S. Korea Tries Brandishing Stick at Intransigent North

What do you do when you’re courting someone who accepts your presents but then throws crockery at you and vilifies you in public--and rubs it in by demanding more gifts as proof of your good faith?

Keep the door open, but post a guard, say the frustrated South Koreans, who are struggling once again to figure out what their intransigent northern neighbor really wants.

In an interview published Monday, South Korea’s foreign minister announced that if North Korea goes ahead with its threatened launch of another ballistic missile, Seoul will cut off trade, tourism and all but essential humanitarian aid.

Hong Soon Young’s warning was the toughest talk heard from Seoul since President Kim Dae Jung took office 17 months ago, waving an olive branch at North Korea. But in the Munhwa Ilbo newspaper, the foreign minister stressed that Kim’s “sunshine policy” of engagement will continue “in a broader sense” even if the North does fire a missile, as the door to negotiation will remain open.

Even before the latest diplomatic tension, relations between the two Koreas had stalemated in the wake of several setbacks: last month’s deadly shootout between the two countries’ navies in the Yellow Sea; the North’s refusal to negotiate on reuniting separated families; the detention of a South Korean tourist; and a report last week that North Korea is building a large new missile base near the Chinese border.

“Although we never announced it officially, our policy toward North Korea has become tougher after the Yellow Sea skirmishes,” Hong said. “Public opinion demanded this.”

The North’s unwillingness to return Kim Dae Jung’s overtures has put the president in an increasingly awkward position as his campaign of sending food, fertilizer, tourists, businesspeople and cultural and religious delegations to the hermetic North has yielded no tangible results. Another missile test could doom hopes that the two Koreas could at least be reconciled, if not reunified, sometime soon.

South Korea’s suspicion and frustration appear to be magnified north of the 38th parallel, which remains the most heavily armed border in the world.

The North Korean government views the sunshine policy as a Trojan horse with which the U.S. and South Korea hope to infiltrate and subvert North Korea. It considers the “carrot and stick” approach now being touted by many South Korean and U.S. hard-liners as a means to control North Korea to be as deeply demeaning as that animal-taming expression implies.

And the leadership in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, views the humanitarian aid sent to the hungry North less as a symbol of foreign goodwill or humanitarianism than as booty that “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il has wrested from the foreigners in a kind of “judo diplomacy,” according to a U.S. aid worker.

The food, fertilizer and other aid “are prizes that Kim Jong Il has won from an opponent who is much bigger and stronger, but still dumb,” the aid worker said.

Moreover, North Korea’s official rhetoric, at least, does not appear to be drawing any closer to South Korea’s world view.

Lately, North Korean propaganda has blared that South Korea and the U.S. are planning a Kosovo-style invasion of the North. Pyongyang viewed President Kim Dae Jung’s visit to Washington earlier this month as evidence that its two enemies are conspiring to finalize their attack plans.

However paranoid that may sound to Westerners, the isolated leadership in Pyongyang is deeply worried by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Yugoslavia precedent: legitimizing the use of force against a sovereign nation that is committing crimes against humanity. North Korea fears that the West could try to use human rights abuses by Kim Jong Il as an excuse to try to oust him, a U.S.-based North Korea expert said.

“Whatever we’ve said against [Yugoslav President Slobodan] Milosevic, they know that a case 10 times as strong can be made against Kim Jong Il,” the source said. South Korean intelligence agencies have for years been compiling a dossier against the North Korean leadership that includes allegations of kidnapping, torture, murder, state-sponsored terrorism and drug-smuggling, not to mention a food policy that has allowed populations in certain areas of the country to starve to death.

“You could make a case against North Korea that would make Libya pale by comparison,” the source said.

But in a sign of how far South Korea has already come since the Cold War, not even the hard-line conservatives who view Kim Dae Jung’s engagement policy as naive and dangerous appeasement suggest trying to indict Kim Jong Il.

The South Korean public is overwhelmingly in favor of dialogue, trade, some aid and nongovernmental exchanges, although there is growing sentiment that the Kim Dae Jung government has been hasty to give but gotten nothing back from the North.

There is no way to measure whether the visits of 7,400 South Koreans have done anything to bridge the chasm that opened up with partition of the peninsula in 1945. The impoverished Communist North remains ideologically committed to liberating its southern brethren from the domination of U.S. imperialists; and the ardently capitalist South is hard at work liberating itself from the economic stewardship of the International Monetary Fund.

Most foreign visitors to the North continue to get the blinker tour, yet some insist that there are changes.

“We already have evidence that in areas where foreigners have access, the [prison] camps disappear,” an expert said.

Kim came into office assuming that it would take a year or so to persuade the North of his good intentions, sources said. But as time passes and the key parliamentary elections scheduled for April 2000 draw closer, the South Korean president becomes more vulnerable to charges from critics that he is engaged in a naive and futile policy of appeasement.

“[Kim] was very confident to have a rapid response from the North, and that response has not yet come,” said Kim Suk Woo, a former vice minister of unification. “Therefore, he is fighting time at the moment, and he is kind of nervous.”

Others argue that while the sunshine policy is sound, Kim Dae Jung’s government has blundered by seeming overeager to have progress in North-South relations.

“This gives them a great advantage because now they know that by sabotaging the sunshine policy they can blackmail us to obtain things they need,” said a South Korean academic. Like most scholars, aid workers and government and former government officials who have direct knowledge of or contacts with the North, the source declined to be named.

The ideological rationale for Kim Jong Il’s harsh regime is that North Korea is a siege state surrounded by hostile forces and requiring absolute loyalty and sacrifice from the population as a condition of survival. Thus, even while the hungry and cash-strapped state begged for South Korean fertilizer, it sent a rust-bucket armada into disputed waters of the Yellow Sea and allegedly fired first.

“They need an enemy,” the academic said with a sigh. “We have to be good friends, supplying them with everything they need, and we have to be a good enemy to them at the same time.”

Recent visitors to North Korea have been told that about 40 Northern sailors were killed and 50 injured in the shootout, a figure that, if true, is higher than any previous estimates. The incident led to the collapse of talks over reuniting separated families--the issue that South Koreans care about most.

Even if the North Koreans do launch another missile, South Korea will urge the U.S. and Japan to not renege on a 1994 deal to build two light-water reactors for the North in exchange for Pyongyang’s agreeing to shelve its nuclear weapons program. The South Koreans warn that the North could resume plutonium production within a few months if the deal falls through.

The three countries have been warning North Korea to desist--but that may only backfire, because the regime’s very legitimacy derives from its willingness to stand up to the “big powers” that have pushed around and partitioned the “fatherland,” a North Korea scholar said. The greater the foreign pressure, the more Kim Jong Il will be forced to launch another missile.

“If it comes to a direct threat--’You fire this missile, and we’re going to do something bad to you’--they are almost obligated to do so,” the scholar said.

Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.) told reporters in Beijing on Monday that he was “discouraged” after talks on missiles with North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan.

“My impression is that beyond defending their right to engage in these tests, I believe they have the intention of doing so,” he said.

Kim Dae Jung has said he believes there is a 50-50 chance that the North will go ahead with the launch.

How to respond? The experts are still scratching their heads.

“There are two ways to go with these guys,” a U.S. official said. “Either you buy them off, or you’re willing to play chicken with them. You have to pick one or the other, and unfortunately, we haven’t been willing to pick. . . . That’s been our problem.”

Engagement is the only answer--the alternative being war, South Koreans argue. Foreign Minister Hong said that if war broke out, North Korea would collapse, but a quarter of Seoul’s population--3 million of its 12 million people--would probably be killed. “What unification policy would be worth such a sacrifice?” he asked.

Thus engagement must be pursued, the South Korean academic said.

“What we need is good strategic thinking on how to make it work,” he said, adding with another sigh: “There are 100 ways of influencing the North Koreans. We have all the cards we need, but we are not using them somehow.”

Chi Jung Nam of The Times’ Seoul Bureau contributed to this report.