Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones, But Names Will Make Me Nuke You…

As the North and South resume diplomatic contact, Seoul is batting for North Korea in the name game, criticizing Washington’s continued use of “outpost of tyranny” to describe the North Korean regime. South Korean Froeign Minister Ban ki Moon has himself suggested that if Washington can lay off the “tyranny” comment for a month, the six-party talks will resume in July. Pyongyang’s hopes had been raised when U.S. President George W. Bush referred to Kim Jong Il as “Mr.” rather that “Dr. Evil,” and Kim returned the favor, calling Bush “Mr.” rather than “a political idiot and human trash.” But apparently, as long as under-secretaries in the United States add “tyranny” or “evil” to descriptions of Kim or North Korea, it will hold out on resuming talks. And this scares the South leadership, as Washington has warned it will leave the talks if they don’t resume soon, and that could lead to military action. So Seoul reminds Washington not to call names, and Pyongyang sits back and smiles; pretty clever for an evil dwarf in a tyrannical outpost.

Kim Coming to Visit?

According to Yonhap, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il said Pyongyang would send “influential figures” to Seoul for the 60th anniversary of Liberation Day on August 15. If Kim plans on returning to the nuclear talks in July and sorting them out, could he be hinting that HE will travel to Seoul in August for the long awaited sequel to the inter-Korean summit?

Defections and Plots?

In what may reveal a lapse in North Korean security around the June 15 inter-Korean summit anniversary celebration, there appear to have been at least three defections by north Koreans June 17 – one man in uniform found in a park in Cheorwon, and a man and a woman on a boat in the West Sea.

Now, this may simply be a case where North Korean soldiers were given a few extra bottles of Soju in celebration of June 15, and some enterprising folks took advantage of the opportunity to leave. Or it may be coincidence that there were two separate defection attempts on the same day. A sinister plotter would say that these are actually moles; fake defectors sent to spy on the other defectors in the South.

What needs to be watched closely, however, is to see whether these two cases are isolated, or turn out to be the first trickle of a wave of defections. Several of the groups that support and encourage defections have said in the past they were going to try to create massive streams of defections to the South – a humanitarian and political crisis the government in Seoul would be unable to ignore.

Given U.S. President George W. Bush’s sudden propensity to talk North Korean human rights and focus his attention on the human rights issue in the North while meeting a fairly high-profile defector, if we see a steady flow of defections after these first two, I would begin to look seriously for signs of massive injections of U.S. money into the defection-facilitating groups.

40 Minutes with Kang

U.S. President George W. Bush’s June 13 40-minute meeting at the Whitehouse with Kang Chol Hwan (author of “The Aquariums of Pyongyang”) received almost no attention in the United States, but was noted quite readily by the South Korean press. Earlier reports that Bush was reading the book were also primarily seen in Korean media, not in the United States.

This was no accident. Bush has been using the Conservative media in the South to try to reshape the public discourse in South Korea on the North Korea issue. Washington has struggled with the change in South Korea in the past half decade from viewing North Koreans as blood-thirsty wolves that will eat school children when they invade to being sympathetic figures; brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, Koreans who just happen to have an unfortunate government. And even that government, while certainly not good, is tacitly viewed with some sense of jealousy, due to its ability to stand up to the United States and not back down.

It is little coincidence, then, that Bush met with Kang for the same 40 minutes as he met with Roh a few days earlier. The Bush administration has used such symbolism before, for example pulling approximately the same number of troops out of South Korea for duty in Iraq as Seoul was considering, but kept stalling, at the time.
For the Bush administration, the Roh presidency is little more than a constant headache, and there are already rumors milling about the halls of Beijing and Seoul that Bush is working to bring back the GNP – and his administration may have been behind the Roh impeachment procedure. While these may be extreme views, there is little doubt that Washington would prefer the GNP leadership. The blunt force of the Bush administration would only increase the Korean propensity to do whatever is opposite what Bush wants just for the sake of showing independence.

Thus Bush is trying a more subtle approach – reaching out to the South Korean populace through signs of taking an active interest in the Korean issue through his reading and meetings (and in ROK/US issues like the June 10 truck accident, something bush addressed quickly to Roh to avoid another incident like the 2002 schoolgirl accident (two views here: View 1, View 2) that triggered a series of protests and candle-light vigils).

By reshaping the discussion to be one of human rights, Bush hopes to exploit the existing sense of “Koreanism” and thus transfer sympathy for the North Koreans against the North Korean regime or any “appeasement” attempts. Will it work? Unlikely. But it is certainly worth watching.

June 15, 2005

Congratulations as the two Koreas mark the fifth anniversary of the inter-Korean summit. Much has changed over the past five and even 10+ years since Kim Jong Il has taken the helm in north Korea. It remains to be seen if “fat bear” Kim Jong Nam will follow in his father’s footsteps, and whether the United States will get its wish and see the GNP return to power in the South. But at the moment, I am not going to pontificate on such issues. I will only note my surprise upon returning to Korea in August of 2000 (after having last been there in 1996 when the last of the major submarine infiltration incidents took place in September, and a North Korean Captain Lee Chul Su flew a MiG-19 across the border in the first pilot defection since 1983) when, on the reviewing stand for the Liberation Day events to see large cutouts of both the South Korean national flower and the Kimjingalia side by side. The change in just four years since Kim Dae Jung’s election was astounding.

Yonhap runs a daily feature “Today in Korean History,” which lists several events for June 15 in addition to the 2000 inter-Korean summit. Among them:

• 918 – Wang Geun unifies the three Kingdoms (Silla, Late-Paekjae and Late-Koguryo) to establish the Koryo Kingdom (of course Yonhap uses the newer government transliteration system, as opposed to my use of one of the older methods that is still more comfortable for me, aside from simply using Korean, which is of course more accurate. There has been an interesting discussion on Romanization on the Korea Studies web recently).

• 1994 (Yonhap has it incorrectly as 1984) – Jimmy Carter visits North Korea to discuss the nuclear issue.

• 1999 – A brief inter-Korean naval clash in the west sea leaves at least one North Korean ship on the bottom of the sea (Yonhap forgets to mention the sinking. North Korea got revenge three years later in June 2002, showing a marked improvement in its own naval capabilities).

• 2000 – South Korean President Kim Dae Jung and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il hold their historic summit meeting in Pyongyang.

• 2004 – (The fifth anniversary of the 1999 naval clash) North and South Korean warships exchange a brief radio message in order to reduce tensions and lower chances of hostilities in the West Sea.

Snow

Snow 
I have been traveling recently (and thus not updated, the cardinal sin of blogging), but now am back. My sleep is currently disturbed by our new Chindo dog, Snow.