Now the question is whether all the drum-rolling means the North is contemplating fresh acts of intimidation before the summit — just to display its strength before the South shows off it status as a major industrial power.
The North’s third nuclear test might seem unlikely, but no one’s ruling out a few missile shots into waters on either side of the Korean peninsula. For that matter, South Korea’s armed forces are bracing for another North Korean challenge to the Northern Limit Line, the boundary in the Yellow Sea, set by the United Nations command three years after the Korean War but never recognized by North Korea.
North Korean patrol boats might again challenge South Korean vessels in the same waters where a South Korean investigation has concluded that a torpedo fired by a midget submarine sunk a South Korean corvette in March, killing 46 sailors. Probably no mass gathering of world leaders has ever happened so close to a volatile fault line in which hostile forces are poised only 40 miles (64 kilometers) away and the central government daily spews forth rhetoric against it worst enemies, South Korea and the United States.
Inevitably, concerns about Korean and East Asian regional security will hover over a forum in which world leaders come together on a document for redressing imbalances in trade, currencies, wealth and income while vastly decreasing risks taken by banks and guaranteeing assistance for poverty-stricken nations.
One economic basket case that’s not likely to reap any rewards from G-20 is North Korea, whose leaders can only look on the occasion with mingled envy and rage.
But then, North Korea can count on China perhaps more than ever in view of China’s resistance to foreign, notably American, pressure to raise drastically the exchange rate of its currency in order to slash its burgeoning trade surplus.
For South Korea, though, the highest priority now is to make sure the summit come off without a hitch, winding up in a great face-saving final “action statement” that glosses over all differences while the South claims another great success in its rise to global economic prominence.
That priority may help to explain why South Korea seems willing to talk to the North Koreans about resuming tours to Mount Kumkang and also to stage the first inter-Korean family reunions in a year at the end of October and early November, barely a week before G-20.
The South’s only concern is that North Korean negotiators will threaten to cancel the reunions if South Korea fails to agree first on the tours. The reunions assume tremendous emotional significance as members of several million families divided by the Korean War die off without ever seeing their loved ones again. So far only 20,000 members of families have actually been reunited for periods of three or four days since the inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang in June 2000 between the late Kim Dae-Jung, the president who initiated the South’s Sunshine policy of reconciliation, and North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il.
More significantly, South Korean officials are talking about appointing a special envoy on North Korea who might help to bring about resumption of six-party talks on the North’s nuclear weapons. North-South military talks sputtered unsuccessfully one day last week at the truce village of Panmunjom, but a nuclear envoy might have the latitude to discuss a range of issues. Steadily, in the run-up to the G-20 summit, the level of vituperation here has diminished somewhat even though the South continues to demand an apology for the sinking of the Cheonan, for which the North denies any responsibility.
South Korea, like the U.S., would also like to sense that nuclear talks would not be a complete waste of time. North Korea has called for returning to the table in Beijing for the first time since December 2008, but has shown no signs of wanting to make any real concessions.
To the contrary, the North’s preparations for revving up it nuclear prowess have reached what a senior official at the Blue House, the center of presidential power here, described as “a very dangerous level.”
Eyes in the sky report heavy-duty equipment doing stuff at the Yongbyon complex, where North Korean engineers have extracted enough fissile material for up to twelve warheads with plutonium at their core. But that’s not all. North Korea is also moving at an alarming pace toward processing highly enriched uranium for use in still-deadlier warheads.
The Institute for Science and International Security in a newly released study report that North Korea may have half the 3,000 centrifuges needed for a uranium bomb.
Given those realities, neither American nor South Korean officials seem to have any clear idea of where to go from here. That much was evident after Kurt Campbell, US assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, stopped off here last week on another swing through Northeast Asian capitals.
Campbell wanted to get across the view that the Americans and South Koreans are “in lockstep” — a term that’s about as much used by U.S. diplomats as “no daylight between us” whenever they talk about how well they and the Koreans are getting along. Campbell more than hinted, though, that the Americans are prodding the Koreans into talking even if the talks have no prospect of going anywhere.
As Campbell put it in the ornate language of diplomacy, “The critical component … in the current environment is to see a re-engagement between North and South Korea.”
But he did not want to seem to be pressing too hard while North Korea moves closer to another nuclear test and the big anniversary day parade on Sunday. Rather, he said, “We feel very comfortable with South Korea in the lead” amid “signs of dialogue and engagement between North and South” — double-talk that showed no one has a clue what the North is up to or what to do about it.
|
ShareThis
