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Tuesday, May 18, 2010     GET REAL

What to do about a problem called North Korea? Not even the U.S. experts know for sure

By Donald Kirk

SEOUL — The question of what to do about the sinking of the South Korean corvette Cheonan consumes Korea's leadership in the face of fears of an escalation of the incident as well as, conversely, an aversion both at home and abroad to any serious response at all.

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The word is "paradigm", and that's what all the speakers were looking for at a two-day conference held by South Korea's Unification Ministry. The search for "Korea's New Paradigm", as the conference was called, had to do with honor, face and revenge over a single episode, the sinking of the Cheonan on March 26 with a loss of 46 lives.

"Unless we know who did it, we cannot sit with North Korea at the conference table," said Gong Ro-myung, a former foreign minister who now chairs the Sejong Institute, a think-tank with close government contacts. "Unless they take these measures — an apology and guarantees — we cannot deal with them."


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The conference began on an appropriate note of bombast from the unification minister, Hyun In-Taek, who proclaimed the North Korean nuclear problem was "shaking world peace", and "the most pressing problem on the global agenda". He said it was "high time to create a new paradigm on the Korean peninsula".

That said, however, the talk ranged from the iniquities of the North Korean regime to visions of "reunification" of the Korean peninsula.

Wendy Sherman, a former State Department official who visited Pyongyang in the company of Madeleine Albright, secretary of state in the administration of President Bill Clinton, had an optimistic outlook.

"I absolutely believe in my heart that unification will happen," she said. "Change can come about because the people themselves catch the chance of change. I believe in the human spirit and human heart, and this message will reach North Korea."

Sherman spoke in part on the basis of the 12 hours that she and Albright spent with Kim Jong-Il before the 2000 presidential election, but she never exactly explained why the rapport that they believed they had achieved so much broke down quite quickly — and why the six-party nuclear talks conducted during the presidency of Clinton's successor, George W Bush, also failed.

It was up to Colin Powell, Bush's first secretary of state, to introduce, a note of realism. "North Korea becomes an historical anachronism," he said.

"North Korea has nothing to show for the past 60 years but tragedy." Indeed, he saw what had appeared as a "gradual thaw in hostilities" between the two Koreas during the era of South Korea's "Sunshine" policy of reconciliation as "a poison pill to the North Korean leaders", who cringed when North Koreans were exposed to the wonders of modern South Korea.

The question for Powell was not whether North Korea would collapse, but how and under what circumstances. "Perhaps the collapse will be somewhere between these extremes," that is, gradually or suddenly. Meanwhile, he saw North Korea playing the nuclear card, "one daunting and most dangerous game" — "blackmail to keep extracting aid".

As for "the incident with the ship, we should be clear", said Powell, forecasting a familiar cycle. "It's unlikely the process [of nuclear talks] will get started again," he said. "The finger is pointed at North Korea, they will get mad all over again."

Victor Cha, who directed policy on Korea on the White House staff during the Bush administration, was more specific — and pessimistic. "It is increasingly clear", he said, "that true denuclearization cannot be achieved under the Kim Jong-Il regime". North Korea, he went on, remains "intent on becoming and remaining a full-fledged nuclear state".

He had, however, a way out that seemed about as unlikely as any of the other forecasts for a happy ending. "The true endgame for denuclearization, the necessary precondition for achieving it, is unification," he said. "We will never achieve a verifiable and irreversible end to the North's nuclear menace until we have a reunified peninsula, free and at peace."

Cha's pessimism conflicted with the measured view of Yuan Jian, vice president of the China Institute of International Studies, who defended North Korea's calls for "action for action" and its "very real concern" about the U.S.'s military threat and refusal to countenance trade. "Pressure," she said, could turn North Korea "away from negotiations". Within the North, "there are uncertainties".

The sinking of the Cheonan, though, undermined confidence in the ambivalence of the Chinese approach. "North Korea's foreign policy pattern is often synonymous with its provocation pattern," said Cha, criticizing a "conditioned and circular response" that failed "to solve the longer-term problem" of how to "ensure that tragedies like the Cheonan" do not happen again.

The words of William Drennan, a former U.S. Air Force pilot who flew cargo planes during the Vietnam War, struck a responsive chord among some Koreans in high places. "I don't know many people who vacation in North Korea," he said, but Nicolae Ceausescu, the dictator of Romania before the anti-communist revolt, had a villa there.

"They were lined up against a wall and shot," he said, recalling the execution of Ceausescu and his wife Elena on Christmas Day, in 1989. "They can't keep things forever."



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