By Pauline Jelinek, Sang-Hun Choe/AP
South Korea has the “full support” of the new Bush administration for its policy of engagement with communist North Korea, Foreign Minister Lee Joung-Binn said on Feb. 7.
Lee made his comments after an hour-long breakfast meeting with Secretary of State Colin Powell, that Seoul had billed as talks “to coordinate” policies of the two longtime allies toward the North.
Officials from Seoul have said they worried the new U.S. administration might adopt a more demanding and conservative stance toward the North — one which could slow momentum on the “sunshine” policy of engagement that won South Korean President Kim Dae Jung the Nobel Peace Prize, and the support of the Clinton administration.
Lee said after the meeting that South Korea would continue its efforts at “reconciliation and cooperation with North Korea ... engaging North Korea,” and that Powell expressed “no differences” with that goal.
“Basically, we are on the same track,” Lee said on his first day of two days of talks with administration officials. “Of course, we agreed to continue close consultations [with] the new Bush administration.”
Diplomats from Seoul are hoping to lay plans for a U.S. summit between Kim and President George W. Bush as soon as possible.
What little the Bush administration has said publicly on the subject sounds as if the general policy will continue, analysts said, but with nuances and changes in implementation that Seoul may not like. Mainly, Bush might want to demand more concrete progress from Pyongyang in dismantling its weapons programs and reducing the conventional threat, analysts said.
For years, North Korea has stationed hundreds of thousands of troops and much of its artillery near the Demilitarized Zone that separates the communist North from the capitalist South. The standoff has led the United States to keep 37,000 troops permanently based in South Korea since the 1950-53 Korean War.
Powell said at his Senate confirmation hearing last month that the administration would move ahead “without any sense of haste” to establish normal relations with North Korea.
And he said: “We are open to a continued process of engagement with the North, so long as it addresses political, economic and security concerns, is reciprocal and does not come at the expense of our alliance relationships.”
Like Kim’s conservative opposition in Korea, U.S. Republicans have been angered by some of the concessions the Clinton administration made to the North, which is infamous for hedging on its commitments, and for taking too much while giving too little.
The South Korean administration operates on the principle that a strict give-and-take policy with the North will not work. It points out that successive conservative South Korean regimes got nowhere during decades of demanding reciprocity.
By contrast, Kim’s policy has brought breathtaking developments, and the greatest chance for peace between the rival nations since the Korean War.
On Feb. 8, the militaries of North and South Korea agreed to their first-ever joint peace project — reconnecting a cross-border railway severed by the Korean War. The 41-point agreement, which also agreed on setting up the first ever hot line between the two militaries, marked another milestone in thawing relations between the two countries. For five decades, the two militaries have faced off across the 2 1/2-mile-wide Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, which is strewn with minefields and guarded by barbed wire and nearly 2 million troops on both sides.
Military cooperation is essential to the work, which involves clearing thousands of land mines inside the DMZ.
“By resolving all related military issues, South and North have laid the most important foundation for the railway project,” said a statement from Seoul’s Defense Ministry.
If reconnected, the railway will become the first direct land transport link between the two Koreas since their war. It will connect Seoul and Pyongyang, the two Korean capitals, and continue to Shinuiju, a major city on the North’s border with China.
After reports of the agreement, reached at a border crossing, South Korean officials said they were hopeful that mine clearing will begin in March and that the rail line could be reconnected by the fall, as scheduled. |
