S. Korea's Roh Enters The North For Summit

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, October 2, 2007

SEOUL, Oct. 2 -- The lame-duck president of South Korea, Roh Moo Hyun, traveled north on Tuesday to a summit with Kim Jong Il, the unpredictable North Korean leader whose closeted government last year exploded a nuclear bomb but this year is flashing intermittent signals of peace.

The summit coincides with a rare season of promise in four years of six-nation negotiations over when and how North Korea might agree to abandon its nuclear program. The Bush administration, rewarding progress on the issue, is sending fuel to the North and is considering removing it from a list of states that sponsor terrorism.

The summit also comes as experts say North Korea's imploding economy is in desperate need of aid, trade and investment -- from prosperous South Korea as well as from the United States and the rest of the world.

Still, the summit's timing -- two months before a presidential election in South Korea -- has provoked bitter cynicism in the South and among U.S. conservatives about the motives behind it. Some also doubt whether the meeting can produce lasting results on key issues such as family reunification, human rights in the North and reduction of military forces along the border.

Roh, traveling by road to the North's capital, Pyongyang, on Tuesday morning, got out of his limousine to cross the famously militarized border.

Just before he left Seoul, Roh said that "clearly there will be some limitations" to what he can achieve at the summit "given the limited days remaining in my term."

Still, he said, "Even if we do not achieve many agreements, if we could narrow our differences and strengthen our mutual trust, that in itself will be an important result." His advisers, who are predicting that substantial trade and investment deals will emerge from the summit, said the symbolism of Roh's walk across the border would be "historic and moving."

Before he stepped across the border, Roh said: "When I return from this trip, I hope more people will make the same trip and maybe eventually and gradually this forbidden line will be erased."

The leaders of the two Koreas, Roh smiling and Kim looking dour, met at noon in Pyongyang in a square surrounded by hundreds of thousands of cheering North Koreans waving pink paper flowers. They made no statement and their first discussions were not scheduled until Wednesday.

For Roh, an unpopular and term-limited leader, movement in public opinion is something his ruling party badly needs to head off what polls indicate could be a disastrous showing in the presidential election.

Roh's party, the Uri Party, has yet to choose a presidential candidate. Low voter turnout in party primaries (around 10 percent) suggests that whoever gets the nod is unlikely to win in December.

The front-runner for the presidency is Lee Myung Bak, a former mayor of Seoul who is the candidate of the opposition Grand National Party. Lee has said he would be much less amenable than Roh to giving economic assistance to North Korea.

Views differ as to what Kim hopes to gain from the Pyongyang summit, which is only the second North-South presidential meeting in the more than half a century since the Koreas waged an all-out war that still is not over officially. The last meeting occurred seven years ago, when Kim met with President Kim Dae Jung. Afterward, the South Korean leader was criticized for having approved secret payments to the North valued at about $186 million -- payments that bought him the historic summit.

This time, the South Korean government is saying it will not make inappropriate payments or concessions. But Roh's advisers are making no secret of his desire to invest generously in infrastructure and free-trade zones.

"Paying money as a matter of extortion is one thing, but making investments in the future of the country is another," said Moon Chung In, a political science professor at Yonsei University in Seoul who advises Roh and is attending the summit.

As for Kim's motives, many scholars and politicians agree that he is hoping to use the feel-good theatrics of a summit to influence public opinion in the South, where a substantial slice of the population hopes for a unified Korea eventually.

If Roh's party were to win the presidential election, Kim's government would be likely to get more money on better terms from the South. The North's economy of about $26 billion last year amounted to about 3 percent of the $900 billion economy of the South.

"The whole point of this summit for Kim Jong Il is to extract as much aid as possible," said Lee Doo Won, a professor of economics at Yonsei University who has studied the North for many years.

Lee said that in the past five years the ability of the communist state's centralized economy to deliver food and other essentials has all but collapsed. This has weakened its stranglehold on the lives of North Koreans, Lee said, as chronic hunger and gross inequality in living standards have increased.

"North Koreans admit they have reached the end of the rope in dealing with their problems in their obsolete way," said Koh Yu Hwan, a professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University in Seoul.

This week's summit and North Korea's newfound willingness to talk with the United States about dismantling its nuclear program, Koh said, are signs that Kim is frantically looking for resources to keep his government afloat.

An alternative theory -- about why Kim agreed to the summit and why he is showing signs this year of wanting to negotiate an end to his country's nuclear program -- has been floated by a Roh adviser.

"From Kim Jong Il's point of view, everything depends on the United States," said Moon, the professor accompanying Roh this week.

Moon said the Bush administration, by branding the North an "evil" country and refusing to hold bilateral talks for seven years, had convinced Kim that his country was at risk of being attacked by the United States. In effect, Bush motivated Kim to explode a bomb last year, Moon said.

But since that test, Moon said, Kim has come to believe that the Bush administration takes him seriously, and he is now willing to abandon his "military first" policy to pursue economic development that can preserve his power.

Moon noted that this week's summit does not include the one party that "has the master key to the North Korea problem: the United States."

Special correspondent Stella Kim contributed to this report.