The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (31 page)

In the wake of Kim’s confession, Washington assigned a senior diplomat to make sure her story was true and had not been coerced. Once satisfied, the United States placed North Korea on its list of countries practicing state terrorism, triggering new economic and political sanctions, and it instituted an interagency drive to assist the South in sophisticated security arrangements for the upcoming Olympics. President Reagan and Secretary of State Shultz personally took up the threat of North Korean efforts to disrupt the Games with Soviet foreign minister Shevardnadze
in March 1988. “Do not worry,” Shevardnadze told Reagan and Shultz. “We [the Soviet Union] will be in Seoul to compete. There will not be any terrorism.” He proved to be right.

THE RISE OF
NORDPOLITIK

The Twenty-fourth Olympiad, September 17–October 2, 1988, provided the pivot for South Korea’s foreign policy at the end of the 1980s. Roh’s “northern politics” shifted South Korea’s declared policy toward Pyongyang and eventually launched new rounds of public and secret negotiations with North Korea’s leaders. More immediate, dramatic, and lasting were the fruits of Roh’s drive to establish relations with the allies of North Korea, as a new pragmatism and efforts at reform swept over communist regimes in the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe. In time, these changes would alter the strategic alignments around the Korean peninsula in historic fashion.

Washington Post
Tokyo correspondent Fred Hiatt and I interviewed Roh on July 1, 1988, midway between his February inauguration and the opening of the Olympic Games in September. In this first meeting with Roh as president, I found him more relaxed and confident than he had been before, even though the government party had surprisingly lost its parliamentary majority in April elections and he was undergoing a rough political shakedown. Roh described to us a fundamental change in policy toward North Korea. In the past, Roh noted, Seoul and Pyongyang had tried hard to isolate each other, each doing all in its power to interfere with the adversary’s relations with outside powers. “We have changed this,” he said. “We will ask our allies, our friends, to induce North Korea to come out into international society as a regular member of the international community.”

Roh’s effort to establish relations with North Korea’s allies followed a previously established path. Contacts with the Soviet Union and China had long been a goal of Seoul governments, in the belief that such relationships would enhance the South’s security and potentially undercut the North. In June 1983, Foreign Minister Lee Bum Suk declared the effort to normalize relations with the Soviet Union and China to be a formal objective of South Korean diplomacy. Lee, who was killed in the Rangoon bombing four months later, called the policy
Nordpolitik
, after the West German
Ostpolitik
policy with East Germany. In early 1985, specialists from several ROK ministries systematically studying the issue concluded that for the
Nordpolitik
policy to succeed, it was necessary to synchronize it with a more positive effort to negotiate with North Korea, lest it merely alarm Pyongyang as well as its allies. The task of implementing a more assertive negotiating strategy toward both North Korea and its allies was
placed in the hands of Park Chul Un, the ambitious relative-by-marriage of Roh Tae Woo, who was made a special assistant to the chief of the ROK intelligence agency.

During his campaign for the presidency in 1987, Roh pledged to pursue a northern policy vigorously, declaring in a speech at Inchon that “we will cross the Yellow Sea” to China in order to resume a historic relationship with Korea’s neighbor and promising new prosperity to the country’s west coast areas. Whereas on the surface China was cool to Roh’s entreaties, Deng Xiaoping’s market-oriented reforms in China augured well for eventual success, as did Mikhail Gorbachev’s reformist “new thinking” in foreign policy that was sweeping the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

To implement his policies, Roh recruited as his special assistant for foreign affairs Kim Chong Whi, a fifty-two-year-old US-educated defense intellectual who had strong ideas about both the conception and the execution of South Korea’s external affairs. With Roh’s consistent backing, Kim steadily increased the authority of his office to hold sway over diplomacy, defense issues, and eventually North-South relations as well. During five years at Roh’s side, Kim energized previously reactive South Korean policy, seizing the initiative on a variety of issues regarding North Korea and its communist allies, while taking advantage of Seoul’s swiftly growing economic strength and the approaching end of the Cold War.

The first high-profile public initiative was Roh’s
Nordpolitik
speech on July 7, 1988, announcing a new policy toward the North and an intensified effort to establish relations with North Korea’s communist allies. Addressing himself to “my sixty million compatriots,” a figure that included the people of both North and South, Roh unveiled a six-point program, including promotion of trade, exchanges of visits at all levels, and humanitarian contacts between the two Koreas. He also announced that Seoul would no longer oppose its allies engaging in nonmilitary trade with North Korea and that Seoul would cooperate with the North in its efforts to improve relations with the United States and Japan. In parallel, he announced, “We will continue to seek improved relations with the Soviet Union, China and other socialist countries.” Although he made no mention of the Olympics in his announcement, Roh’s aides said at the time that the northern policy was explicitly designed, in part, to smooth the way politically for communist nations to participate in the Seoul Games.

North Korea’s first reaction to the new policy directions was negative, though with signs that Pyongyang was not closing the door to dealing with Roh. When the South Korean president in an October 4 speech proposed an inter-Korean summit, the North “welcomed” his offer to travel to Pyongyang, though laid down its own conditions.

The first benefits of South Korea’s intensified effort to establish relations with North Korea’s allies came in Hungary, whose pragmatic
“goulash communism” made it the least ideological of the Eastern European countries. A pathfinder for this breakthrough was a businessman, Chairman Kim Woo Choong of the giant Daewoo group, an energetic and successful salesman who became increasingly close to Roh during his presidency. Always looking for new fields to conquer, Kim had pioneered the establishment of business deals and official ties with several countries who previously had relations with Pyongyang but not with Seoul. In the early 1980s, he began knocking on the door of China but concluded that an early breakthrough was too difficult, whereupon he turned his attention to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

In December 1984, the Daewoo chairman flew to Budapest aboard his private jet for conversations that broke the ice between the two countries. With Hungarian government and party acquiescence, a series of business exchanges took place, culminating in an agreement between the two chambers of commerce and the opening of trade promotion offices in each other’s capitals in late 1987 and early 1988.

As Roh’s
Nordpolitik
drive gathered force, Seoul pressed for full diplomatic relations with Hungary. Its timing was fortunate. In May 1988, a new and more Western-oriented team of officials took office. The following month, word came to Seoul from the chairman of the newly organized Hungarian Credit Bank, Sandor Demjan, that Hungary would be willing to establish diplomatic relations before, during, or after the Olympics on the condition that Korea provide $1 billion in economic aid. The Hungarians were also very interested in increased trade with Korean firms.

Demjan’s proposition touched off a series of secret negotiations between the two governments, in which financial aid was a key element. From July 5 to 14, a Korean team headed by Park Chul Un, Seoul’s special negotiator with communist countries, visited Budapest, staying in a guarded villa on the outskirts of the capital. In the talks, the Koreans offered $400 million in loans, while Hungary reduced its asking price to $800 million. Then Hungary agreed to establish an official mission in Seoul short of full relations in return for $400 million in loans, and to go all the way to diplomatic relations in return for an additional $400 million.

A second round of secret talks in Seoul, August 8–12, produced a tentative agreement to establish consular-level missions before the Olympics and full diplomatic relations within six months. An announcement of a breakthrough with at least one communist country before the Olympics was important to Seoul, which believed this would improve the political atmosphere for the Games and lead to progress with other nations afterward.

To finalize the deal, a third round of secret diplomacy in Budapest, August 22–27, with meetings sometimes lasting long past midnight, was necessary. In the end, Hungary settled for $625 million in loans, mostly on a commercial basis, to take the first dramatic step. The exchange of
ambassadorial-level missions was announced by the two nations on September 13, just four days before the opening ceremonies for the Seoul Olympics. Full diplomatic relations were established less than five months later, on February 1, 1989.

The reaction from North Korea was vehement and bitter. Pyongyang recognized that Hungary’s act would have important significance for other East-bloc countries. Natalia Bazhanova, a Russian researcher who has studied the record of secret policy making in Moscow regarding Korea, reported that as North Korea suspected at the time, Hungary did consult the Soviet Union before establishing relations with Seoul and obtained approval. After the September announcement, an authoritative “Commentator” article in
Rodong Sinmun
accused Hungary of committing “a treacherous grave act against the principles of Marxism-Leninism and the revolutionary cause of the working class.” The lengthy denunciation asked, “Is Hungary so strapped that it has no choice but to beg for a few dollars even from the South Korean puppets, breaching faith with a friend to survive?”

Only two weeks before the announcement of ties with the South, Kim Pyong Il, the younger half-brother of Kim Jong Il, had arrived in Budapest as North Korean ambassador, whether sent into the looming disaster by Kim Jong Il to embarrass him or to get last-minute traction with the Hungarians is an interesting question. North Korea downgraded its relations after the establishment of full Seoul-Budapest diplomatic relations but did not break them off. Moreover, barter trade between the two countries continued to flourish. “North Korea is very pragmatic” when its economic interests are concerned, commented a Soviet bloc diplomat from Pyongyang.

Not surprisingly, as athletes of 160 nations marched into Olympic Stadium in Seoul for the opening ceremonies of the games on September 17, Hungary’s Olympic team was deliriously cheered by the predominantly Korean audience. Cheers were also notably enthusiastic for the groundbreaking appearance by athletes of the Soviet Union. Korean spectators cheered wildly for the Soviet basketball team as it vanquished the American team, to the shock and dismay of many American viewers.

In the new era of Soviet public diplomacy under Gorbachev, Moscow’s athletes had been preceded in Seoul by an impressive procession of cultural and political emissaries, including the Bolshoi Ballet, the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Moscow State Radio and TV Choir, the latter group including two Soviet-Korean vocalists.

Korean Air Lines, the national flag carrier whose Boeing 747 airliner had been shot down by a Soviet fighter plane five years earlier, was given special permission to fly over Soviet territory in connection with the Olympics. The Seoul government, in return, played host in Inchon
Harbor to the 12,800-ton
Mikhail Sholokov
, a floating hotel for nearly two hundred Soviet athletes and officials. With ROK blessing, the Russians took home with them the computers they were given in Seoul to record the Games and the cars and buses that were used to transport the Soviet delegation.

Of the 160 nations participating in the Games, 24 had no diplomatic relations with South Korea. Nevertheless, global television via satellite leaped across nearly all political boundaries. The nations of the world broadcast an average of ten to twelve hours of the Olympics per day to a huge audience, ranging from the modern cities of Europe, Asia, and North America to tiny villages in remote parts of the third world. The one political boundary that proved to be impervious was on the Korean peninsula. The Olympics were not broadcast in North Korea, and its athletes did not participate.

WASHINGTON LAUNCHES A MODEST INITIATIVE

On July 5, 1988, Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Shin Dong Won traveled from the Foreign Ministry, just across a broad boulevard in downtown Seoul, to the American Embassy on the opposite side. Calling on Ambassador James Lilley, Shin brought a copy of the special six-point declaration on North Korea that President Roh planned to make public two days later, which had been developed within the Blue House independently of the United States. Because South Korea lacked direct communication with the Soviet and Chinese governments, however, Washington loomed large as a transmission belt and potential influence on Moscow and Beijing. Shin asked for US support and requested that the United States pass advance copies to the two big communist powers.

Lilley pointed out that the planned ROK declaration “implies changes in U.S. policy toward North Korea,” which previously had required that Pyongyang take specific steps to improve relations with the South before any improvement in American–North Korean relations could be made. The South Koreans fully understood that their shift would have consequences for US policy and were cautious about what this would mean in practice. When I had asked Roh in the July 1 interview if South Korea would stop objecting to North Korean applications for visas to visit the United States, he replied, “The change of government policy cannot be too drastic. There is a risk involved in changing everything too quickly.” Nonetheless, he added, the basic policy would be to ask the United States and others “to help us draw [North Koreans] out to the international community.”