U.S. Must Get Behind North, South Progress

If indeed the leaders of the two Koreas hold a summit in Pyongyang in mid-June, as both pledged to do on Sunday, milestone will tumble upon milestone.

Since the country was divided in the immediate aftermath of Japan’s surrender in August 1945, no Korean heads of state have ever met. Instead they have thrown 55 years’ worth of brickbats at each other. This meeting will also herald the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War. And the summit will be the coming-out party of Kim Jong Il, a recluse who has barely met a foreigner since he came to power, let alone the leader of the enemy camp.

The North never found a South Korean president it liked (including the current one). The South always denied that another Korean state existed.

Anniversaries usually mark some kind of closure, but the war never really ended. Meanwhile, our media routinely call the mysterious son of Kim Il Sung a terrorist, a nut case, a playboy, a Nero who fiddles while his people starve to death.

Hopes of reconciliation in Korea have been raised by the two sides before, only to be dashed. In July 1972, the two governments published several principles for reunification that grew out of secret talks between Kim Il Sung and the South’s intelligence director. More joint principles issued forth in late 1991. In June 1994, Kim Il Sung proposed a first-ever summit with his southern counterpart, but he died two weeks later. The presumably “epochal” principles were as fleeting as the proposed summits. But this one may well be different because the ground has been prepared by years of diplomacy, through dramatic changes in South Korean and American policy and through compromises by the North that belie its obstinate, nasty image.

A three-year crisis over the North’s nuclear program nearly led to war in June 1994, but energetic diplomacy got the North’s nuclear reactor program frozen, and it is still frozen. In 1997, the North agreed to “four-power talks” to replace the continuing technical state of war, quietly dropping its refusal to deal with a South that never signed the armistice. A hullabaloo in 1998-99 over a huge underground installation said to harbor nuclear facilities ended with the North yielding to unprecedented U.S. inspections of its security facilities, followed by a major agreement with Washington last September to halt missile tests in return for lifting the 50-year-old economic embargo on the North. Lately, Pyongyang has been on a diplomatic offensive, opening relations with Italy and talking about doing the same with Germany, France, England, Australia and Washington, where a first-ever, high-level North Korean delegation is due for talks next month.

Republicans have lambasted this progress as appeasement and Democrats have found it impolitic in an election year, even though it is one of Bill Clinton’s finest foreign policy achievements.

Meanwhile, Kim Dae Jung has done more to change policy toward the North than any previous South Korean or American president, in spite of facing a far greater immediate threat than we do. At his inauguration in February 1998, he pledged to “actively pursue reconciliation and cooperation” with North Korea, and declared his support for Pyongyang’s attempts at better relations with Washington--in total contrast with his predecessors, who hated any hint of such rapprochement. He was the first to call publicly for an end to the embargo, during a visit to Washington in June 1998. He shipped food and other forms of aid to the North without demanding concessions, and he encouraged many South Korean businesses to invest in the North. His patient and persistent “sunshine policy” grows out of his long-term study of the North-South problem and his experience as a leader whose adult years span the entire existence of both Koreas.

Many pundits have rushed forward to question the timing of the summit announcement, coming three days before important parliamentary elections in the South. Maybe so, but if so, the North did Kim Dae Jung a highly unusual favor. Plus no one ever said Kim is not a politician. There might be another word--statesman--for this man who suffered for decades at the hands of Korea’s dictators and learned the hard way the virtues of dialogue, reconciliation, peace and the necessary magnanimity to strive in those directions. Such virtues cut against the grain of Korea’s history, a history that teaches us how easy it is to get into a war--indeed, it happened overnight in June 1950--and how hard it is to get out. Who would have imagined, in Harry Truman’s time, that one of the most destructive wars of the 20th century was around the corner, and that 50 years later we still are not out of it?

Kim Dae Jung wants to leave office as the man who ended the Korean War, which is the necessary prelude to an eventual reconciliation and reunification. Instead of begrudging this man his admirable ambitions, our politicians should shut up, get behind him and push.