The first quarter of 2006 saw inter-Korean relations brisk, in more senses than one. As the chronology illustrates, both the variety and density of interactions testify to ever-growing ties between North and South across a range of activities and on many levels: political and security, economic and business, social and cultural, and more. Rightly or wrongly, no one in Seoul (or at least in the ROK government) appears inclined to let the continuing impasse over the six-party nuclear talks – which have not met since November and show no sign of doing so any time soon – derail or even decelerate burgeoning North-South links.

However, it is not all plain sailing. From the Southern viewpoint, the North is not only reluctant to make concessions, but continues to stall on implementing matters to which it had agreed in outline. There are also quarrels: the past quarter saw several tiffs, and one major row that could have easily proved damaging. In the past any of these might have escalated out of hand, putting all ties on ice for months. That this did not happen is mainly due to the South’s vast reserves of patience, which to critics risks shading into appeasement.

Yet defenders of the Sunshine Policy can point to subtle changes in North Korea’s stance, too. Pyongyang’s noisily extreme rhetoric continues unabated, but its deeds talk louder. At least twice in the past quarter the North showed its displeasure with the South by actions which, if regrettable and uncalled for, were noticeably less extreme than in the past. This more careful calibration suggests a deepening commitment to the relationship as such. A more cynical view is that Kim Jong-il knows not to push the goose too far lest it stop laying golden eggs, in what remains financially and otherwise a very one-sided process.

Military talks get nowhere

South Korea has long set great store by military talks with the North, partly because there is much to discuss, and also out of resentment that Pyongyang continues to view Washington as its sole worthy interlocutor on security matters – the boss, as it were. Rare talks between generals in 2004 made progress on two fronts: establishing naval radio contact to prevent fatal firefights like those in 1999 and 2002, and dismantling propaganda loudspeakers and other structures along the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the border between the two Koreas.

Since then the North had been reluctant to reconvene this channel, but finally agreed to do so at Panmunjom in early March. South Korea hoped to flesh out details of a planned joint fishing area in the West (Yellow) Sea, the scene of past clashes, which the North agreed to in principle last year. Also on Seoul’s agenda was installing a direct hotline between the two sides’ West Sea fleet commands, and a second round of defense ministers’ talks, which only happened once so far – soon after the June 2000 breakthrough Pyongyang summit.

The South also sought an agreement on land border security, pursuant to relinking railways in the Kyongui (west) and Donghae (east) cross-border corridors. Both are now open to road traffic, but no trains operate. At the latest in a series of lower-level practical meetings on railway matters, held just before the military talks, the North yet again prevaricated on test runs – originally due last October – and no date to meet again was set.

The opening day found the South optimistic. The atmosphere was good: for the first time the Northern team included a Korean People’s Army (KPA) naval officer. The North had proposed, and the South readily accepted, raising the level of the talks from one-star to two-star generals. Yet hope turned to disappointment. The North not only predictably berated upcoming joint U.S.-ROK war games (on which more below), but also insisted that fisheries could only be discussed in the context of redrawing the inter-Korean maritime boundary, the Northern Limit Line (NLL). The NLL was unilaterally drawn up by the U.S.-led UN Command on the basis of actual control at the time of the 1953 Armistice. It has done the job for over half a century, but North Korea never formally accepted it and in recent years has proposed a line further south, putting several ROK islands in DPRK waters – an obvious non-starter.

So there was no agreement, joint statement, or even a date set for another meeting. Several possible interpretations arise. North Korea’s maximalism may mean it does not really want to talk – or that internal (perhaps intra-KPA) politics make it hard to yield and accept the NLL, even de facto. Or this may reflect a longstanding contrast in approach between a pragmatic South that prefers to start small and easy before tackling the tough stuff, and a North that sets great store by fundamentals – or claims to. In practice Pyongyang is slowly becoming more flexible, so the hope in Seoul is that patience will deliver the desired result.

Ministerial meeting postponed

South Korea was relatively unfazed by this deadlock, expecting to be able to press the issue again soon enough at the next round of Cabinet-level talks, due in Pyongyang at the end of March. Since the June 2000 summit this has become a regular quarterly forum, alternating between the two capitals – with occasional excursions, such as to the ROK resort island of Cheju last December. On March 11, however, the North unilaterally postponed the next meeting, saying that “hostile war exercises and peaceful dialogue cannot go together.” The timing was unfortunate, coinciding with two joint U.S.-ROK military exercises, Foal Eagle, and Reception, Staging, Onward Movement and Integration (RSOI). Both are routine: Foal Eagle dates back to 1961. Pyongyang’s protests are routine too, but their vehemence varies. In the past, the North cited the Team Spirit annual war games as an excuse to break off dialogue entirely. So a month’s postponement, this time, is a mere slap on the wrist.

That said, as of April 3 no new date had yet been set. The South has proposed April 20, but the North has yet to reply. April is a busy month in Pyongyang, both with events marking the birthday on April 15 of the DPRK’s founder and “eternal president” Kim Il-sung, and the Supreme People’s Assembly (SPA), the rubber-stamp Parliament that is due to meet April 11 – a single day suffices – to review the economy and this year’s budget.

Any further delay would disappoint the ROK’s new-ish Unification Minister Lee Jong-seok. Nominated by President Roh Moo-hyun Jan. 2 and finally confirmed Feb. 10, this meeting will be Lee’s first chance to meet his DPRK counterpart, “Cabinet counsellor” Kwon Ho-ung (quite what that obscure title connotes is unclear). Otherwise, dare one say, this channel’s temporary suspension is in practical terms by no means so serious as the abeyance of the Six-Party Talks; inasmuch as a plethora of other lower-level inter-Korean contacts in specific areas carries on.

Exchange or charity?

Some of these other channels have their own problems. When inter-Korean talks resumed in mid-2005 after almost a year’s hiatus, the North seemed unprecedentedly eager for wide-ranging economic cooperation. Except the Kaesong Industrial Zone, on which more below, little of this has come to fruition. Working-level economic talks in Kaesong in January failed to narrow differences evident at the 11^th session of the Inter-Korean Economic Cooperation Promotion Committee (ECPC) last October. Like the Cabinet-level talks the ECPC is supposed to meet quarterly, but it has now gone nearly half a year with no new date fixed.

As discussed in the last issue of Comparative Connections, last fall the North demanded large quantities of raw materials for light industries ranging from soap to shoes. The South agreed in principle, but in exchange would like joint ventures in Northern minerals like coal, zinc, magnetite, and phosphoric concentrate. But despite having earlier reportedly accepted such reciprocity, North Korea now wants the two projects to be separate – with a strong implication that the South’s supply of basic necessities should be on a charitable rather than a commercial basis.

Yet here again formal deadlock seems not to prevent progress on the ground (in the ground, in this case). Korea Resources Corp (KoRes), the relevant ROK parastatal, is cutting its own deals. Having announced plans to invest in gold, silver, and zinc, on a joint venture or consortium basis, with Chinese firms in China, Mongolia, and North Korea, on March 22, KoRes President Park Yang-soo signed an agreement in Beijing with China Minmetals, whose projects include coal mines in the DPRK. A week later KoRes reported another deal with a Chinese firm in Heilongjiang to jointly mine North Korean iron ore. Hoping to dig 144,000 tons over three years, it expects the first shipments in May, along with graphite from a mine just north of the DMZ where it is already invested; it is also eyeing DPRK magnesite (as distinct from magnetite). KoRes further reported that North Korea plans to invite over 100 interested parties from the South, including state banks, to an investor relations meeting in Pyongyang on April 28, to encourage further investment in mining. All in all, the DPRK’s decrepit but extensive and varied mines look about to receive the fresh investment and upgrading that they have long needed.

Multifaceted aid

Northern demands for aid are brazen, given how much they get already. As the year began, the ROK Unification Ministry (MOU) revealed that since early December it had supplied 60,000 tons of coal to help Kaesong workers through the bitter winter. The 6 billion won ($5.9 million) cost will come from MOU’s 1 trillion won budget for inter-Korean cooperation.

Larger-scale seasonal aid followed, as is now routine. On Feb. 1, North Korea asked for 150,000 tons of fertilizer immediately with a further 300,000 tons to follow. Three weeks later the South agreed to the former, and shipments began Feb. 28 in both ROK and DPRK vessels. On past form, half a million tons of rice will also be demanded and offered ere long – despite North Korea’s announcing last fall that it no longer needs humanitarian (as distinct from developmental) aid, to the consternation of international aid agencies.

In a new if overdue initiative, South Korea is to give a modest $20 million over two years via the World Health Organization (WHO) for maternal and infant health care in the North. Specifically, this should cover vaccinating some 2.5 million under-5s and almost a million mothers. Seoul is also talking to Unicef and other UN bodies about further ways to help Northern women and children. This is all the more urgent in view of North Korea’s ordering many foreign NGOs to leave. It is doubtful that food is so plentiful as to warrant such insouciance – the UN World Food Program (WFP) still hopes to negotiate a reduced role under the new policy – and the health situation certainly does not. Infant mortality in the DPRK is said to be nine times greater than in the ROK. South Korea, humanitarianism aside, should surely regard today’s undernourished Northern children as part of the human capital of a future reunified Korea; as such, their health is vital.  The memorandum of understanding also noted that this project helps to improve aid transparency; the ROK government smarts at criticisms that its generous and barely monitored food aid is what enables the DPRK to spurn the WFP.

Foreign press visits Kaesong zone

Many hopes in Seoul are pinned on the Kaesong Industrial Zone, just an hour’s drive north of the Southern capital across the DMZ, where 15 (so far) ROK firms employ 6,000 DPRK workers making goods for export. On Feb. 27, Seoul-based foreign journalists were allowed their first glimpse of this flagship of North-South cooperation; a stream of articles followed in early March. Most were broadly positive: at $57.50 per month, wages are low, but these are shiny new plants, not sweatshops. Yet, all remarked on constraints and contrasts. They were not allowed to speak to the mainly female Northern workforce, though some did try. The $57.50 is paid to the government; no one would say how much the workers actually received. The zone’s gleaming new buildings and brisk construction seemed worlds apart from the surrounding dusty brown treeless plains and decrepit hovels with plastic sheeting for windows. The Northern workers who commute between the two daily must notice too.

Trade tops $1 billion

Thanks to Kaesong, inter-Korean trade last year topped $1 billion for the first time, according to the South’s Korea International Trade Association (KITA). Up 51.5 percent over 2004, this breaks down as $340 million in DPRK exports and $710 million sent by the ROK. While nearly all the former was true trade, much of what Seoul sent was really aid rather than commerce. The Kaesong zone’s contribution – on both sides of the ledger: it imports machinery and raw materials to export finished goods like garments, watches, and kitchenware – more than quadrupled from 2004’s $42 million to $177 million, or 17 percent of total trade. This will go far higher if the zone’s ambitious growth plans are fulfilled: the 15 ROK firms there so far are due to jump to 2,000 by 2012. One billion dollars suffices to make South Korea the North’s second trade partner, after China; by contrast, this is a minuscule 0.2 percent of the ROK’s total trade. Trade has continued to grow in early 2006: January’s $63 million and February’s $66 million were up 27 percent and 42 percent, respectively, on 2005 figures.

Southern visitor numbers to North Korea also multiplied last year, more than tripling from 26,213 in 2004 to 87,028. In addition, 298,247 tourists visited the North’s Mt. Kumgang resort, up 11 percent. No figures were publicized for flows in the other direction, which are tiny: mainly a handful of officials attending meetings. Sunshine is a largely one-way process, thus far.

Planning for the long-term, on March 15 the ROK officially opened large new combined customs, immigration, and quarantine (CIQ) offices on its side of both the Kyongui and Donghae trans-DMZ corridors. Costing $43 million and $56 million respectively, these can process 1.7 million and 2.6 million travellers annually. Last year’s total was 402,485, with over 58,000 vehicle trips across the once impermeable border.

Don’t mention abductions

Potentially the most serious inter-Korean row of the past quarter erupted at family reunions in the North’s Mt. Kumgang resort on March 22. The 13^th event of its kind since the 2000 summit, these follow a predictable and constrained format. Every few months, a fortunate few elderly Koreans get to meet relatives whom they have not seen for over half a century. They have just three days, in the glare of media publicity, and that is all. No further contact is allowed, even by telephone, letter, or email, much less the visits to ancestral homes and graves that Korean custom demands. Since last year there are now also even more tenuous videolink reunions: again one-time, for just two hours per family. During the past five years some 12,000 persons in total have participated; but in South Korea alone, almost twice as many (about 20,000) of the 120,000 who originally applied for reunions have died waiting.

South Korea would like to expand and expedite such meetings. Recently, not before time, it has also tried to raise in Red Cross talks the fate of about 1,000 ROK citizens believed to be held in the DPRK. (The figure would be far higher if the thousands of civilians taken North during the Korean War are included.) The ROK National Intelligence Service (NIS) tallies 538 prisoners of war (POWs) who ought to have been returned in 1953, plus a further 486 abducted since then, mostly fishermen. Pyongyang, naturally, denies detaining anyone and claims all are there of their own free will. In a vaguely worded concession whose worth remains to be tested, North Korea agreed at the latest Red Cross talks in February to work toward confirming the fate of persons missing during and after the Korean War.

However, the North has allowed a few individuals in this category to take part in family reunions. This latest round included two such: the son of an old POW, and Chon Mon-sook, a Southern fisherman kidnapped in 1969 who was briefly reunited with his wife.  But when an ROK reporter tried to file copy which used the word “abductees,” DPRK officials barged into the press room, seized tapes, and demanded that the offender leave on the bus with the families (rather than stay for the second half, when 100 more North Koreans were due to meet another batch of ROK relatives). This standoff held up the elderly South Koreans’ departure by 11 hours until almost midnight. In the end the entire Southern press corps left the next day, in solidarity with their colleague. The second reunions thus passed unreported – giving participants more privacy than they usually get – but without further incident. It is not yet clear whether this contretemps may jeopardize an earlier agreement to hold a reunion twice as large as usual in June, involving 200 rather than 100 families from each side and their relatives, to mark the sixth anniversary of the June 2000 Pyongyang Summit.

Deplorable as this episode is, in the past Pyongyang might have cancelled the whole event on the spot, and not restored it for months. Hence the fact that the quarrel was controlled is progress, to some degree. The peacemaking included an expression of regret by Seoul (but not, it was emphasized, an apology). Southern conservatives were cross, but surely a case can be made for damage control. The North’s behavior had already shown its true colors.

There is less excuse for Chung Il-yong, president of the Journalists’ Association of Korea, who in a TV discussion on April 1 claimed (not for the first time) that some South Koreans went North voluntarily, and that it was often impossible to determine if someone had been abducted. He also contrived not to mention the censorship at Mt. Kumgang. Pro-abductee and defector civic groups, not a powerful force in Seoul, demanded his resignation. There were indeed defections to the North in the early heady days soon after partition in 1945, and a few of those under DPRK occupation in 1950 were voluntary, but all sources suggest that the vast majority were forcibly abducted or detained.

POWs: varied fates

More hopefully, Koreans hurt or unhelped by their governments are now better placed than before to secure their own salvation. A striking case in point, and a standing reproach to the likes of Chung Il-yong, is Lee Ki-chun. An ROK soldier captured during the Korean War, Lee (now 75) escaped via China half a century later in 2004 at his third attempt. Last June his wife escaped too, only to die in a traffic accident in the South. Lee’s two daughters, the husband of one, and a grandson have followed, the last two as recently as March 31. This is only the second case where a POW has managed to bring out his family, doubtless paying one of a new breed of daring go-betweens to slip into North Korea and effect this.

Most are less fortunate. Another old Southern POW, Han Man-taek (72), who escaped to China last year, was arrested and repatriated to North Korea despite a plea from Seoul to Beijing not to do so. He is now thought to be in a prison camp.

Les Miserables out-miseried

South Korean tendencies not to dwell on North Korean human rights abuses were jolted in March, at least temporarily. The DPRK gulag must be the least likely subject for a musical since Mel Brooks’ fictional Springtime for Hitler. That did not deter Jeong Song-san. A DPRK defector once imprisoned for listening to ROK radio, Jeong devised Yoduk Story, a 3-hour song and dance extravaganza set in one of the North’s most notorious concentration camps. Despite many obstacles – the original backers dropped out, possibly under official pressure (bad for Sunshine); Jeong even had to pledge a kidney as collateral for a loan, and received anonymous threats – the show opened in Seoul on March 15. Remarkably, this tale of everyday murder, torture, hunger, and rape became a hit, and soon sold out: it closed on April 2 but may now tour elsewhere in South Korea, or even travel overseas. The show was patronized (in every sense) by the rightwing opposition Grand National Party (GNP), somewhat to Jeong’s discomfort. But his aim – to arouse South Koreans’ awareness of atrocities being committed on their doorstop – succeeded beyond his expectations.

Yet some in Seoul have hearts of stone. Even as Yoduk Story played to packed houses, 90 ROK leftists paid $1,300 each to fly to Brussels to picket a U.S.-funded hearing on DPRK human rights at the European Parliament. As defectors recounted their sufferings within, these worthies unfurled a banner which read “Stop attacking North Korea on the pretext of human rights which blocks peace of Korea.” Others chanted “No war, no Bush.” Most passers-by appeared bemused; the Seoul daily Chosun Ilbo’s headline read: “Korean Protests Baffle Belgians.” And not only Belgians.

Billions for suffering spies: they cannot be serious

Earlier, North Korea began the year with its own implausible bid to play the human rights card. In a complaint filed with South Korea’s Human Rights Commission on Jan. 6, Pyongyang demanded “several billions of dollars” in compensation for the sufferings of its former agents who served long jail terms in the South, or had died there. It is true that these veterans, like many more innocent, were dreadfully tortured by the ROK’s former military rulers. Yet with blatant if typical asymmetry, whereas Seoul repatriated 63 such ex-spies to the North in 2000 as a unilateral goodwill gesture, Pyongyang has refused to yield an inch on the thousand-plus South Koreans it is reckoned to be illegally holding. This new demand could be a warning to Seoul not to raise human rights issues, or a pretext to extract ransom money, much as West Germany used to pay the former GDR to release political prisoners.

Four abducted Southern fishermen who had escaped from the North promptly counter-sued the DPRK for $1 billion each. Little has been heard since of either suit, nor of another filed in Seoul on Jan. 17 by arguably the most neglected category of all. Families of senior civil servants and others, taken North when the DPRK briefly overran most of the South in 1950, sued the ROK government for negligence in failing to locate these victims. Unlike both POWs and post-war abductees, members of this much larger group have become non-persons. No one is fighting in their corner except their families – who in the past often suffered themselves from guilt by association (still practiced in the North) under former ROK military regimes.

KEDO, adieu

The new year also saw the sad closing of an important chapter in inter-Korean relations. On Jan. 6 the last 57 South Korean caretaker staff were evacuated from the now-terminated light-water reactor (LWR) project site at Sinpo, North Korea, on the Hankyoreh, a vessel that has shuttled fortnightly between the east coast ports of Kumho (DPRK) and Sokcho (ROK) for the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO). The Northern authorities made them leave behind materiel worth $45 million, including some 190 buses and jeeps plus 93 pieces of heavy equipment (cranes, excavators, concrete-mixers, and so on).

If opinions remain divided on how far the October 1994 Agreed Framework (AF) served its avowed purpose of reining in North Korea’s nuclear threat, there is no doubt that the now moribund KEDO consortium, created under the AF, helped to bring the two Koreas closer – despite misgivings in both Seoul and Pyongyang – by forcing them to cooperate practically. Over the past decade thousands of Southern engineers and others have lived and worked at Sinpo alongside Northerners. The Hankyoreh and its ilk, followed by direct flights, were the first regular North-South transport links. Though inter-Korean ties now have their own momentum, the pioneering role of this pre-Sunshine precursor should not be forgotten.