KOREA-U.S.: Koreas Seem Close to Four-Party Peace Talks

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Apr 17 1997 (IPS) - The unfinished four-decade war between North and South Korea has moved closer than ever to possible peace talks involving the United States and China.

North Korea is expected to commit itself Friday to the proposed four-party talks aimed at winning a final peace treaty.

The mood was upbeat as foreign ministry officials from both Koreas and the United States began meetings here Wednesday. All sides declared the initial talks “encouraging.”

North Korea’s deputy foreign minister Kim Gye Gyaw, however, conceded that though “there has been some encouraging progress” in his meetings with his South Korean counterpart, Song Young Shik, a conclusion to these talks may still be farther off.

“Sometimes talks don’t end easily,” he said. “Sometimes talks can take a few days, and sometimes it can take months.”

Nonetheless, deputy U.S. assistant secretary of state Charles Kartman said he was optimistic as Washington awaited North Korea’s response to the talks, proposed by President Bill Clinton a year ago. Kartman said North Korea’s response could finally be ready Friday.

For many observers, the key factor influencing North Korea’s decision to accept the offer may be whether the Clinton administration, which this week said it will contribute 15 million dollars in desperately needed food aid to Pyongyang, can also coax Japan and South Korea to commit to large-scale aid as well.

“North Korea is trying to get commitments of the first stages of the delivery of food aid in the bargaining for the four-party talks,” Selig Harrison, a Korea expert at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Centre for Scholars, told IPS.

After the Wednesday meetings, Song, the South Korean assistant foreign minister, admitted that a main point of discussion so far has in fact been the issue of commitments of food aid.

The World Food Programme (WFP) says that North Korea may require as much as 200,000 tonnes of food relief to survive food shortages caused by floods and the decline of the communist country’s trade with the former Soviet bloc.

North Korea is lacking about half of the food necessary for its population’s basic needs, or as much as 2.3 million metric tonnes, the WFP estimated after a fact-finding team visited the country last month. WFP Director Catherine Bertini said that, during the visit, she saw children with distended bellies and other signs that famine was already hitting urban North Korea. Conditions were reportedly worse in the rural areas.

Although food may have brought Pyongyang to the table, all sides have been quick to deny that there is a connection between aid and the peace process. “We view the issue of food for children as a humanitarian issue only,” U.S. State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns said Tuesday. “It is not linked to politics, nor should it be.”

Hyung declined to comment on the issue of food aid and would not specify what issues still needed to be resolved.

Yet for many Korea experts, the current discussions present the best opportunity yet to bring to a close the Korean war, which ended inconclusively with a 1953 armistice and which has since led to tense border stand-offs and harsh rhetoric.

“Certainly North Korea doesn’t want to cut off the process, so they don’t want a definite ‘no’ to the four-party talks,” Harrison said. As a result, he argued, this could be the best time for U.S. diplomats to prod Pyongyang on a date for such talks to begin.

U.S. officials are equally optimistic.

“They wouldn’t have come here all this way for just a one-word response,” one U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said of the North Koreans. “If they were going to say ‘no,’ they could have done that already.”

China, North Korea’s main ally, may have equally good reason for talks to take place, since Beijing is keen to avoid a refugee crisis on its borders if the famine in North Korea worsens.

Yet there remains caution about how far the North can go under the leadership of Kim Jong-Il, who has not even formally accepted the reins of power since the 1994 death of his father, Kim Il- Sung. Beset by famines and the recent defection of chief Communist Party ideologue Hwang Jang Yop, Pyongyang may remain hesitant about how quickly it wants to move to definitive peace talks.

As Leonard Spector, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment, a Washington-based think tank, puts it, “North Korea normally takes one step forward, half a step back, and a step sideways.”