Korean talks: Kim comes to the table, but why?

Some call it ‘sunshine diplomacy’ but most observers suspect Pyongyang’s reasons for agreeing to talks with Seoul.

The head of North Korean delegation Ri Son Gwon, centre, arrives at the South side for the meeting with South Korea at the Panmunjom in the Demilitarized Zone in Paju, South Korea. Picture: AP

The final surviving conflict of the Cold War last year threatened to flare back into life to consume much of the world in nuclear conflagration.

So it was symbolically appropriate that the talks that started yesterday between North and South Korea took place in Panmunjom, the area where the armistice between them was signed on July 27, 1953 — and where core unfinished business remains on the table.

The bitter war from 1950 to 1953 between communist North and capitalist South Korea, with China’s People’s Liberation Army supporting the former and UN forces led by the US the latter, killed almost two million people. Including those wounded and missing, about 10 per cent of the entire Korean population were casualties.

About 17,000 Australians served with the UN forces during the war, of whom 340 were killed and 1216 were wounded.

The war is still only paused, through a truce. No peace treaty has been concluded.

North Korea and China, both still communist countries, remain formal allies albeit disengaged, while the US remains South Korea’s core ally.

Panmunjom is the only place of formal contact between the two sides, along the 38th parallel, which although described as a “demilitarised zone” remains the most militarised zone in the world, bristling with mines, artillery, missiles and other weaponry deployed by hundreds of thousands of soldiers.

The DMZ, 250km long and 4km wide, cuts the Korean peninsula in two.

Panmunjom, 53km north- northwest of Seoul, is where the world’s leaders are brought, usually from the south, to gaze helplessly at the concrete reality of one of the great intractable global divides. US President Donald Trump was to have visited in November but the helicopter trip to the border from Seoul was aborted due to fog.

Originally the name of a village just over the border inside North Korea, Panmunjom now delineates the Joint Security Area straddling the border.

Each side contains viewing platforms for visitors, who can enter the prefabricated military huts where the truce was signed in 1953, with a line across the centre of the negotiating table marking the exact border.

Soldiers from each side stand rigidly on guard within and outside the buildings. They are within whispering distance of each other, yet their governments have for two years failed to find a way to communicate. The channels were mostly cut by Pyongyang, ensuring Kim Jong-un — now usually described in the regime’s typically understated manner as “Supreme Leader” — continued to hold all the keys to his kingdom.

The only phone and fax line between the two Koreas — used as a hotline to prevent misunderstandings that might lead to military conflict — was cut by Pyongyang in February 2015, when the previous South Korean government closed down the Kaesong joint industrial zone in response to the North’s fourth nuclear test. Up to then, 123 South Korean companies were employing 53,000 North Korean workers in this 14-year-old zone 10km west of Panmunjom, just inside North Korea.

Oh Choong-suk, the director of the international co-operation division of South Korea’s Unification Ministry that is responsible for North Korea relations, says: “We have lost all communication channels with the North.”

Instead, he says, a Ministry official had to shout repeatedly through a loud-hailer to North Korean soldiers at the DMZ to try to pass on any message.

This occurred, for instance, when the body of a North Korean fisherman washed up on a South Korean shore, and Seoul offered to repatriate the remains.

It took a lot of shouting via loud-hailer, says Oh, before eventually the North literally opened a gate to allow the remains to be passed back.

In another case, the South needed to dispatch firefighting helicopters to extinguish a severe bushfire near the border, and wished to alert the North that this was not a combat deployment so that it did not attempt to shoot the helicopters down.

This was not resolved in a timely way — though the North did return South Korean fishermen who had strayed inadvertently across the sea border and had been arrested.

Last July, the South Korean Red Cross attempted to set up a meeting with its North Korean counterpart organisation, to seek its support for the resumption of visits for family reunions by people from the South.

They are now ageing, 65 years after the split of the Koreas, says Oh, “and some of them have died without ever meeting again their separated family members in the North”.

He says there was no response, either yes or no.

There was also no reply to Seoul’s invitation to Pyongyang to send athletes to participate in the Winter Olympic Games in PyeongChang, in the northwest of South Korea, next month.

But in his new year’s address, Kim wished success for the Olympics — marking the first indication of a thaw following a year of inexorably mounting tension as the North tested a succession of intercontinental ballistic missiles and, on September 3, a giant nuclear bomb.

Then, a week ago, the hotline — which continued to be tested daily by South Korea — was suddenly restored by Pyongyang. North Korea used it to inform the South that it wished to talk about participating in the Olympics — a move accepted at yesterday’s talks, with the International Olympic Committee keeping the door open for the North’s late entry.

South Korea’s centre-left President Moon Jae-in, a former human rights lawyer elected last May to replace conservative Park Geun-hye, who was impeached for corruption, has consistently argued for a negotiated solution to the many outstanding issues between North and South.

But he has also pragmatically and strongly supported Trump’s tough line on North Korea’s rapid nuclearisation.

It remains unclear whether Kim’s new year shift has come due to his anxiety about the prospect — held open by the Trump administration — of a military attack, or due to the opposite: a sense of invulnerability based on his regime’s attainment of its core nuclear weapons goals following the intense testing through 2017.

Either way, the talking has begun and appears likely to continue.

While Trump has welcomed this move, calling it “a big start” for which he is responsible, China and Japan appear less convinced that it will lead to any permanent resolution of the major outstanding issues. The nuclear threat also imperils those larger neighbours, and through them the world’s economy in which they are the second and third-largest players after the US.

China’s official position, as stated by Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang last Friday, is that Beijing welcomes the agreement between North and South to hold talks, and “also hopes the international community will support efforts to find an effective way to enrich mutual trust, relieve tension and resume dialogue”.

But an increasingly influential section of opinion leaders believes that the Kim regime has become intractable in its nuclear fixation, and that only when the country starts to open up to economic modernisation in a similar manner to China 40 years ago, will it start to stabilise.

Global Times published a story yesterday saying “people suspect the intention of North Korea”, asking whether its participation in the talks is a stalling tactic or a strategy to divide the key forces aligned at the UN to restrain it.

The newspaper notes that at critical junctures in its nuclear progress, North Korea has agreed a halt — only to continue to advance its nuclearisation surreptitiously. “It seems the familiar story is playing out once more,” it says.

It adds that prominent Chinese academics generally hold two kinds of opinions.

One is that it is timely for North Korea to seek change, in the face of tightening economic sanctions and considerable progress with its nuclear project, and of the rising risk of attack by Trump.

Others, the newspaper says, think that the North is just taking advantage of the South again, viewing the latter as the weakest link in the regional chain, and seeking to obtain economic support that can “transform the UN sanctions into just a blank piece of paper”.

Jin Canrong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing, agrees, saying: “North Korea is playing the old game again. History doesn’t make us optimistic.”

He says that despite the optimism about “sunshine diplomacy”, he remains “quite pessimistic”.

“The destiny seems set: North Korea will not give up its nuclear weapon, unless there is war.”

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was also guarded in his welcome for yesterday’s discussions, warning against “talks for the sake of talks”.

Consequently, North Korea’s media has recently redirected its attacks to focus on Japan, which has strongly supported the enhanced UN sanctions against Pyongyang agreed last month.

The newspaper Minju Joson says that Tokyo is “dancing to the war tunes of lunatic Trump: It would be a great mistake for it to think that the Japanese archipelago would be safe under the ‘nuclear umbrella’ of the US … It is clear to everyone that it would be no trouble for North Korea to reduce Japan to ashes.”

Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, called “riffraff” by Minju Joson, yesterday described North Korea’s willingness to participate in the Olympics as “a change of their attitude, and we would like to welcome that”.

But he added that the country’s “nuclear and missile development is an unprecedented, imminent and grave threat to the peace and security in this region including Japan”.

He said: “It remains unchanged that Japan, the US and South Korea are co-ordinating to keep pressuring North Korea to change its policies.”

Yesterday’s discussions, and the smiles of the negotiating teams sent by bitter enemies, in part vindicate the core purpose of the Olympic Games — to restore peace, initially in ancient Greece and now in modern times — by replacing war with athletic competition.

But 65 years after the formal conflict ended on the Korean ­peninsula, patterns of mistrust of the durable, wily and cruel Kim dynastic regime — born of bitter experience — inevitably raise questions about how durable are the hopes raised by the renewed talks.