The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (62 page)

As they stood before the court to hear the announcement of their sentences, Chun and Roh, two old friends and military academy classmates who had become estranged after one succeeded the other in the presidency, linked their fingers in a public gesture of solidarity.

On December 16, 1996, the Seoul High Court commuted Chun’s sentence to life imprisonment and reduced Roh’s to seventeen years. The court also reduced the sentences of all the other military and civilian defendants. It acquitted two of the
chaebol
leaders who had been convicted earlier and suspended the sentences of the other big businessmen. Under the ruling, none of the tycoons who contributed the funds were sent to jail.

A year later, in the Christmas season of 1997, President Kim Young Sam pardoned Chun and Roh, who returned quietly to private life.

SUMMIT DIPLOMACY AND THE FOUR-PARTY PROPOSAL

As had been the case with the last three South Korean leaders, summit diplomacy with the American president was important to the domestic standing of President Kim Young Sam, a fact that contributed to Washington’s leverage in South Korea. In the summer of 1995 and the spring of 1996, the United States sought to use this leverage on North-South issues. Its efforts had mixed success.

President Kim was planning a visit to the US capital in July 1995 to participate in the dedication of a monument on the Washington Mall to American veterans of the Korean War. Although President Clinton had visited Kim for two days in July 1993 and had hosted him in a three-day official visit in November 1993, including the Clintons’ first big White House dinner for a foreign guest, Kim was eager to turn the mid-1995 trip into an important visit with even more protocol honors. The US administration told Kim this could be done only if there was a substantive move toward accommodation or peace on the divided peninsula to justify a further allocation of Clinton’s time and attention.

In response, the ROK Foreign Ministry devised a “two plus two” formula, whereby the two Koreas would negotiate a permanent peace treaty to replace the Korean War armistice, with the United States and China acting as facilitators and eventual guarantors. The State Department welcomed the proposal as a step in the right direction if it were serious and well prepared, and if Washington were kept informed of what was happening.

The “two plus two” proposal, while still confidential, was enough to obtain the recognition Kim wanted. He was granted a four-day state visit with full honors, including an address to a joint session of Congress. In a conversation at the White House during the visit in late July, Kim looked Clinton in the eye and told him, “We are going to do this on August 15,” the fiftieth anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japan and a day for important pronouncements in Seoul. Kim’s aides leaked the proposal to the South Korean press, and the ROK president himself said in an interview with CNN that he planned to make “a refreshing and important initiative towards North Korea” on Liberation Day. Based on Kim’s assurance, Secretary of State Warren Christopher took up the proposal with Chinese foreign minister Qian Qichen in a bilateral meeting in Brunei.

After returning to Seoul, however, Kim executed another of his sudden reversals in the face of the conservative political tide following North Korea’s interference with ROK ships delivering rice to DPRK ports. Without consultation with or notification of the United States, Kim scuttled the initiative he had proposed to Clinton. American diplomats were not pleased.

In the spring of 1996, summit diplomacy reappeared when Clinton planned a state visit to Japan. At this point the US administration was increasingly apprehensive about the reports of privation and instability in North Korea and unhappy with Kim’s inconsistent and, lately, unresponsive policies. Although American presidents usually stopped in Korea when visiting Japan, Clinton was not inclined to do so this time. Considering Clinton’s earlier visit to Seoul and Kim’s two visits to Washington, “we thought we’d done enough” for Kim, said an administration official who was involved in the internal discussions. No stop in Korea was planned.

Kim, however, had different ideas. Clinton’s schedule would bring him to Japan on April 16, just five days after the nationwide National Assembly elections in Korea that would have a crucial bearing on Kim’s authority in his last two years in office. For it to be known in the campaign period that Clinton would visit Japan but bypass Korea would suggest low regard for Kim; indeed, there were reports in Seoul that the president’s longtime rival, opposition leader Kim Dae Jung, was preparing to make the omission an issue. The ROK president was desperate to persuade Clinton to change his mind.

In a repeat of the previous year’s discussions, Ambassador Laney, who was gravely concerned about the lack of movement in North-South diplomacy, told the Blue House that Clinton could spare the time for a visit only if a serious peace initiative were to come out of it. Talks between Clinton’s national security adviser, Anthony Lake, and his Korean counterpart, Yoo Chong Ha, produced agreement in principle for the two presidents to undertake and announce such an initiative. The details were worked out in person during a trip by Lake to Cheju-do, where he was very well received by Yoo and his deputy, Yu Myung-hwan, and by long distance, in great secrecy, using the telephone instead of cables to bypass the established bureaucracy and other potential sources of leaks.

Kim got his meeting at 5:50
A.M.
on April 16, 1996, when Air Force One touched down at Cheju Island, off the southern end of the Korean peninsula. Five days earlier, Kim’s party had won a commanding position in the National Assembly elections, due in part to the curiously timed North Korean military incursions in the DMZ. After taking an early-morning walk through a garden of bright-yellow flowers, Clinton and Kim settled down to discussions in the same hotel suite where Presidents Roh Tae Woo and Mikhail Gorbachev had met in April 1991.

In a prearranged declaration that had already been presented informally to North Korea, China, Japan, and Russia, Clinton and Kim proposed a four-party conference of the two Koreas, the United States, and China “to initiate a process aimed at achieving a permanent peace agreement” on the Korean peninsula. In a significant difference from the stillborn initiative of the previous year, this was a joint US-ROK proposal rather than an ROK proposal backed by the United States.

Announcing the proposal in a press conference before flying on to Japan, Clinton cautioned against expecting an immediate and positive response from the North: “What is important is to put the offer out there and let it stand and be patient.” Clinton and Kim were heartened when Pyongyang did not immediately reject the proposal. Chinese president Jiang Zemin, in a letter to Kim a few days after the Cheju announcement, expressed Chinese support for the four-power talks.

There were only two problems. Pyongyang seemed confused as to why Washington would put a major new initiative on the table when the US-DPRK Agreed Framework was still finding its footing, and the North Koreans did not want Chinese participation in matters they considered to be none of Beijing’s business. At the same time, Pyongyang could see that Washington had put some weight behind the proposal—President Clinton had personally announced it—and so rejecting it out of hand was impossible.

Furthermore, the country was on the very edge of famine. The food situation in the winter of 1996 had been extremely bad, and it would only
get worse in the summer months before the next harvest. In mid-May the UN World Food Program issued a special alert on North Korea, warning that “the food supply situation has deteriorated more seriously than had been anticipated.” The UN agency reported that the DPRK government had reduced rations under its public distribution program to 300 grams (10.5 ounces) of grain per person per day, about 1,000 calories. The UN minimum standard for refugees was 1,900 calories per day.

Diplomatic discussions with the United States, which had revolved around the nuclear issue and political relations in the previous three years, were increasingly dominated in the spring of 1996 by North Korea’s urgent need for food. Calling on Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Hubbard, the State Department’s senior point man on Korea following the reassignment of Robert Gallucci to other duties, North Korea’s external economic chief, Kim Jong U, offered a frank swap of ballistic missiles exports and food. Kim said the North could either sell missiles to Middle Eastern countries to obtain money and food, as it had formerly done to American disapproval, or it could accept food from the United States to forgo those sales. Another high-ranking DPRK caller on Hubbard that spring, Ri Jong Hyok, pushed hard for additional food aid, warning bluntly that “revolutions are made by hungry people.”

Meeting in Jakarta, Indonesia, on July 24, Secretary of State Christopher and his South Korean and Japanese counterparts formally agreed to supply additional food aid and ease some American economic sanctions if North Korea would participate in a joint US-ROK briefing on the four-party peace plan. The same day, the skies over Northeast Asia darkened again, and the heavens opened up with new torrential downpours, three to five times the normal abundant rainfall of that time of year. While the resultant flooding was not as serious as that of the year before, this time it struck more of the country’s principal food-producing areas. Once more the forces of nature, compounding the failure of the
juche
system, had dealt North Korea a painful blow.

THE SUBMARINE INCURSION

A few minutes after midnight on the morning of September 18, 1996, a taxi driver speeding along a seaside road near Kangnung, on the east coast of South Korea, noticed a group of men crouched near the highway. Suspicious, the cabbie returned to the area after dropping off his passenger and spotted a large object, which he thought at first to be a giant dolphin, in the water near the beach. On second look, it appeared to be a man-made object. Certain that it wasn’t a fishing boat, he reported it to the local police.

Within hours, ROK troops and police identified the object as a thirty-seven-yard-long North Korean submarine of the Shark class that
had run aground on the rocky coast and been abandoned. Before dawn that morning, the Defense Ministry was mobilizing forty thousand troops, helicopter gunships, and sniffer dogs in a massive search for an unknown number of intruders from the North.

In midafternoon, on a mountain three miles from the landing site, an army squad reportedly came across a grisly scene: eleven bodies of the North Koreans, all crewmen unequipped for serious infiltration, all executed with bullets to the back of the head. There were no signs of a struggle; one of the dead, an officer on the sub, was armed with a pistol still in its holster. It appeared likely that, in line with standing orders, the eleven had accepted death at the hands of one of their colleagues rather than be captured.

About the same time, local police in a nearby area, acting on a tip from a villager, arrested Lee Kwang Su, a North Korean infiltrator from the sub, in a farmer’s field. Lee, who was the only occupant of the submarine to be taken alive, said the personnel of the submarine belonged to the North Korean military’s Reconnaissance Bureau, charged with the collection of tactical and strategic intelligence on US and ROK forces. The sub’s mission was to test ROK defenses and reconnoiter an ROK air base and radar facility near Kangnung.

Despite the near-hysterical reaction in Seoul, there were probably only three real infiltrators, trained and equipped for the mission. Another three were part of the escort party to get the main group ashore. The rest were crew members who were never supposed to have landed in the South. In the ROK manhunt over the next two weeks, eleven North Koreans, only a few of whom were armed, were killed. Two more, from the original highly-trained three-man infiltration squad, held out for forty-eight days before being pinned down and killed in a final firefight near the eastern end of the DMZ. The organizational discipline and fighting skills of the ROK forces had not been impressive, and the Defense Ministry was relieved to end the search and return to normal operations. The deaths of fourteen South Koreans—four civilians, eight military personnel, and two policemen—were attributed to the infiltrators, although several were actually victims of friendly fire.

South Korea, with dense vegetation close to the peninsula-spanning DMZ and fifteen hundred miles of irregular coastline dotted with offshore islands, is highly vulnerable to infiltration. North Korea has penetrated the South’s defenses on many occasions. In the 1970s, as noted in Chapter 4, Kim Il Sung had boasted that his military reconnaissance teams kept American maneuvers in the South under surveillance, and the US Command had concluded that the North could infiltrate and exfiltrate its agents or special warfare units to virtually anywhere in the ROK virtually at will. By the mid-1990s, only modest gains against these operations had been accomplished.

What made the September 1996 incursion different from those of the past was the context. For the first time, Washington found itself positioned between the two Koreas, with important interests on both sides. On the one hand, it was seeking to protect its new relationship with North Korea and especially to keep the freeze of the DPRK nuclear program won through the Agreed Framework. On the other hand, it was still committed to maintaining solidarity with its ally in the South and protecting the security of ROK territory and US troops. The ROK, which had received unqualified US backing in military disputes in the past, was disappointed and angered by the altered American posture, all the more so because policy toward the North—once a taboo subject—had become a central political issue in Seoul.