NK Diplomacy in Minor Key

By Dale McFeatters

Scripps Howard News Service

Who knew North Korea's secretive and tight-lipped leadership had such expansive tastes in Western music?

No sooner does the New York Philharmonic make a groundbreaking visit to Pyongyang than the North Koreans invite British rocker Eric Clapton to come on over and put on a concert.

The orchestra was greeted with great warmth and received a five-minute standing ovation from the North Korean elite for a performance that featured both nations' national anthems, Dvorak's ``New World Symphony" and Gershwin's ``April in Paris," and concluded with a Korean song, ``Airang," which holds great significance and sentiment in both North and South.

The temptation is to compare this visit with the 1971 visit of an American Ping-Pong team to China, then almost as much a sealed nation as North Korea.

It led to a Beijing visit by President Richard Nixon, the establishment of diplomatic relations and, in fits and starts, growing engagement between the two nations. China now is a vital diplomatic partner of the United States in trying to prevail on North Korea to abandon its nuclear-weapons program.

Any kind of rapprochement with the United States will have to wait until the nuclear issue is resolved.

Visiting musicians aside, North Korea is still a thoroughgoing Stalinist dictatorship. The visit received only terse mention in the controlled press, and while the philharmonic's concert was broadcast live, its members traveled about the city in motorcades and were kept away from ordinary North Koreans.

Dictator Kim Jong-il did not attend the concert and six North Korean musicians who rehearsed with the orchestra did not play.

But nothing official happens by accident in this hermit land, and it does appear that its leadership is tentatively testing the possibility of a little more openness to the outside world. North Korea's own symphony is to visit the United Kingdom this fall.

Once the door is opened enough for the North Korean people to get a peek at the outside, it will be very hard to close. Besides, if as William Congreve said, ``Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast," maybe it also has the power to calm a bellicose regime.

Dale McFeatters is an editorial writer of Scripps Howard News Service (www.shns.com)