Next Step : Looking for a Cold War? Try Korea : High-level peace talks are scheduled, but rapprochement remains a distant dream on the divided peninsula.

By KARL SCHOENBERGER

Aug. 28, 1990 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

SEOUL —

Anyone who thinks the Cold War is over had better take a look at the Korean Peninsula before uncorking the champagne. Capitalists and Communists still hate each other here. South Korea and North Korea remain mutually suspicious, equally recalcitrant and dangerously armed to the teeth--with some help from U.S. ground troops and Soviet weapons salesmen.

Rhetoric about peace and reunification may be sacrosanct on both sides of the demilitarized zone, but so far neither of the two Koreas has demonstrated a real commitment to ending four decades of throat-rattling enmity.

Never mind that East and West Germany made their peace and are rapidly reintegrating their systems. Korean rapprochement remains an absurd game of bluff and bluster.

That was the case earlier this month, when authorities went through the motions of preparing to throw open, temporarily, part of their heavily fortified border.

The plan was to hold a “pan-national” reunification rally at the truce village of Panmunjom, and to allow free travel between north and south to celebrate the 45th anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japan--and its division between U.S. and Soviet spheres of influence--at the end of World War II. But hard-line officials on both sides sabotaged the initiatives with objections over procedural details.

Next week, Korean incorrigibility is likely to take center stage once again when the prime ministers of the rival regimes are scheduled to meet in Seoul for what would nominally be the highest level of political contact ever between north and south.

The three-day meeting stands a good chance of being scuttled at the last minute, though, especially now that the aborted border-opening experiment has poisoned the air. But if the meeting takes place it could lead to a second round of talks scheduled for October in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, and mark a modest breakthrough in relations.

Still, despite the appearance of movement, no one is anticipating much in the way of tangible results that would set the two Koreas on a course of reconciliation. Both sides have far more to lose than to gain by opening up at this time.

At stake is the rigid ideological control each side keeps over its populace.

North Korea wants to isolate its Stalinist system from the wave of political reform sweeping socialist countries in Eastern Europe. And South Korea wants to guard its convoluted society of extreme poverty and showy affluence from the seeds of revolution.

Ever vigilant against a fifth column, South Korean police recently rounded up 37 people--including 10 soldiers--suspected of plotting to overthrow the government. They allegedly were part of a clandestine group called the Revolutionary Class Struggle Union, with ties to former student radicals.

The prevailing view among the conservative rulers in the south is that North Korea still would like to reunify the peninsula through force, as it attempted to do by invading the south at the onset of the 1950-53 Korean War. But because the continued deployment of American troops puts the Vietnam model for reunification out of Pyongyang’s reach, Seoul believes the north’s strategy is to destabilize the south through propaganda and covert means.

At the same time, a boom in economic development has made the capitalist south so robust that eventually the north will be overwhelmed and forced to capitulate in a German-style model of peaceful reunification, most South Korean analysts contend.

That’s why the Seoul government is in no hurry to rush to the negotiating table, or to make concessions to its anachronistic Communist foe.

“Time is definitely on our side,” said the head of a private think tank in Seoul. “We can wait until hell freezes over.”

Nevertheless, South Korean President Roh Tae Woo has set an ambitious timetable for national reunification, which he says can be realized in the next decade. Since taking office at the beginning of 1988, the former army general has blithely engineered a diplomatic thaw with the north’s socialist allies, culminating in his surprise summit in San Francisco with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev in June.

But with North Korea still demonized, many southerners are confused and anxious about their national destiny.

“I want to die out of frustration,” said Shim Myong Shik, 60, a construction contractor in suburban Seoul who attended a government-sponsored rally near the border Aug. 13, when a five-day period of free travel between the two Koreas was supposed to begin.

Shim had hoped to go north to try to find his parents and brother, from whom he was separated--like millions of his countrymen--during the Korean War. But the Seoul government called off the border crossing, originally proposed by President Roh himself. Seoul blamed North Korea’s refusal to issue written guarantees of safe passage for travelers.

“We don’t know politics. All I wanted was to see my family again,” said Shim, who obtained travel pass No. 001 out of more than 61,000 permits issued by Seoul authorities for the now-aborted exchange. “But the north doesn’t want us to come because we live better than they do.”

The two Koreas have not allowed separated families to reunite since a limited exchange was sponsored by the Red Cross in 1985. Negotiations to continue those humanitarian exchanges subsequently broke down, as have an array of other inter-Korean talks on such matters as parliamentary meetings or the fielding of a joint athletic team for this year’s Asian Games in Beijing.

If the Korean political dialogue were to miraculously get on track, the agenda would be a full and complicated one, loaded with stubborn issues that have defied progress for decades.

For starters, the two sides remain technically at war, having never signed a peace treaty after an armistice stopped the shooting 37 years ago.

Disarmament is the paramount task to reduce tension on the peninsula, and this has been underscored in speeches by both Roh and his autocratic counterpart in the north, President Kim Il Sung. It is also the major stumbling block. North Korea demands that the 45,000 U.S. troops in the south be withdrawn, and it was not mollified by a Pentagon proposal earlier this year to cut troop strength by 7,000--for budgetary reasons.

South Korea and the United States, meanwhile, are nervous about North Korea’s potential to augment its 1-million-member army by developing nuclear weapons, and have demanded the right to inspect atomic power facilities under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. North Korea refuses, demanding assurances that there are no U.S. nuclear arms in the south. The U.S. military adheres to a strict policy of not confirming or denying nuclear deployment.

In a dispute that points up how the Korean reunification conundrum is inseparable from South Korean domestic politics, the north insists that Seoul must abolish its anti-Communist National Security Law before relations can warm up.

Officials in Roh’s ruling Democratic Liberal Party concede it is a bad law that has been exploited in the past to crack down on legitimate dissent, but they favor limited revision, not repeal.

It is under this law, criticized by human rights groups, that authorities have detained hundreds of political prisoners. Police recently invoked it to arrest 19 students for “praising” North Korea in campus publications.

The same law applied to several South Koreans jailed last year for making forbidden trips to North Korea through third countries.

One of these travelers was Im Su Kyung, then a 20-year-old student at Yonsei University. She went to Pyongyang by way of East Germany to represent fellow students at a Socialist youth festival in July, 1989, and was arrested the following month after walking south across the demarcation line in Panmunjom. The Seoul District Court handed the so-called flower of reunification a 10-year prison sentence, which an appellate court reduced to five years in June.

“I know what the law is--there’s no denying she violated the law,” said Im Pan Ho, the student’s father. “But she was pure at heart. She didn’t do this to harm South Korea or help the north. She did it for the cause of reunification.”

“If the government did this simple thing, released one frail girl from prison, would it make South Korea smaller, or larger?” asked Im’s mother, Kim Jung Eun. “Sometimes I get very angry, and I feel like it was Roh Tae Woo who violated the National Security Law, not my daughter.”

Ironically, while Im languishes in prison, a young North Korean woman convicted of mass murder and sentenced to death for bombing a Korean Air passenger jet in 1987 received a pardon and was freed--albeit to the protective custody of the National Security Planning Agency. The terrorist made a tearful confession and apology; the “flower of reunification” was defiant in court.

Roh’s bold and highly publicized gestures toward North Korea are routinely dismissed by political opponents as cynical diversions from his domestic problems.

“Roh and his administration are speaking through a very sarcastic smile to the government in the north,” said Lee Boo Young, a dissident and veteran of South Korean prisons. “It’s all a bluff.”

But loyalists say Roh is grappling seriously with the question of how to break out of the impasse with North Korea.

Lee Hong Koo, the former national reunification minister who now serves as a special assistant to the president, said that even Roh’s 80-year-old mother is applying “tremendous pressure” on her son to do something soon. The reason is that she has elderly friends separated from their families in the north, and fears they won’t live long enough to realize their dream of reunion.

But Lee is not optimistic that much progress will be made any time soon.

“The events in Eastern Europe encouraged us that we may somehow see the integration of the two Koreas, but it also alarmed the North Korean system and very sharply heightened the dilemma they are facing,” Lee said. “It put them in a defensive position, and now it’s going to be very hard to sort out a new framework for dialogue.

“I think a more productive dialogue may take place next year,” Lee added. “This year is still a search for a new modality.”

Prepared or not, Lee and others believe that North Korea is under considerable pressure to go through with the formality of north-south political talks from its Soviet ally, which is assumed to be losing patience with Pyongyang’s hard-line position.

In contrast, Rhee Sang Woo, a political scientist at Seoul’s Sogang University, sees Japan--not the Soviet Union--as key to bringing Pyongyang to the table.

North Korea desperately needs an infusion of Japanese capital and technology to get its troubled economy moving, but Tokyo is keeping its distance until Pyongyang improves ties with Washington, Rhee’s theory goes. The United States, which still brands North Korea a “terrorist state,” wants the two Koreas pursuing humanitarian exchanges to build confidence on the peninsula.

Fundamentally, South Korean officials and intellectuals still haven’t figured out why--or whether--they want reunification, and at what cost it would be justified, said a prominent Korean analyst who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

“Every Korean citizen at this point is very confused,” he said. “In the north they still haven’t budged from the view that a revolution in South Korea will lead to reunification, and in the south you have hard-line cold warriors struggling against optimistic idealists in the bureaucracy.

“It’s the job of the top policy-maker to straighten this out and impose his own conception, but this government has lots of tacticians and no strategists,” the analyst said. “It just doesn’t know what to do with North Korea.”

The Koreas at a Glance

The Korean War began June 25, 1950, when troops from communist-ruled North Korea invaded the south in an action condemned by the United Nations. Sixteen countries eventually responded with troops to a U.N. call for military aid to South Korea and 41 countries sent equipment, food, and other supplies.

Of about 520,000 U.N. troops at the peak of the war, more than 90%, or 480,000, were American. They joined a maximum of 590,000 South Korean soldiers against more than 260,000 North Korean and 780,000 allied Chinese soldiers on the other side. The Soviet Union gave military equipment to the North Koreans.

The conflict ended with an armistice agreement between North Korea and the United Nations on July 27, 1953. But no peace treaty has ever been signed by the between the two Koreas, and U.S. forces remain in the south to discourage any resumption of hostilities.

The Korean War was one of the bloodiest in history. About 1 million South Korean civilians died and several million more were made homeless. No account of civilian casualties in the north has ever been given.

Combined North Korean and Chinese casualties totaled some 1.6 million against 580,000 South Korean and allied forces. The United States lost 54,246 dead, 103,284 were wounded, and 5,178 missing.

Population

North Korea: 22,500,000

South Korea: 43,300,000

Population Growth rate

North Korea: 2.4%

South Korea: 1.3%

North Korea life expectancy: Male-67 Female-73 South Korea life expectancy: Male-66 Female-73 Land area (in square miles)

North Korea: 46,540

South Korea: 38,023

External debt (in millions)

North Korea: $2.5

South Korea: $31.4