Korean entente

President Roh Moo-Hyun (left) of South Korea and North Korea's titular head of state Kim Yong-nam water a pine tree during the inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang on October 4. -

The second inter-Korean summit yields results that the ultra-conservatives on both sides hardly bargained for.

A formidable tunnel, lighted up as a history-tourism site, has served for a number of years as a symbol of the political ethos of a divided Korean peninsula. The intricate underground passage forms part of the centrepiece-structures of a nominally demilitarised zone (DMZ). This zone has kept the Republic of Korea (RoK), widely known as South Korea, delinked from its northern neighbour, the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK), since the 1950-53 Korean War.

The tunnel was originally designed to give the DPRK, also known as North Korea, secret access to South Korea for a possible military invasion. However, the forbidding subterranean structure is not known to have been carved out during the Korean War. South Korea actually detected the tunnel sometime during the Cold War that followed the 1950-53 hostilities. The southern segment of the passage was then sanitised by South Korea and its long-time military ally, the United States, which holds jurisdiction to this day over the relevant portion of the highly fortified DMZ.

With South Korea throwing open this portion of the tunnel as a tourist site, a complicated message began to emerge. This related to the trust deficit between the ethnically homogeneous but ideologically divided Koreas within their shared peninsula.

The trust deficit dominated the thought processes of South Korean military officers as they explained the intricacies of the tunnel to External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee and his entourage, including this writer, during a recent visit to the DMZ. A ride by mono-rail to the very heart of the tunnel, beyond which one could not proceed as that portion is under North Koreas jurisdiction, was a journey into a partition of the mind.

On October 2, President Roh Moo-hyun took a small step that could turn out to be a giant leap forward for all Koreans. He seemed to promise the beginning of the end of a tunnel vision which, for long, had kept the two Koreas apart.

As Roh travelled to Pyongyang for the second inter-Korean summit in over 50 years, he chose to take the DMZ route. The run-up to this summit was rich in the irony of a divisive zone serving as the bridge. As Roh walked across a part of this territory before stepping on to the North Korean side in quest of peace and reconciliation between the two Koreas, he crossed what he himself described as a forbidden line. Suffused with political symbolism, as this might have been, the summit that followed between Roh and the North Koreas supreme leader, Kim Jong-il, yielded results that the ultra-conservatives on both sides hardly bargained for.

Roh was first welcomed by North Koreas titular head of state Kim Yong-nam. Unexpectedly, and soon thereafter, Kim Jong-il, in his capacity as Chairman of the National Defence Commission of the DPRK, greeted Roh with a hearty handshake at a formal welcome ceremony in Pyongyang. The two said they were glad to meet each other, and the ceremony ended with no more pleasantries or exchanges of views. This raised speculation about the political chemistry, involving the two leaders, for the summit.

Two days of intensive talks followed and at one stage during the summit, Kim, the unchallenged leader in his country, asked Roh to extend his stay. At this, Roh indicated he might have to consult his aides, and this prompted Kim to wonder why his counterpart, the leader of an economically vibrant democracy, could not act on his own volition. This and other snippets of information about the atmospherics of an evolving dialogue were immediately interpreted by Korean experts as signs of a difficult engagement across the divide.

As the two leaders unveiled their future-setting accord on October 4, with no extension of the deadline for talks considered necessary, pundits were at a loss to find the right words to describe a historic outcome. It was not so much the political chemistry involving two leaders with differing styles as the vision about a common future for a long-divided people.

Kim and Roh agreed to resolve the issue of unification on their own initiative and in line with the spirit of by-the-Korean-people themselves. Outwardly, this was a statement of the obvious, in that the two divided societies can reunite only if they were to take a concerted initiative. However, Kim and Roh have now explicitly kept the U.S. out of the reckoning in regard to the policy, not just sentiments, on inter-Korean efforts towards reunification. This aspect does represent a seismic shift in the long-settled geopolitical dynamics in the Korean peninsula.

For some years now, more so since the first inter-Korean summit in 2000, there has been a groundswell of sentiment, especially in South Korea, for reunification with North Korea on its own steam. Significantly, Roh and Kim have agreed to transcend the differences in ideology and systems so as to reunite the two Koreas.

The newly indicative seismic shift is greatly evident from the Roh-Kim agreement on the need to build a permanent peace regime on the Korean peninsula. Right now, the stability of the peninsula is based on the foundation of an armistice formula that ended the Korean War without a parallel or follow-up peace settlement. The armistice deal was signed by the U.S.-led United Nations on one side and North Korea and China on the other. South Korea, whose existential reality was underwritten by the U.S.-led U.N. in the early 1950s, was not formally a party to the accord.

While Roh and Kim described their latest pact as a reunification-oriented package, their decision to begin efforts to establish a new order of peace on the peninsula emerged as their guiding principle. Co-prosperity of the two Koreas was portrayed as an objective of not only the proposed reunification but also the new vision of an order of peace.

Kim and Roh agreed to make efforts to bring together three or four [relevant] parties to fashion a new peace regime on the peninsula. The parties remained unspecified. This set off frenetic speculation about the party that the two leaders would wish to exclude in the event of a dialogue being started involving just three interlocutors. If the three signatories to the old armistice accord were to be seen as natural parties to a future dialogue on a peace regime, South Korea will find itself excluded. The U.S., North Korea and China will emerge as the natural candidates. However, South Korean experts insist that the country cannot conceivably be kept out of the discussions to be launched in the light of Rohs own pact with Kim.

A related question is whether Kim will be inclined to keep China out of the proposed peace-regime negotiations. China and North Korea were on one side during the Korean War while the U.S. led the U.N. forces and eventually guaranteed South Koreas political existence. So, it would be awkward for North Korea to keep either China or South Korea out of the proposed peace-order talks. It was Kim who took the formal initiative to suggest the formulation of three or four parties. And he did so in response to Rohs ideas that the inter-Korean dialogue should begin to fashion a new and stable peninsula itself.

North Korean leaders showed a great deal of reluctance to be drawn into any kind of post-summit public diplomacy to clear this confusion. At this, South Korean officials and experts began indicating that Roh and Kim were not sure, at the time of the summit, whether China would be keen on attending the proposed peace-order talks. By mid-October, the two Koreas were not yet ready to name the parties to such future talks. But the consensus in diplomatic circles was that North Korea and China, as the original allies, and the U.S. and South Korea, as the natural partners in the regional dispensation that followed the Korean War, should all be at the negotiating table.

Certain other aspects of the Roh-Kim pact also merit attention. The two leaders agreed to work together to implement smoothly all the incremental accords reached during the six-party talks on the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula. The six parties are North Korea, the U.S., China, South Korea, Japan and Russia.

The salient aspects of the relevant agreements pertained to Chinas announcement that the DPRK agreed to disable all [its] existing nuclear facilities, subject to [their] abandonment. The disabling of these facilities, by now verifiably shut down by North Korea following its own earlier commitments, is slated to be completed by the end of this year. By the same timeline, North Korea has now agreed to provide a complete and correct declaration of all its nuclear programmes. There is no timeline set for its total abandonment or dismantlement of all the relevant nuclear facilities.

At a quick glance, it will appear that North Korea has staged a strategic retreat after testing a nuclear weapon, against Chinas counsel and the wishes of the larger international community, on October 9, 2006. However, Kim has certainly not agreed, as of now, to give up his existing nuclear arsenal, whatever its size. Speculation is that his willingness to dismantle North Koreas nuclear facilities is based on the possibility that he has optimally utilised all the fissionable material at his command to make nuclear weapons.

In a very subtle fashion, North Koreas nuclear-arms issue figures in the latest inter-Korean pact. The proposed peace regime on the Korean peninsula is possible only if this entire territory, consisting of both Koreas, can be denuclearised. Significantly, the goal of the six-party process, too, is such a peninsula-wide denuclearisation. Relevant to this goal and the new inter-Korean accord is the issue whether South Korea is free of all U.S. nuclear weapons and related facilities.

For quite some time now, the U.S. line is that no such weapons and facilities exist on South Koreas sovereign territory. However, Kim is keen to address the issues arising out of the extended nuclear deterrence that the U.S. is interminably providing South Korea with, as an insurance against a possible attack from North Korea.

Seoul is aware of this, and Rohs latest accord with Kim to set up a maritime peace zone in the disputed inter-Korean space has upset South Koreas conservative war veterans. The guarded optimism of the U.S. to stay the course as South Koreas big ally and the growing anti-America sentiments among young South Koreans were evident during a recent visit to Seoul. According to Korean strategic affairs experts such as Lee Chang-Bum, a reinforcement of the [South] Korea-U.S. alliance and [their] bilateral cooperation should be seen as the best means to help bring about an early resolution of the North Korean nuclear problem. The future of the Korean peninsula may be determined by the interplay of such seasoned views and the sentiments of young South Koreans.