Leader of North Gave Assent To Several Conciliatory Steps
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, October 5, 2007
SEOUL, Oct. 5 -- The summit of the two Koreas served up a peculiar conversation about where a head of state might eat the best cold noodles. It served up a peculiarly detailed commitment to a first-ever joint Olympic cheering squad that will travel by train from South to North Korea and on to the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing.
Most peculiar of all, the summit this week in Pyongyang served up North Korea's Kim Jong Il, who just 12 months ago terrified the world by detonating a nuclear bomb, as a leader announcing that he wants nothing more than to get along with his next-door neighbor.
Kim signed a declaration at the end of the three-day summit with South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun that made many conciliatory commitments, including this one: "The South and the North have agreed not to antagonize each other, to reduce military tension and to resolve disputes through dialogue and negotiation."
There have been only two Korean summits in the more than half a century since the North and South, with the participation of troops from China and the United States, fought a savage civil war. This week's summit, like the first one seven years ago, coincides with a rare season of cautious optimism about North Korea's willingness to stop scaring its neighbors with missiles and bombs.
Most of that optimism derives not from what happened in Pyongyang this week, but from North Korea's newly professed willingness to disable its nuclear processing facilities and disclose all of its nuclear programs in exchange for aid, trade and a U.S.-led phaseout of the communist state's pariah status.
A breakthrough on that score was announced in Beijing this week on the day that Kim and Roh were chatting about, among other things, whether the cold noodles in Pyongyang were superior to those in Seoul. Roh conceded that Pyongyang's were better.
Noodles aside, a surprising amount of specific and encouraging substance came out of this Korean summit.
The leaders agreed to make North-South family reunions easier; to open roads and a rail line; to establish air links to a tourist destination, Mount Baekdu, in the North; to build a joint shipbuilding industry; and to step up investment in free trade zones in the North.
They promised to set up a "peace zone" around a much-disputed border in the Yellow Sea where the countries' armed forces have skirmished in the past. The waters would become a joint fishing area.
Kim and Roh also pledged to seek talks with China and the United States aimed at formally ending the 1950-53 Korean War, which concluded with an armistice and not a full peace treaty.
Several longtime observers of North Korea said these commitments reinforced recent signals that Kim, believed to be 65 years old, is now trying to ensure the survival of his dictatorial state through engagement, rather than confrontation.
"It is significant that Kim offered to play a positive role in establishing peace on the Korean Peninsula," said Kim Ki Jung, a professor of political science at Yonsei University in Seoul.
Another North Korea expert, Baek Seung Joo of the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, a government-funded research group in Seoul, said Kim changed a long-held position by promising to work alongside South Korea in seeking a formal peace treaty.
"Kim Jong Il has been refusing to recognize South Korea as a relevant entity in ending the war," Baek said. "So it is significant to South Korea that Kim finally gave that recognition through the declaration."
Still, the North Korean leader was characteristically hard to pin down on many issues. Roh said he tried to get Kim to promise to come to Seoul for another summit. "Why don't we have Kim Young Nam pay you the return visit this time, and I will come to Seoul when the time is ripe," said Kim, according to Roh's account. Kim Young Nam is the No. 2 official in the North.
After the last summit, Kim Jong Il promised in writing to come to Seoul for another summit but did not show.
This week's summit also focused close attention on Roh, a lame-duck leader whose poll numbers have plummeted in the past year. There is a presidential election in the South in December, and Roh's many critics accused him of using the summit as a way to pump up the popularity of his ruling party, which has yet to choose a presidential candidate.
After the summit, Roh was criticized for not securing the release of South Koreans who have been abducted and taken to the North over the years -- and of prisoners still not returned home after the Korean War.
"It was disappointing that President Roh is returning home empty-handed," said Kim Woo Sang, an international relations professor at Yonsei University.
Disappointing, perhaps, but not surprising. Roh's aides had made it clear that he was not going to use the summit as an occasion to pester Kim about human rights or nuclear weapons.
From his four hours of sitting across a summit table from Kim, Roh said he learned something important about the North Korean leader: He really does not like to be lectured by outsiders about his country's need for political openness and economic reform.
Roh, indeed, seems to have had an epiphany on this point. "I realized that one-way communication can lead to unnecessary misunderstanding," he said. "We should try to avoid making such misunderstanding by not going on and on with reform and opening-up to North Koreans."
This epiphany, though, is likely to come to nothing. Roh leaves office early next year.
The likely next president of South Korea, according to opinion polls, is Lee Myung Bak, a former mayor of Seoul and candidate of the Grand National Party.
Lee said this week in an interview with The Washington Post that he would not approve major investment in North Korea unless Kim's government moved toward openness and reform.
Special correspondent Stella Kim contributed to this report.
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