Koreas Sideline Rivalry and Let the Sunshine Back In

As tea was served on a table set with a white linen cloth, South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun looked as giddy as a young man on a first date. He turned to the guest sitting beside him, North Korean envoy Ri Jong Hyok, and made an astonishing admission.

“I’ve never actually met a North Korean in person,” Roh told his guest, “but you seem like somebody very familiar to me.”

The occasion was a fourth-anniversary celebration last month of the historic June 15, 2000, summit between North Korea’s Kim Jong Il and South Korea’s then-president, Kim Dae Jung. During the two-day event in a Seoul hotel, Koreans from both sides of the 38th parallel shared jokes and anecdotes, made grandiloquent speeches about brotherly relations and toasted the future of their relationship.

“They looked like they were renewing their marriage vows,” said Bradley O. Babson, a North Korea advisor for the World Bank who attended the event. “I’ve never seen a situation where North and South Koreans were so relaxed together, sitting around the dinner table and chatting like cousins.”

“It was a real love-in,” said another foreign participant, who asked not to be quoted by name.

The scene was all the more remarkable given the long dry spell that preceded it. The Bush administration’s hostility toward North Korea and the nuclear tensions of the last year and a half had forced South Korea, a U.S. ally, to keep the brakes on neighborly relations. That’s why Roh, despite 16 months as president, hadn’t met with a North Korean until June.

But now the “sunshine policy” -- which won Kim Dae Jung the Nobel Peace Prize -- is back on the fast track. In recent weeks, North and South Koreans have probably accomplished more than at any time in recent years.

By all accounts, North Korea has been on especially good behavior lately. Despairing of making much progress with the United States, the secretive regime has been on something of a charm offensive in the region, trying to patch up relations with China, Japan, Russia and particularly South Korea.

That has allowed work to be accelerated on the $180-million industrial park South Korea is developing north of the border in Kaesong. In recent weeks, both sides have begun to dismantle loudspeakers along the demilitarized zone that have blasted propaganda across the border for decades. The militaries of the estranged Koreas have held half a dozen meetings recently to set up joint radio frequencies and a hotline and take other measures to avoid accidental clashes.

“The military relationship is developing so quickly,” Babson said. “It shows that both sides can do things quickly when they want to.”

After a lull in activity, there’s a busy summer of cultural exchanges and tourism. The writers’ associations of the two nations are scheduled to meet in August for the first time since the Korean War. The Hyundai Asan conglomerate is hoping to start day trips across the border to tour North Korea’s scenic Mt. Kumgang.

South Korea is planning to use a government website to broadcast North Korean television news programs, albeit only after they are edited, and legislation has been introduced to lift laws against logging on to North Korean websites.

To some extent, the new mood on the peninsula reflects Seoul’s impatience with the Bush administration.

After North Korea admitted in late 2002 that it had restarted its nuclear program, the United States leaned on South Korea to hold back its aid as a bargaining chip. But the nuclear crisis has dragged on, with the United States digging in its heels and, until a new round of six-party talks last week in Beijing, refusing to budge on its demand for verifiable and irreversible dismantlement of all North Korean nuclear facilities.

“Everybody was getting very frustrated with us,” said Leon V. Sigal, director of the Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project in New York. “In effect, they’ve been saying, ‘If you’re not going to play, we’ll do it on our own.’ ”

It is not only the South Koreans who have stepped up contacts with the North. Russian Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il recently in Pyongyang, the capital. In May, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visited Pyongyang to meet with Kim and promised the regime 250,000 tons of rice and $10 million in medical aid.

In return, Koizumi retrieved family members of five Japanese who had been abducted to North Korea in the 1970s. This month, Koizumi said during a televised debate that he would like to see Japan normalize relations with North Korea within a year.

In Washington, an administration official, who asked to remain unidentified, said U.S. officials didn’t believe the increased contact was interfering with efforts to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear program.

“Each of these countries has its own interests and own reasons for engaging in the way they’re engaging,” the official said. “For Japan, the abductees issue is very much at the forefront. For South Korea, the reunion of families and the normalization of ties is something they’ve long been pursuing. So our view is that this is not contradictory to or detracting from the process underway” at the six-party talks.

The official said that if the North Koreans were trying to gain tactical advantage from the contacts, “we don’t see much of an impact. In the six-party talks, we have a pretty strong consensus on our goals and how to get there.”

In South Korea, Roh also may have been emboldened to step up cross-border contacts by the April elections, which resulted in a left-of-center majority in the National Assembly. Previously, the conservative opposition put strict constraints on dealings with North Korea through its control of the legislature.

“Now [Roh] is in a position where he can reveal his true intentions with regard to North Korea policy,” said Yoon Deok Ryong of the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy in Seoul. “He had to wait for the general election.”

In terms of symbolism, the fourth-anniversary celebration last month was almost like a coming-out party for Roh. He sat side by side with Kim Dae Jung -- a rare joint appearance that made it appear as if the older man was handing responsibility for North-South ties to his successor.

Roh has made it clear, however, that there is a limit. In a speech at the event, he promised that the South was prepared to provide a massive infusion of aid “to develop North Korea’s economy in an epochal manner” -- but only after the nuclear problem was resolved.

Conservative critics complain that the South Korean government is being manipulated by Pyongyang. Lee Dong Bok, a former South Korean intelligence official and negotiator, doesn’t trust the apparent progress.

“These are merely tactical maneuvers by the North intended to drive a wedge between the U.S. and Seoul,” Lee said. “We’ve seen this before.”

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Times staff writer Paul Richter in Washington contributed to this report.