The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (89 page)

A SECOND NORTH-SOUTH SUMMIT, BUT NOT A THIRD

A high-water mark in inter-Korean relations had been reached under Lee Myung-bak’s predecessor, Roh Moo-hyun, though not without difficulty and certainly not without fiery criticism from the conservatives. Through most of his administration, Roh had pressed the North for a summit, but it was not until the early summer of 2007, Roh’s final full year in office, that the idea gained traction. In August, prodded by Seoul’s warning that the opposition party would soon have its presidential candidate in place and after that happened moving to a summit would be much more difficult, the North had finally indicated it was ready to go ahead. This was much the same problem Washington had experienced in 2000, trying to get Kim Jong Il to agree to a high-level meeting earlier rather than later in a crucial election year in order to avoid problems set in motion by domestic political developments.

The summit was scheduled for late-August 2007, but heavy rains in the North caused a postponement until the autumn. Finally, on the morning of October 2, President Roh Moo-hyun walked across the military demarcation line at Panmunjom and drove the ninety-odd miles to Pyongyang, leading several busloads of officials, journalists, and businessmen. South Korean media scrutinized and commented on every detail of Kim Jong Il’s reception of the ROK president, comparing it unfavorably with the meeting between the North Korean leader and Kim Dae Jung seven years earlier. Kim Jong Il appeared to the media less effusive, not as deferential, and, to some observers, even a little stiff. The photographs
suggested his health was not good, and there was considerable speculation that rumors earlier in the year of heart problems might be true.

The summit visit ended on October 4 with the release of a joint statement. Statements emerging from summits are often largely verbiage. This one contained its share of airy phrases, but it also identified a large number of concrete steps that Seoul and Pyongyang agreed to take to improve relations. The list demonstrated, at least on paper, how far the two Koreas might go in cooperation. The steps included:

       
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convening a meeting between the two side’s defense ministers by November 2007 to discuss building military trust, including a plan for “designating a joint fishing area to prevent accidental clashes in the West Sea, the turning of this area into a peace zone, and the issue of military guarantee measures for various cooperation projects”

       
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establishing a West Sea “special peace and cooperation zone comprised of the Haeju District (in North Korea) and its neighboring areas” and “pushing ahead with the establishment of a joint fishing area and peaceful waters, the construction of a special economic zone, the practical use of Haeju Port, the direct passage of civilian vessels to Haeju, and joint use of the estuary of the Han River”

       
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completing the first-phase construction of the Kaesong Industrial Complex as early as possible, launching the second-phase development, and starting the railway freight transport between Munsan (in the South) and Pongdong (in the North)

       
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reconstructing and repairing the railways between Kaesong and Sinuiju (on the Amnok River) and the motorway between Kaesong and Pyongyang for joint use

       
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constructing a zone for cooperative shipbuilding in Anbyon and Nampo (on North Korea’s east and west coasts) and conducting cooperative undertakings in various fields, including agriculture, health care, and environmental protection

       
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conducting tours of Mount Paektu and opening a direct flight between Mount Paektu and Seoul

       
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having the “cheering squads” of the two sides travel to the 2008 Beijing Olympics on the train running on the Seoul-Sinuiju railroad

       
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holding the first meeting of premier talks to implement this declaration “sometime this November [2007], in Seoul”

This was an enormously ambitious agenda, and virtually none of it would survive beyond Lee Myung-bak’s inauguration in February 2008.
Many commentators called the steps completely unrealistic given Roh’s low ratings in the polls and the upcoming presidential elections. The US Embassy in Seoul had been worried that the outcome of the talks would undercut the six-party efforts on denuclearization and had sought reassurances beforehand that Roh would take a strong stance on the nuclear issue. It ended up making no difference whether he pressed the denuclearization issue or soft-pedaled it; the six-party process was about to run into problems that had nothing to do with Roh.

South Korean officials involved in the planning of the meeting say that, from their perspective, one of the main goals of the summit was to create a framework for easing tensions in the West Sea. (The importance of that issue comes through in the emphasis it received in the October 4 joint statement.) They shake their heads ruefully and say they knew the timing for the summit was not good, but that was not by South Korea’s choice. If there is to be another summit, they say, it should come early in a president’s term, to give whatever agreements emerge time to take root and become part of an established strategic landscape before a new administration comes to office.

The provisions on the West Sea in the October summit agreement may have been among the most important; they were certainly the most controversial, in public and within the administration itself. The two Koreas had spent considerable time in military talks in 2006 and 2007 discussing the Northern Limit Line, the de facto boundary separating the two sides in the West Sea. For the South Korean military, the NLL was a core issue for national security. Holding the islands and the waters around them was considered crucial to denying North Korean forces an advance position for attacking the ROK via the west coast near Seoul. For South Korean conservatives, the NLL was not just militarily but also psychologically important. To cede any territory at all to the North would, in their view, signal fatal weakness on the South’s part, weakness that Pyongyang would exploit to the maximum. Whereas some in Roh’s administration saw a potential for turning these dangerous waters into something less volatile, opponents saw the step as naive in the extreme and surrendering to North Korean extortion.

Once in office in late-February 2008, Lee Myung-bak made clear that his administration would almost entirely dismiss the Kim-Roh summit agreement. The argument often heard from his supporters was that the previous two presidencies—of Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo-hyun—had resulted in a “lost decade” in terms of inter-Korean relations and that Seoul had given away too much while asking too little of the North Koreans. Lee was not opposed to dealing with the North, and his advisers as a whole were not blindly ideological. They had convinced themselves, however, that the long-term trends within North Korea were working in
their favor and that the best way to encourage those trends was to turn off the aid and cash spigot and deal with Kim Jong Il from a position of strength. By the end of Lee’s term, however, the general sentiment in South Korea was that this approach, though it had offered a correction to the Sunshine Policies of the earlier decade, had not in the end left the situation in better shape.

In July 2008, Lee was at the National Assembly, scheduled to give what his aides say was meant to be his most positive speech to date on inter-Korean relations, when terrible news came in. A South Korean tourist at the Hyundai-run Mount Kumgang resort in North Korea had been shot and killed by a North Korean soldier during a predawn stroll into an off-limits area. The circumstances were not clear, but the public response to the killing of the tourist—a middle-aged housewife and mother—was one of outrage. This public anger, whipped up further by inflammatory media coverage, caused a quick decision by the administration to close down the tours to Mount Kumgang even before all the facts could be determined. The North apologized immediately but blamed the South for the incident; for its part, Seoul said the North rejected its demands for an investigation.

In August, when there was still no resolution of the incident in sight, Pyongyang released an unusual “special statement” in the name of “a spokesman for the unit of the Korean People’s Army stationed in the area of Mt. Kumgang.” It noted that the North had already “expressed regrets” for the “unpleasant incident,” but it pushed the blame for the incident onto the victim, whom it argued had not paid attention to the regulations in the area. The statement went on to declare that, because Seoul was making such an issue of the incident, the North would expel “unnecessary personnel from the tourist area,” tighten control of passage of vehicles across the military demarcation line to enter Mount Kumgang, and “take strong military counteractions against even the slightest hostile actions in the tourist resort in the area of Mt. Kumgang and the area under the military control from now on.”

Under other circumstances, Seoul might have found a way to accept the North’s expression of regret, but the conservatives in the government were determined not to let the tours—which they considered to be a money pot for Pyongyang—reopen. Over the next few years, they came up with a variety of reasons that the enterprise had to remain closed. Eventually, the North argued that South Korea could not forbid the North to use its own territory to earn tourist dollars. Even after the chairwoman of Hyundai Group, Hyon Jong Un, met with Kim Jong Il on August 16, 2009, and received his assurances for security for the tours, Seoul would not relent. Among the North Korean officials at the meeting with Hyon was Kim Yang-gon, who a week later would be in Seoul carrying the message from Kim Jong Il.

After Lee Myung-bak heard the North Korean supreme leader’s proposal to meet, and over the grumbling of some of his advisers, he instructed Labor Minister Im Tae-hee, formerly his chief of staff, to arrange for secret talks with Kim Yang-gon. Seoul did not convey its answer to the North right away, however, and after waiting a few weeks, Pyongyang inquired why there was no word. Finally, Lee sent a response, telling Kim Jong Il that he basically agreed with the idea of improving relations. At this point, it was barely two months after the UN Security Council resolution calling for increased international sanctions on the North. To have Seoul peel away from the solid phalanx supposedly confronting Pyongyang would not be helpful to Washington’s strategy. Aware of the talks but largely in the dark about the details, the White House watched somewhat nervously, but held out hope that the initiative would, in the end, go nowhere. It turned out to be a good bet.

SECRET TALKS, PUBLIC CLASHES

Throughout 2008 and into 2009, as inter-Korean relations deteriorated, the threats from the North became more strident. A particular area of concern was the West Sea, where several smaller naval clashes between the two sides had already taken place. Increasingly, it looked possible that a major incident could occur at any time. Within a year, there would be such serious developments, but with Kim Jong Il’s push in the summer of 2009 for improved ties with the United States and South Korea, the path detoured first to Singapore, where representatives of the two Koreas met in October 2009 to discuss the possibility of a third inter-Korean summit.
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From sources who were very well placed to observe the events directly, there are significantly different versions of what happened in the talks. In later accounts, the South Korean delegate, Im Tae-hee, has publicly claimed that over their two days of discussions, he and his interlocutor, Kim Yang-gon, came extremely close to agreeing on the basic framework for a summit, including a venue in the North, taking into account Kim Jong Il’s health. A contrary account holds that Im exceeded
his instructions from President Lee and that the two sides were not really close when the Singapore meeting ended.

Im says the North was amenable to talking about the return of abducted South Koreans and ROK prisoners of war held in the North since 1953; in return, the North was looking for compensation—primarily food. According to Im, this sort of exchange was in line with the West German policy of “Frei Kauf,” in which the Bonn government had supplied money to the communist government in Berlin in return for the ability of East Germans to move west. Even South Korean unification minister Hyun In-taek, hardly a pushover when it came to dealing with North Korea, acknowledged that the government was considering a similar but noncash approach. According to an account of the meeting that appeared in public a few months before the 2012 presidential elections (and was probably an inspired leak meant as ammunition against the progressive candidate, Moon Jae-in), the deal foundered because the North Koreans asked for too much compensation. Im Tae-hee firmly denies this.

Not long after the Singapore meeting, the secret talks continued in Beijing, but these did not close the deal, either. By then, Lee Myung-bak had decided he did not really want a summit, at least not yet. He especially did not want to be seen as following in the footsteps of Roh Moo-hyun or Kim Dae Jung. By contrast, whether through self-delusion or misreading signals, the North Koreans apparently still thought they were close to a deal. Word was already swirling around the South Korean press about the “possibility of a summit,” and after first denying everything the Blue House admitted there had been contacts, but nothing else.

In November lower-level representatives of the two sides met in the border town of Kaesong. The South Koreans indicated there was a considerable gap and much left to settle before there could be a summit. Not least, the South Koreans now said they wanted the summit to be held in the South, not in Pyongyang. The North Koreans were outraged at what they saw as a reversal in Seoul’s approach to the idea of a summit. A few days later, during a break in the talks, South Korean naval vessels attacked a North Korean patrol boat that had crossed the Northern Limit Line in the West Sea. The South Korean guns poured fire into the North Korean ship, which retreated badly damaged, likely with serious casualties. The South Korean warships were virtually unscathed. It was the sort of victory—near total and annihilating—the South Korean navy loved, but ROK officials were cautious about what had happened. The normal public accusations about North Korean “aggressive behavior” were tempered by speculation that the northern ship had crossed the line by mistake. For its part, Pyongyang appeared particularly incensed by the incident, accusing the South Korean ships of firing “thousands of bullets” aimed at not simply warning the smaller North Korean patrol ship but destroying it.
Neither event by itself, the clash in the West Sea or the breakdown in the talks, might have been enough to tip the scales in Pyongyang, but the two together appear to have combined to convince Kim Jong Il that it was time to teach the Blue House a lesson.