The two Koreas agreed to rebuild a rail link connecting Seoul and Pyongyang during a breakthrough summit in June 2000. Trains were supposed to start running a year ago. But the new track laid by the South Koreans ends at the thicket of bunkers and land mines that marks the border. Pyongyang, citing various pretexts, has barely lifted a shovel to fix the railway on its side of the DMZ. Like most of the projects proposed with great fanfare when South Korean President Kim Dae Jung met his northern counterpart, Kim Jong Il, in Pyongyang nearly two years ago, the railway remains nothing more than a broken promise. Seoul “has pressed [Pyongyang] to do something substantial, like linking the railway, allowing more family reunions or opening up their society,” says Paik Jin Hyun, a foreign-affairs specialist at Seoul National University. “But it hasn’t worked because North Korea has reached a point beyond which it is afraid to go.”
Now the West’s patience may be nearing its own breaking point. Not only has “Great Leader” Kim Jong Il failed to deliver promised road and rail links or to permit war-torn families meaningful contact (via reunions, mail or phone calls), he continues to deploy nearly a million Korean People’s Army soldiers along the border. When U.S. President George W. Bush visits the DMZ station as part of his East Asian tour this week, he will bring demands–not rice cakes–that the North pull back some of its forces from the border, halt its missile sales abroad and abandon the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Talks are still possible, a senior administration official tells NEWSWEEK, but only if the regime drops preconditions like being removed from the U.S. State Department’s list of state sponsors of terror. “He’s holding his nose, but is willing to talk,” the official says of Bush.
To put the rhetoric in context, remember that in the Clinton administration’s final days, the then U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright visited North Korea to negotiate with dictator Kim Jong Il (whom she described as “decisive, practical and serious”). A trip such as hers, which nearly sealed a sweeping deal to trade the North’s missile and nuclear programs for massive U.S. development aid, is not likely to be repeated on Bush’s watch unless Pyongyang gets a whole lot more serious about honoring its commitments and negotiating in good faith. A more likely scenario: a diplomatic stalemate leading early next year (when Pyongyang’s self-imposed moratorium on missile tests expires) to more saber rattling and brinkmanship along one of the cold war’s last frontiers.
The situation has come full circle since President Kim began formulating his “Sunshine Policy” in 1998. Since then he has single-mindedly attempted to engage the communist North by offering detente, peaceful coexistence and, eventually, unification. Just before the Pyongyang summit in June 2000, he lifted Seoul’s ban on tourism to the North, prodded southern conglomerates to seek new projects above the DMZ and offered rice and fertilizer as good-faith gifts. Kim’s goal: use money, not guns, to coax Pyongyang toward moderation. A few months later his initiative won him the millennium’s first Nobel Peace Prize.
Yet at times the Sunshine Policy seems to obscure the nature of the North Korean regime. Take the Unification Observatory, a museum-cum-lookout post atop a crag overlooking the DMZ. Visitors can pop coins into powerful binoculars and peer into North Korea’s “propaganda village”–a concrete facade of modern high-rise flats festooned with banners praising the North’s juche ideology of self-reliance. Yet it’s downstairs, in a museum funded by the Unification Ministry in Seoul, where the propaganda is most egregious. The displays amount to a shrine to the North-South summit. Glass cases laden with southern products manufactured above the DMZ (like audiocassette players and bags to hold golf shoes) give the impression that the North’s factories are churning out vast quantities of export goods. Pictures of bountiful grain harvests and bustling peasant markets suggest full silos and fat bellies in the countryside. Kim Jong Il, one wall-size display explains, “is a leader seeking changes.”
That view has not been borne out by events. In the last year, spurred in part by tough talk out of Washington, the North has withdrawn several times from scheduled ministerial-level talks and family reunions, while returning to the fierce anti-Western rhetoric of years past. Pyongyang has kept a promise not to test long-range missiles in flight and seems to be adhering to an agreement to halt its nuclear-weapons program. And aid workers and Western diplomats say that the country is taking small steps toward economic reform–including importing high-yield grains and vegetables, allowing small private farms and training elite officials in market economics. But the country is still plagued by famine, and the regime continues to rely for hard currency on missile sales, drug profits, aid and investment from South Korea and “donations” from resident North Koreans in Japan. So far there has been no sign the country is moving toward the kind of Chinese-style market liberalization that might lift the country’s fortunes. Not surprisingly, many South Koreans are beginning to wonder if their money is be-ing well spent. Probably the most prominent deal linked to the Sunshine Policy–Hyun-dai’s six-year, $940 million tourism venture on Mount Kumgang–contributed to the conglomerate’s bankruptcy last year.
No one is talking seriously about withholding humanitarian assistance from the North, which still relies upon international aid agencies for a third of its food. But many governments and organizations are growing weary of funneling aid to Pyongyang in hopes of keeping the country stable–a strategy that, “simplified, is ‘Feed me or I’ll shoot you’,” says Lee Chung Min, professor of international relations at Yonsei University in Seoul. Tokyo has already cut off shipments of rice to the North, and some aid groups like Medecins sans Frontieres have pulled out of the country, accusing the regime of diverting humanitarian assistance to the military and other favored groups rather than those most in need. “They want money for everything. They are always asking for another 100,000 tons of grain,” says former U.S. ambassador James Lilley, who thinks food aid should be used as “some very good leverage on these guys.”
Tokyo has toughened its attitude toward Pyongyang in other ways, too. Talks aimed at normalizing relations broke down in late 2000, and at this point Japan is in no hurry to resume them, a senior Japanese official says. Japan’s Coast Guard and Self-Defense Forces have recently stepped up surveillance of the country’s territorial waters in order to curtail espionage activities and a thriving drug trade originating in North Korea. Since 1999 Japanese authorities have confiscated about 1,260 kilograms of North Korean methamphetamines worth $580 million on the Japanese market. (Experts say the drugs are produced in government labs and shipped by the North Korean Navy.) Last November authorities also raided Pyong-yang’s de facto embassy in Japan, an organization for North Korean residents called Chosensoren, arresting a former official on embezzlement charges. In better economic times, the group is suspected of having funneled as much as $1.2 billion a year in “donations” to North Korea.
Washington, despite the newly bellicose rhetoric, has thus far only speculated about possible steps to take against the regime. According to the senior administration official, the United States and its allies “are not going to stand by and let them survive by pumping out counterfeit money and missiles.” A senior State Department official says that the administration is exploring several ways of curbing missile sales, including interdiction on the high seas, tightening international control regimes and working with Russia, China and other possible transit countries to stop the trade. Washington is also watching closely to see whether the North keeps a promise to allow International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors to verify that it has halted its nuclear-weapons program. If the inspections are blocked, the United States will likely withhold two nuclear-fired power reactors that it has agreed to supply in return.
Changes in South Korea are most evident in public sentiment. Amid the summit euphoria in 2000, most citizens were only too eager to play down the North’s long history of terrorism and belligerence. But over the last year relations with Pyongyang have emerged as a major issue in presidential elections set for December. Grand National Party president Lee Hoi Chang, the front runner, lost narrowly to Kim Dae Jung in the 1997 election and has spent much of his energy since then attacking his rival’s peace overtures. (Kim Jong Il, he says, “has hardly ever kept his promises.”) The lack of any visible progress in negotiations has contributed immensely to Kim Dae Jung’s slide in popularity: his latest approval ratings stood at only 30 percent. Kim, who is constitutionally barred from seeking a second consecutive term, will pass his mantle to one of several Millennium Democratic Party candidates, none of whom wholeheartedly endorses his Sunshine initiatives. Their ambivalence is also explained by the polls. A recent Gallup survey revealed that while 29 percent of respondents support the Sunshine Policy outright, 15 percent want to stop it, and the largest group, 42 percent, think it has “some problems” but should be modified, not scrapped.
That lack of enthusiasm for further concessions could spell trouble ahead. This year South Korea will cohost the World Cup–protected by U.S. Air Force AWACS planes and aircraft carriers offshore–as well as hold presidential elections; both events are likely to inspire vitriol from the North. Pyongyang may face IAEA inspections later this year, and in early 2003 its self-imposed ban on the testing of long-range missiles will expire. Either of those commitments could be abrogated if the regime feels cornered–which would likely provoke an angry U.S. response.
South Korean critics claim such brinkmanship is shortsighted. Moon Chung In, an international-relations specialist at the South’s Yonsei University and a strong proponent of the Sunshine Policy, says, “There are three possible futures regarding North Korea: the first is standoff, the second clash and the third compromise,” he says. “We should all work for compromise because the trigger mechanism on the Korean Peninsula is very fragile.” For the moment, though, the Korean peace train looks to be stalled.
