A Special Envoys Trip to Panmunjeom
By Kim Se-jeong
Staff Reporter
Korea is often described as a fast-moving country with a constantly changing landscape. Yet the description doesn't apply to the truce village of Panmunjeom, where South and North Korean soldiers stand face-to-face.
Czech Senator Jiri Dienstbier, the first democratic foreign minister of the former Czechoslovakia appointed a few days after the Velvet Revolution in November 1989, said that while on a return visit to the site, everything remained the same.
"Nothing has changed," Dienstbier told The Korea Times last week as to his impression of the place after two decades. He was in Seoul last week as a special envoy to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Korea-Czech Republic diplomatic ties.
As democratic Czechoslovakia's first top diplomat, Dienstbier had attempted to open doors to the Western world.
In March 1990, a Korean delegation visited Prague, during which he and then South Korean Foreign Minister Choi Ho-joong signed an agreement.
Seven months later in October that year, Dienstbier came to Korea as the first high-ranking Czechoslovak government official, and visited Panmunjeom.
He is now a senator, chairing the foreign affairs committee.
The senator remembers North Korea's reaction to Prague's decision to open ties with South Korea.
"The reaction was critical," he said, as Czechoslovak was told to leave the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission at Panmunjeom by Pyongyang.
When South Korea and Hungary signed the diplomatic relations in 1989, North Korea expelled the Hungarian ambassador in Pyongyang.
Hungary was the first country in the former Soviet bloc with which South Korea opened diplomatic ties.
What Dienstbier still remembers about North Korean reaction is that as soon as the Velvet Revolution, a peaceful uprising by people against the regime in 1989, rattled Czechoslovakia, and all North Koreans working and studying there disappeared.
"They (North Korean regime) called them back in," he said with a concern that its people, although they were already a chosen few in favor of the regime, would be influenced by the democracy movement.
He remembered exactly the same situation from the early 1960s. When the Sino-Soviet split occurred, and North Korean government recalled all their students and workers from Prague. "We never heard from them again," he added.
The senator now wonders for how long North Korea could keep its people under tight control, something the communist government on his soil couldn't manage for longer than four decades.
The reclusive regime in North Korea was born at the end of World War II, having maintained power for more than 60 years now.
The power of Kim Jong-il, son of the late Kim Il-sung, founder of North Korea, is reportedly going downhill due to health failures, and the succession of Kim Jong-un, Kim Jong-il's son, is imminent.
The Czech Republic has an embassy and a resident ambassador in Pyongyang.
According to Czech Ambassador to South Korea Jaroslav Olsa, Jr., his government has been offering scholarships to students in the North, yet they hardly take.
Dienstbier was at the center of the communist power's demolition two decades ago.
After working as a press foreign correspondent in the Far East in the 1960s, he became a democracy and human rights activist after the Soviet occupation in 1968, having written for underground publications and given interviews to the Western media on real situation in then communist country.
That put him on the regime's watch list, the former minister said.
He couldn't get an adequate job because of his opposition to the regime.
"It was a time when you could get arrested for not being employed," he said.
That explained why his resume has also random careers, such as being a boiler man and a night watchman.
Dienstbier encouraged South Korea and the Czech Republic to expand the extent of cooperation to the multilateral level.