A History of Korea (98 page)

While reaffirming the U.S. security commitment to South Korea, conservative President Ronald Reagan simultaneously tried to improve North Korean– U.S. relations, promoting the cross-recognition scheme but insisting that the United States would not negotiate with North Korea on security issues without South Korea’s full participation.

In February 1983 the United States signaled a change in its attitude toward North Korea by allowing U.S. diplomats to make contact with North Koreans in a third country. But the slow improvement in relations between the two countries stalled on 9 October 1983, when North Korean agents attempted to assassinate South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan.

In 1987 the Reagan administration once again allowed U.S. diplomats to contact their North Korean counterparts, and shortly thereafter North Korea and the United States began their councilor-level meeting in Beijing through Chinese mediators. No concrete agreements emerged, however, as North Korea continued to demand that U.S. troops withdraw from South Korea and that a peace treaty replace the existing armistice agreement between North Korea and the United States.

In early May 1990 the United States officially announced that conditions for direct talks with North Korea would include a dialogue between North and South Korea, an end to terrorist attacks and aid to terrorists, and the return of the bodies of American
MIA
s from the Korean War. On 28 May 1990, for the first time since the end of the Korean War, North Korea returned the bodies of five U.S. soldiers at P’anmunj
ŏ
m. By December 1993 a total of 94 bodies of U.S. soldiers had been handed over to the
U.N.
side at the truce village.

By the early 1990s, to bring a reluctant United States to a bilateral conference table and to continue its production of nuclear weapons, North Korea played the nuclear card and achieved both goals. The nuclear issue would dominate all future negotiations between North Korea and the United States.

At first, the North Koreans denied they were developing nuclear weapons and refused to sign a nuclear safeguard agreement authorizing inspections of their nuclear facilities by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Under heavy pressure from the international community, including the United States and the Soviet Union, in June 1991 North Korea grudgingly notified the
IAEA
that it would sign the agreement, but it refused to open its nuclear facilities at Y
ŏ
ngby
ŏ
n to
IAEA
inspectors.

The new issue of the North Korean nuclear weapons program caused a serious problem for the United States. Fortunately for the United States, on 13 December 1991, the two Koreas concluded the “Basic Agreement on North-South Reconciliation, Nonaggression, Exchange, and Cooperation.” The negotiators from both Koreas also initialed, on 31 December 1991, the “Joint Declaration of the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” signed by the prime ministers of the two Korean states on 18 February 1992. North Korea signed the nuclear safeguard agreement on 30 January 1992, at last allowing
IAEA
inspections of its nuclear facilities in May 1992.
²¹
Thus certain hopeful signs appeared for improving relations between North Korea and the United States, as well as between both Koreas. But soon the situation deadlocked, as North Korea returned to its earlier uncompromising policy.

Most of the years before the late 1990s witnessed unremitting hostility between the two Koreas. The people of both Koreas were almost entirely isolated from each other and anxious about their security, but the pattern of total isolation and lack of dialogue was interrupted for three short periods—1972–1973, 1984– 1985, and 1991–1992.

From the end of the 1960s to the mid-1970s, dramatic changes took place in the international system, such as the “Nixon Doctrine,” U.S. moves toward détente with the Soviet Union and rapprochement with China, and the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. This new atmosphere in the international sphere caused the two Koreas to fear that, unless they began resolving their differences on their own initiative, they might lose their own great power patronage. Thus the two Koreas took the path of inter-Korean dialogue.

In August 1971, for the first time since 1953, the two Koreas’ Red Cross societies began talks with each other over the plight of families that had been separated when the country was divided. Then, secret contacts between North and South Korea resulted in a surprise Joint Statement on 4 July 1972, simultaneously announced in Seoul and Pyongyang and embodying the basic principles that had been agreed upon for Korean reunification: to solve the problem of reunification independently, with neither foreign interference nor dependence on foreign power, achieve reunification peacefully without the use of armed force, and put the principle of “grand national unity” as a homogeneous Korean people above differences in political or social systems and ideology. The two sides agreed not to vilify each other and to cease armed provocations, promote various inter-Korean exchange programs, cooperate with each other for Red Cross talks, create a North-South Coordination Commission with five members on each side, discuss reunification measures, and establish a telephone “hot line” between Seoul and Pyongyang.

The first Red Cross plenary meeting opened in Pyongyang in August 1972 but deadlocked in July 1973 over the issue of reuniting separated families. The first conference of the North-South Coordination Commission was held at P’anmunj
ŏ
m in October 1972. But in August 1973, shortly after the kidnapping of Kim Dea-jung by
KCIA
operatives, the Commission meeting was suspended indefinitely. North Korea used Park Chung-hee’s Yushin coup, particularly the abduction of Kim Dae-jung, as an excuse to discontinue the North–South Korean
talks and to renew its propaganda offensive against its southern neighbor. Thereafter both sides periodically proposed resuming the inter-Korean dialogue but merely as lip service, for each time the other side naturally objected. The inter-Korean talks of the early 1970s were predestined to end in failure, as Park Chung-hee and Kim Il-sung, each lacking patriotic spirit, intended to gain political capital from the dialogue for reunification in order to consolidate their own power. In fact, while Park was establishing the Yushin regime in October, Kim was instituting the “socialist constitution” and creating his autocracy in December 1972. Both leaders justified their actions as preparing the ground for reunification. Naturally, therefore, inter-Korean talks produced no meaningful agreement.

The 1972–1973 talks between the two Koreas set a precedent for the negotiations that followed in the 1980s and 1990s, in which initially successful negotiations soon came to a deadlock. In the course of imputing failure to the other side, increasing recrimination and confrontation followed and further increased mutual hostility. The agreement signed by both Koreas was usually dead in the water.

Meanwhile, in late 1972, the North Koreans engaged in digging an extensive underground tunnel in the southern part of the
DMZ
on orders from the highest echelons of the North Korean regime, shortly after the beginning of the first inter-Korean talks. In November 1974 South Korean forces located the precise location of the first tunnel, and in February 1975 they found the second tunnel. “Tunnel number two” was regarded as a masterpiece of North Korean engineering. Two more fully developed tunnels were found in 1978 and 1990.
²²
South Korean forces destroyed the tunnels on the South Korean side of the
DMZ
. The intercepted tunnels were tangible evidence of North Korea’s aggressive and deceptive behavior against South Korea. On the other hand, the Park Chung-hee government would proudly repeat that it had saved the country by finding the North Korean tunnels whenever it faced the stiffest resistance from the political opposition and wanted to justify its political suppression.

In the 1980s North and South Korea slowly moved toward more open relations. On 12 January 1981, to divert public attention from his repressive rule, South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan proposed an exchange of visits between the two Koreas by the “highest responsible person” of each country “without any condition, and free of obligation.” This was rejected by North Korea a week
later. On 5 June 1981 Chun again suggested a summit meeting, and again North Korea flatly rejected the proposal.

Two years later North Korea reached the zenith of its pressure tactics against South Korea, when, on 9 October 1983, its agents attempted to assassinate Chun during his state visit to Burma. The agents planted a bomb in the superstructure of the Aung San Martyr’s Mausoleum in Rangoon, timed to explode as Chun and his entourage were in the building paying respects to the Burmese national hero. Chun’s entourage was waiting for him to arrive when the bomb went off, and 17 South Koreans were killed, including several cabinet members and the chief presidential secretary. Because he arrived late, Chun himself escaped injury or death.

In the aftermath of the assassination attempt North Korean tactics changed, and negotiations were once again activated between the two Koreas during 1984–1985. In September 1984, when South Korea was hit by a typhoon that caused devastating floods, North Korea, on its own initiative, delivered relief supplies, including rice, cement, and medicine, to South Korea through Red Cross channels. This goodwill sprung not from altruism but from political calculations, for North Korea anticipated that South Korea would refuse to accept the relief supplies and that the offer itself would serve North Korea’s propaganda war at home and abroad. Thus the South Korean decision to accept the aid was completely unexpected in the North. In any event, the outward display of goodwill had positive effects on North–South Korean relations, and the following year, in 1985, ties between the two Koreas markedly improved. In September 1985 the two countries arranged for an exchange visit between Seoul and Pyongyang of members of separated families, journalists, performers, and support personnel, numbering 151 in all, under the auspices of the Red Cross societies from each country. In the two capitals, dramatic meetings occurred between family members after separations of 35 years or longer. Other channels were also opened for dialogue: delegations headed by officials of vice-ministerial rank worked out an agreement on economic cooperation; delegations of legislators from each side sought a joint parliamentary meeting; and the International Olympic Committee arranged a meeting of sports officials from each side to discuss North Korean participation in the Seoul Olympics to be held in 1988.

On 20 January 1986, however, the North Koreans suspended political talks with South Korea, claiming that the atmosphere for dialogue was poisoned by the South Korea–U.S. annual Team Spirit military exercise. Talks on the Olympics
continued but also failed to reach agreement. North Korea considered the Team Spirit exercise a grave threat to its national security and denounced it as a dangerous war game intentionally designed to further destroy inter-Korean relations.

On 29 November 1987 the bombing of a South Korean airliner during a flight over the Andaman Sea killed all 115 persons onboard. Two North Korean agents had planted the bomb on the plane before disembarking themselves in Bahrain. One agent committed suicide with poison, and the other was captured and confessed to having been part of a special task force organized personally by Kim Jong-il. The destruction of the plane was part of an effort by the North Korean leadership to destabilize South Korea during its impending presidential election campaign and to increase international anxiety over the forthcoming Seoul Olympics. The bombing was interpreted as a warning to foreigners that a trip to South Korea would not be safe. This incident stamped North Korea as a terrorist state for a long time to come.

Despite the airline bombing, in 1988 delegations from the South Korean National Assembly and the North Korean Supreme People’s Assembly met at P’anmunj
ŏ
m to discuss arrangements for a joint parliamentary meeting. The joint meeting never occurred, however, because North Korea once again protested the 1989 annual Team Spirit military exercises. Another channel for inter-Korean dialogue opened on 9 February 1989, when delegations headed by vice-minister level officials met at P’anmunj
ŏ
m to discuss arrangements for high-level political and military talks by delegations to be headed by the prime ministers of both governments. But the third round of preliminary meetings, scheduled for 26 April 1989, was postponed to 12 July when North Korea protested the South Korean government’s arrest of the dissident South Korean Presbyterian minister Mun Ik-hwan, who had visited North Korea in March– April 1989 and met twice with Kim Il-sung without authorization from the South Korean government. Sports officials from the two Koreas opened still another channel for dialogue on 9 March 1989 over the formation of a joint team for the Asian Games to be held in Beijing in September 1990. The two sides agreed on using the song “Arirang,” a traditional Korean folk song, as the official anthem for the joint team but failed to agree on the team name or flag. In the end the the two states would participate separately in the sports festival.

The abortive North-South dialogue of 1988–1989 did produce, however, a constructive by-product. As part of its nordpolitik efforts, in January 1990
South Korea opened its first direct trade with North Korea. On 21 January 1990 Ch
ŏ
ng Chu-y
ŏ
ng, the patriarch of the Hyundai Group, visited his North Korean birthplace and negotiated with the North Koreans on a joint venture to develop tourism in the K
ŭ
mgang-san region. This would have a tremendous impact on future inter-Korean relations.

In 1990–1991, the two Koreas engaged in unprecedented face-to-face talks, with the prime ministers alternating their visits to Seoul and Pyongyang. Because of differences in their approaches, however, little progress was made. While North Koreans stuck to political issues, their southern counterparts emphasized humanitarian and cultural issues.