North-South summit may seem long — but maybe worth taking on the chance of a payoff in the end.
