By Park Si-soo
South Korea is facing immense pressure to overhaul its hard-line policies toward North Korea following the death of the latter’s leader Kim Jong-il.
If it maintains its tough stance, this will frustrate the North’s new leadership and push Seoul away from the core of multinational dialogue aimed at ending Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions, analysts warned.
It will also pave the way for the United States and China to have a bigger say in deciding other inter-Korean affairs, making it harder for the two Koreas to initiate dealings of their own, they said.
Seoul appears to have recognized the need to adopt a new approach amid the unfolding change of leadership in the North.
“The time has come to reshape policies toward Pyongyang,” said a high-ranking official in an interview, Wednesday. “The urgent task we should address at this moment is coddling North Korea to prevent it from committing any provocative action against the South.”
The official said on condition of anonymity that Seoul’s primary goal of diplomacy is encouraging the nuclear-armed North to discard its nuclear weapons program and open its society to the outside world.
“To that ends, it’s possible for Seoul to provide large-scale economic aid to North Korea,” the official said.
Experts here say this signals the South’s sense of urgency in the need to repair badly frayed ties with the North to start anew in the post-Kim Jong-il era.
Yet this awareness came later than Seoul’s key diplomatic counterparts, particularly the U.S. and China, analysts said.
“The U.S. and China are already many steps ahead of us in building relations with North Korea’s new leaders,” said Prof. Yang Moo-jin at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul. “Without drastic, fundamental changes, Seoul will remain as a follower, not a leader, when it comes to North Korean policies.”
Yang urged the government to exercise “flexibility” on relations with Pyongyang.
“Seoul has maintained apology-first-and-talks-later stance toward the North,” he said, referring to the government’s demand that North Korea formally apologize for its two deadly attacks on South Korean soldiers and citizens last year, or otherwise it will never engage in inter-Korean dialogue. “If deemed necessary, the government should talk first despite sharp criticism from conservatives.”
Relations between the two Koreas soured after President Lee Myung-bak took office in early 2008 with pledges to halt aid and link future assistance to progress in efforts to end North Korea’s nuclear programs. Those ties plunged into deeper trouble after the North launched two deadly attacks on the South last year.
The U.S. and China are taking advantage of the North’s leadership vacuum to beef up their political leverage in the regime.
China is the most aggressive.
It was one of the quickest countries to offer condolences over Kim’s death. Moreover, Chinese President Hu Jintao, Premier Wen Jiabao and many other political leaders visited North Korea's embassy in Beijing to offer their condolences over Kim’s death.
China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu lauded the late Kim as a “great leader,” an act meant to appeal to new the North Korean leadership.
The U.S. is also making efforts to keep its hard-earned political clout on the communist state intact. This was seen in a Wednesday announcement from the U.S. State Department that despite the chaotic situation in Pyongyang, U.S. officials discussed “details of possible food aid” with North Korean officials by phone.
U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said the contact was at a “technical level” and it was designed to make clear that there are still questions with regard to the nutritional assistance issues.
It’s rare for the U.S. to unveil a phone discussion it had with the North, analysts here said, adding this was to highlight that the Obama administration is keeping the door open for engagement with the new North Korean leadership.
They said the U.S. is also trying to keep the existing framework of denuclearization dialogue with the North intact, in which the U.S. has wielded considerable influence over other concerned countries, including China, the South, Japan and Russia.
One of the factors backing such a scenario was U.S. Ambassador to Seoul Sung Kim’s remark during a meeting with Rep. Park Geun-hye, the interim leader of the ruling Grand National Party, Wednesday.
The U.S. ambassador told Park that the Washington-Pyongyang dialogue aimed to resume the long-stalled six-nation denuclearization talks “significantly progressed under Kim Jong-il’s leadership.”
Experts said this rare revelation of the talks’ development was to put pressure on the new North Korean leaders to maintain the existing framework of dialogue.