KOREAS: Officials Upbeat about Pyongyang’s Posture as Talks Renew/REPEATING AND CORRECTING GARBLED COPY

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Aug 5 1997 (IPS) - Analysts of the longtime Korean conflict are optimistic that, despite the cloudy political scene in North Korea, Pyongyang is demonstrating a firm commitment to keeping peace talks – which resumed here Tuesday – on track.

The talks, under way at Columbia University, have brought together working-level diplomats from North and South Korea, the United States, and China. Few expect much to come out of their effort, beyond practical arrangements for future, higher-level meetings. But Pyongyang’s positive attitude so far has lifted the spirits of many observers who had become cynical over the 44-year impasse since the end of the Korean War.

The two Koreas have kept tylking despite the famine in the North, a corruption scandal in the South, a still-unexplained incursion last year by a Northern submarine into Southern waters and the defection this year of Pyongyang’s top ideologue. More importantly, argued analysts at a recent panel sponsored here by the Centre for War, Peace and the News Media, the Pyongyang regime has carefully avoided derailing the ongoing North-South talks.

“Every step of the way, North Korea has kept these talks on track and made sure mishaps and mistakes did not interfere with the process,” said K.A. Namkung, director of the Atlantic Council’s Programme on Conflict Resolution. “This does not represent the last gasp of a dying regime, but fulfillment of a strategy set in motion years ago.”

He contended that North Korea’s former leader, the late Kim il- Sung, had long envisioned making peace with the United States, which supported his opponents in Seoul during the 1950-53 Korean War and has maintained troops in the South ever since. Although Kim’s son, Kim Jong-il, remains a mystery as he slowly takes over most leadership roles in the North, the government seems just as committed to building a bridge to Washington.

Leon Sigal, author of the forthcoming book ‘Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea’, argued that the North has been so cooperative towards arriving at four-nation peace talks that the current meetings could have been held six months ago.

The main reason for the delay, he said, was that the United States and South Korea last winter briefly stopped cooperating with the North on a programme to seal up nuclear reactors – which Washington claims could be used to make weapons – in the Northern town of Yongbyon. The U.S.-South Korean impasse, in turn, resulted from suspicions that the submarine incident had been a failed attempt by Pyongyang to spy on the South.

Significantly, “the North Koreans have been cooperating fully even through the whole period of the submarine incident,” Sigal said, noting that the government continued to allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency to monitor plutonium levels at the plants and to store the nuclear materials within them.

“When we were not cooperating, they were,” he summed up. “That’s important, because it tells me they want to play this game.”

Officials of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organisation (KEDO) – the international organisation set up to replace the North’s current, allegedly weapons-grade nuclear reactors with light-water reactors – also say the North is cooperating. Stephen Bosworth, KEDO’s executive director and a former U.S. ambassador, said the Pyongyang government has helped his organisation to push ahead with its goal of providing light- water nuclear reactors by 2003.

“Our relationship with the North Koreans has developed in a more or less satisfactory way after a rather difficult beginning,” Bosworth said. “It’s a very businesslike relationship. We do not engage in polemical exchanges in our work with the North Koreans – we are talking about practical and prosaic things, albeit things with a distinct political flavour to them, such as how we get in and out of the country.”

If KEDO succeeds, it could be more than simply a construction project, some argue. For one thing, as Bosworth noted, KEDO will actually begin working in the North within the next few weeks, employing several hundred South Korean workers, and adding a few hundred from the North as well. “As the project evolves, at the peak of construction activity, we will have a few thousand South Korean technicians and engineers working with several thousand North Korean workers and technicians,” he added.

“It is an extraordinary moment for a South Korean company using lots of South Korean workers to be building a project that would in fact provide much of the electricity to run whatever needs to be run by electricity in North Korea,” Sigal said. “It is a kind of prototype for…the beginning of economic integration of North and South.”

Such lofty hopes are, by most estimates, considerably distant for now. The notoriously reclusive Communist regime in the North, and the U.S.-backed government in the South – wracked by corruption charges against top officials and members of President Kim Young Sam’s family – have only begun to talk without including their traditional, bitter Cold War-era rhetoric. More importantly, the North’s severe food crisis has worsened following a drought in recent weeks, complicating Pyongyang’s posture further.

U.N. officials estimate that the drought has already cost North Korea 70 percent of its corn output for this year, adding to the severe malnutrition that the population has already been suffering from following two years of crop damage from heavy flooding. Although U.S. officials deny any connection between North Korea’s participation in peace talks and food aid, some U.S. diplomats have privately confirmed that food has been a major topic pushed by Pyongyang in all the rounds of preliminary meetings held here.

Washington has already given Pyongyang some 60 million dollars in food aid since 1995, but has asked for tighter monitoring to ensure that the food goes to the neediest groups.

Despite U.S. denials of any linkage, each round of New York talks in recent months has been accompanied by fresh concern in Washington over the food crisis. “There is a quid pro quo, but all parties say there isn’t,” said Leonard Spector, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington think tank. “You do see, bit by bit, an opening…It’s incremental progress, but it’s progress.”