The first four months of 2011 saw no real improvement in relations between the two Koreas. Their sole official contact, military talks in February, broke up in acrimony after two days. A slight easing of South Korea’s aid restrictions in April was in response to dire humanitarian need in the North, and probably does not indicate a wider thaw. As often there was the odd hint of back-channel talks, even about a possible summit – but no suggestion of progress. The obstacles are familiar. Pyongyang’s peace offensive as the year began, with a barrage of offers of seemingly unconditional talks, did not impress Seoul as it failed to deal with what remain two huge stumbling-blocks: the sinking of the corvette Cheonan on March, 26, 2010, and the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island on Nov. 23. The North continues to deny all responsibility for the former, and to insist it was provoked into the latter. In a democracy, and having taken much flak over both incidents, there is no way that ROK President Lee Myung-bak could afford to let either matter go – even if he was so minded, which he manifestly is not. It may be no easier for Kim Jong Il to back down either, in the midst of crafting a delicate succession for his untried third son Kim Jong Un. This appears a recipe for stalemate, perhaps for the rest of Lee’s presidency, which ends in February 2013 – although in Korea surprises are always possible.

More provocations?

If a single assault could conceivably have been a rogue one-off act, a second one suggests a campaign. Besides the difficulty of settling accounts with the recent past, last year’s twin attacks have heightened Southern vigilance against further provocations. Explicit and repeated Northern threats to shoot at the Imjingak pavilion in the Western sector of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), from which defector activists and their supporters regularly launch balloons carrying anti-Kim propaganda, radios, and so on into the North, cannot now be dismissed as bombast. Hopefully the North is sufficiently attuned to Southern political niceties to realize that any further act of aggression would be third time unlucky; it would be bound to bring military retaliation since President Lee cannot afford to look weak again. Such reaction could easily escalate, with unpredictable or unthinkable consequences.

While perverse and reprehensible, Pyongyang’s provocations tend to be carefully calculated and calibrated. One must hope the Kims now reckon they have made whatever point they were striving for, and that Kim Jong Un’s succession will not require further acts of bravado. Or perhaps the North has simply switched tactics. In March, and again in April, South Korea experienced serious cyber-attacks. Southern investigators have fingered North Korea in both cases, as well as for jamming GPS signals during US-ROK military exercises. Though it is all but impossible to trace responsibility definitively in such cases, North Korea is known to have been building up its cyber-warfare capabilities. Their deniability makes sneak attacks of this sort much less risky for the perpetrator, and perhaps no less destructive in their way, than old-fashioned overt acts of aggression such as sinking a ship or shelling an island. If the North is indeed behind the cyber-attacks on South Korea, this hardly suggests any serious will for peace or dialogue – other than on the only terms Pyongyang seems able to project, where the subtext is: you’d really better talk to us, or else you’ll regret it.

Ambiguous talk of peace

2011 began with both Korean states making noises about peace, but in ways that hardly suggested they meant it. North Korea’s usual joint New Year editorial of three major daily newspapers – those of the party (Rodong Sinmun), military (Joson Inmingun), and youth organization (Chongnyon Jonwi) – included some encouraging sentiments, “Confrontation between north and south should be defused as early as possible … Dialogue and cooperation should be promoted proactively. Active efforts should be made to create an atmosphere of dialogue and cooperation between north and south by placing the common interests of the nation above anything else. Free travel of and exchanges between people from all walks of life should be ensured and cooperation projects encouraged, to contribute to improving inter-Korean relations and to achieving reunification.”

Yet the adjacent paragraphs exhibited a tone and content sharply at odds with this: “Last year the south Korean conservative authorities revealed their true colours as the minion of war and anti-reunification, confrontation maniac. In collaboration with the outside forces they incessantly hatched anti-DPRK plots and perpetrated north-targeted war moves … The entire nation should never tolerate the criminal moves of pro-US war hawks who stake their fate on foreign forces and drive the situation to the brink of war in collusion with them.”

Seoul showed a similar inconsistency, if in less colorful language. In his New Year address on Jan. 3, President Lee said, “I remind the North that the path toward peace is yet open. The door for dialogue is still open.” Yet, he at once added a condition: “Nuclear weapons and military adventurism must be discarded.” Opposing adventurism is unexceptionable. Obviously, South Korea has every right to insist on no more attacks by the North, like the two it experienced last year. But denuclearization? That can only be the end-point of a very long road, wearily trodden for the past 20 years. To posit it as a precondition for talks seems wholly unrealistic. Yet this has been Lee’s constant refrain since he took office in 2008.

Lee continued, “From now on, we need … peace and reunification policies based on solid national security … [and to] make endeavours to engage our North Korean brethren in the long journey toward freedom and prosperity.” Whom was he addressing here? Surely these “brethren” are not the DPRK government but the North Korean people. This suggests that Lee has given up on Kim Jong Il, and in effect is awaiting – or fomenting? – regime change.

Similarly, as noted our last report, on Dec. 9 Lee had been in messianic mode. Saying “I feel that reunification is drawing near,” he added that Seoul has a responsibility to achieve reunification as soon as possible, so that 23 million North Korean people may live with the right to happiness. This message will not be lost on Pyongyang, but one wonders what Seoul seeks to achieve with such talk. If the Kim regime reads this as confirming that Lee Myung-bak wants them gone, and that he has no serious will to engage them on any terms they could accept, they may conclude that they have little to lose from continuing to harry him. Having given Lee two nasty bites last year and got away with it, why not do it again?

Yet as so often, the North abruptly changed tack. On Jan. 5 a joint meeting of the DPRK government, political parties and organizations – these were not further specified – declared that “We are ready to meet anyone, anytime, and anywhere … We propose discontinuing to heap slanders and calumnies on each other and refraining from any act of provoking each other… We courteously propose having wide-ranging dialogue and negotiations with the political parties and organisations of south Korea, including its authorities.”

Sweet words, but Seoul smelled a rat. Putting matters thus posits the ROK government as just one interlocutor among many; a longstanding trope in the North’s tactics to delegitimize South Korea. Even though a few sentences later the North called for “an unconditional and early opening of talks between the authorities having real power and responsibility, in particular,” one can understand the South’s tepid response.  Vice Unification Minister Um Jong-sik commented, “In both format and content, I believe it is difficult to see [the DPRK statement] as a formal proposal for talks.” He called instead for a “respectful attitude … For dialogue to take place, it must be guaranteed that it can be constructive and beneficial.”

Military talks break down

“Guaranteed” is asking a lot. But it is right to demand that the North stop playing games and approach the South properly, government to government. This it finally did on Jan. 20. In a telegram to the recently appointed ROK Defense Minister Kim Kwan-jin, his DPRK counterpart Kim Yong-chun proposed military talks to exchange views on both the Cheonan and Yeonpyeong incidents, and discuss reducing tensions on the peninsula more generally. By then Seoul was at risk of appearing the obstinate one if it kept turning down Pyongyang’s advances. This one finally passed muster; the South accepted with rare alacrity the same day.

Colonel-level talks were duly held at Panmunjom on Feb. 8-9. The two interlocutors – Ri Son Kwon for the Korean People’s Army (KPA) and Moon Sang-gyun for the ROK – know each other well from previous encounters. This meeting was intended to prepare the ground for higher-level military talks later, perhaps between generals or even ministers of defense. It began promisingly, lasting for nine hours on the first day, which suggests a real effort to resolve problems. But on the second day they met for only an hour before lunch – and just 12 minutes thereafter, before the North stormed out. Vitriolic denunciations of the South for insincerity and treachery swiftly followed in the Pyongyang media.

It was always going to be very difficult to find an agreed formula to discuss, or get past, the Cheonan and Yeonpyeong incidents. Carefully parsing Pyongyang’s plethora of seemingly no-strings offers of dialogue, Seoul had decided that both the forum itself and the terms used by the North in suggesting military talks offered some hope of progress. But it was not to be. Specific sticking points, it appears, included niceties of language in specifying the agenda, as well as disagreement about the date and appropriate rank for the higher-level talks to follow.

Three months later there has been no effort to resurrect military talks. In collateral damage, so to say, their failure also put paid to hopes of fresh Red Cross dialogue to arrange a further round of family reunions. Elderly Koreans on both sides of the DMZ will thus continue to die without ever seeing again relatives from whom they have been separated for almost 60 years.

A boat people saga: most go home, finally

Three days before the military talks, a separate saga began which in the end would prove more prolonged, just as fraught, but ultimately soluble up to a point. On Feb. 5 a very small fishing boat with 31 North Koreans aboard – 20 of them women, oddly – appeared out of the fog near Yeonpyeong – the Southern island near the Northern coast shelled last November. It seems they drifted across the sea border due to engine trouble. That is not rare, and normally the South, unlike the North, swiftly repatriates such people. This time it delayed, citing the need to question them all. The Seoul press reckoned that the real reason was to play hardball.

On Feb. 27, South Korea said the group would be sent home in a few days – only to add on March 3 that four now wished to defect. A predictably furious North demanded that all 31 be returned. On March 4, the other 27 were brought to Panmunjom, but the North refused to take them. Pyongyang then proposed Red Cross talks, with the would-be defectors and their Northern relatives also on hand. The South agreed to talks, but without such family presence and pressure; the North rejected this. On March 15, the North finally agreed to accept just the 27, but by sea rather than land. This and bad weather caused further delay; even with a new engine, their decrepit 5-ton boat was not seaworthy. Finally on March 27, the 27 in their boat were handed over at the Northern Limit Line (NLL), the contentious maritime border. North Korea continues to demand that the other four be returned too, claiming they are captives.

Cyber-war?

A sense of relief that as of early May North Korea has not so far carried out further attacks on the South, like its twin assaults last year, may be premature – or at any rate needs  to be qualified. In March and April, South Korea suffered two separate cyber-assaults, and it is blaming them both on the North. The first resembled an earlier attack in July 2009, when a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack paralyzed 21 websites in South Korea (both state and private) as well as 14 elsewhere, including in the US. Some 115,000 computers in South Korea were affected then, with 396 hard drives destroyed. The National Intelligence Service (NIS) later claimed to have traced this to the DPRK Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (MPT), and said that 435 servers in 61 different countries were used to spread the virus.

During March 3-5, a fresh DDoS attack hit some 40 websites in South Korea, again a mix of public and private. Those targeted included the NIS, the Blue House (presidential office) and Ministry of National Defense (MND), US forces in Korea (USFK), major banks such as Kookmin, Woori, and Shinhan, and two leading internet portals, Naver and Daum. This was technically similar to the 2009 episode, but more sophisticated. Three different viruses were spread this time, affecting all Windows operating systems rather than just three as in 2009. The file composition changed with each attack, and user attempts to access anti-virus sites were blocked. Although 746 servers in 70 countries were used, less damage was done this time because lessons had been learned from 2009 and defenses were installed: still, over 100,000 computers were affected and 219 hard drives destroyed. On April 6, the ROK National Police Agency (NPA)’s Cyber Terror Response Center said that this latest attack had been traced to the same internet protocol (IP) addresses in China that were used in July 2009.

Six days later on April 12, the National Agricultural Cooperative Federation (Nonghyup), a major bank, had its computer systems crippled. Holders of 30 million accounts were unable to access them for several days, with some transaction data irretrievably lost. At first this was seen as a technical failure or an inside job by a disgruntled employee. But on May 3, prosecutors again blamed North Korea, saying this too was a cyber-attack – of a new kind. The claim is that a notebook computer owned by a worker at the firm managing Nonghyup’s servers was infected with malicious code by North Korea’s General Reconnaissance Bureau in September 2010. Once the code was remotely activated, the program wiped out Nonghyup’s operating system, and did in fact knock out 273 of the bank’s 587 servers in three attacks. It has since been discovered that a further 200 South Korean computers are similarly infected.

There could well be more such ‘zombie’ computers as yet unknown, raising alarm that the North could strike anywhere, any time. The Seoul press voiced fears that subway systems, ports and airports, or the power grid (including nuclear facilities) could be targeted. South Korea has demanded that the North cease such attacks. There is talk of referring all three incidents to the UN, but it will be difficult to adduce conclusive proof of responsibility. Not everyone is convinced even locally that North Korea was behind the Nonghyup attack.

Jam, too

Separately, Seoul claims that on March 4 Pyongyang jammed its global positioning system (GPS) signals during the Key Resolve joint military exercises with the US near the western end of the DMZ. On March 8, the Foreign Ministry (MOFAT) threatened to report the DPRK to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), which bans interference with another country’s transmissions. A day later ROK Defense Minister Kim Kwan-jin told the National Assembly that the jamming came from not only Kaesong and Haeju in the west, but also Mt. Kumgang in the east of the peninsula. In the first US confirmation of this, on April 6 Gen. Walter Sharp, commander of USFK, told the House Armed Services Committee, “We have seen North Korea use GPS jammers.” South Korea first detected such interference in 2010.

China has a plan

Not infrequently, especially around Korea, diplomatic movements break the bilateral bounds which are Comparative Connections’ chief remit and organizing principle. Such is the case currently on the nuclear issue. China has a plan, which involves a complex quadrille between four parties in two pairs and three stages. Our last issue accused Beijing of pulling a dead rabbit out of a hat, when it feebly called for an emergency session of the long-stalled Six-Party Talks (6PT) in response to sharp inter-Korean tensions after the Yeonpyeong shelling.

Maybe China took this critique to heart for this time they have conjured up something more subtle, even ingenious. Not a dead rabbit, but a bird that might just fly. Wu Dawei, China’s point man on Korea, shuttled busily between Pyongyang, Seoul, and elsewhere this spring. What he has come up with is a phased process that could offer something for everyone.

Phase one would be nuclear talks between the two Koreas. That is something the South has long demanded, but the North has steadfastly refused; insisting that matters nuclear are not fit to be discussed with the puppets in Seoul but only with Washington, or at a pinch in the 6PT. This was not always Pyongyang’s stance. In January 1992, in what turned out to be a false dawn of inter-Korean reconciliation, the two Koreas signed a Joint Declaration of the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula (available at http://www.nti.org/db/china/engdocs/snkdenuc.htm .) In May 2003, amid a fresh nuclear crisis, the DPRK stated that this agreement “has been nullified” – and blamed the US. (Pyongyang’s habit of abrogating accords at whim, seen most recently with Hyundai, cannot but raise the question of its sincerity, or what value can really be put on any accord it purports to sign.)

Seoul would love to talk nukes with Pyongyang, even though the immediate threat it faces is from the KPA’s torpedoes and artillery. But does it want this enough to swallow its demand for admissions and apologies for the Cheonan and Yeonpyeong before anything else? There is said to be debate about this within the Lee administration, with hardliners unwilling to let anything go forward absent an apology which will never come. Such a stance risks looking obstructionist, given the wider need to kickstart the 6PT. On April 16, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and ROK Foreign Minister Kim Sung-hwan reiterated two key points. Inter-Korean talks must precede resumption of 6PT, and the North must show real sincerity for denuclearization (One wonders what could count as proof of the latter.).

With rare optimism, on April 18 the usually skeptical and hard-line conservative Seoul daily Chosun Ilbo ran the headline “1st inter-Korean nuclear meeting ‘likely.’” Based as so often on an anonymous official leak, this predicted:

1. Korea may accept a call for a meeting between the two Koreas’ chief negotiators to the 6-party talks as early as this week, according to a senior government official. ROK official: The North “can’t drag its feet indefinitely” after Wu Dawei proposed a 3-stage process to revive 6-party talks after a meeting with N. Korean chief negotiator Kim Kye-gwan.

Somebody jumped the gun here, for almost a month later there was no sign of such progress. Perhaps inter-Korean nuclear talks remain anathema to the North, whose capacity for foot-dragging should never be underestimated. To sweeten that pill, Wu Dawei offers a reward: his Phase Two is direct talks between Pyongyang and Washington, always Kim Jong Il’s favored forum. The third phase would be the full 6PT, creaking back to life after over two years in abeyance and nearly eight years since this interminable process first got under way.

Many questions obviously arise: above all the willingness of all concerned (especially North Korea) to accept this – sincerely, as opposed to just playing along. The division of labor between the three phases will also need specifying. But anything is worth a try. We shall see.

What trade ban?

If the political and security relationship between the two Koreas is almost unrelieved gloom currently, economic ties by contrast show light as well as shade. President Lee’s supposed ban on inter-Korean trade, imposed a year ago (May 2010) as a reprisal for the Cheonan, has one very large exception – which makes a nonsense of it. The Kaesong Industrial Complex (KIC), the last North-South joint venture (JV), was exempted. Last year, this accounted for three-quarters of all North-South trade, to the tune of $1.44 billion. As a result, total inter-Korean trade rose by 14 percent over 2009, reaching a record $1.91 billion. Some ban.

These figures were compiled by the Korea International Trade Association (KITA), which represents ROK exporters. What interests KITA is competition with China, which is forging ahead. Sino-DPRK trade last year jumped 32 percent to $3.46 billion: almost twice the ROK-DPRK total. Under the former “sunshine” policy South Korea was catching up; it had become the North’s top export market, a little publicized fact. By 2007, total inter-Korean trade reached 91 percent of that with China; it would surely have overtaken it if that year’s North-South summit accord, with its ambitious plans for expanded North-South economic cooperation, had been implemented. Instead President Lee backtracked on the summit agreement, insisting that Pyongyang denuclearize first. History will judge whether that was wise, but at all events, under Lee the ratio of inter-Korean to Sino-DPRK trade has fallen each year; to 65 percent in 2008, 64 percent in 2009 and 55 percent in 2010. KITA warned that the gap will widen further unless tension between the South and North is swiftly eased since economic cooperation between Pyongyang and Beijing is growing fast.

As reported, KITA rather oddly gave no breakdown into exports and imports. Those data can be found month by month at WTS, a Kyoto-based firm that tracks North Korea’s trade (see http://www.stat-trade.com/blog/stat/post/ ; the table is clearer if pasted into Word.) Against expectations that Seoul’s trade ban would show up in the second half of 2010, in fact the dip was quite slight. ROK exports to the DPRK in July-December at $427 million were hardly less than in January-June ($439 million). In the other direction, Seoul’s imports from Pyongyang fell slightly more, but not hugely, from $553 million to $491 million. More striking is the acceleration in Sino-DPRK trade as the year progressed, especially North Korean exports, which almost tripled from $341 million in the first half to $840 million in the second. Some of this trade may have been redirected away from South Korea, or be opportunity lost.

Non-KIC investors are tanking

These aggregate figures hide important contrasts. For South Korean small- and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) in the KIC, last year’s tensions were annoying but not fatal – though they remain anxious. But the few bolder ROK firms who invested elsewhere in the North, such as Nampo or Pyongyang, face a bleak future thanks to Seoul’s trade ban, which for them is real and devastating. The head of one such company, Kim Jung-tae of Pyongyang Andong Hemp Textiles – the first 50-50 inter-Korean joint venture, long in preparation but launched only in October 2008 – said on March 6 that hundreds of Southern firms who did business in North Korea are close to bankruptcy. The far smaller number that have invested in the North – to the tune of $180 million in total – have posted operating losses of $150 million so far. MOU, the ROK Unification Ministry, tallies no fewer than 860 Southern firms active in the North; most are small traders rather than investors. Last June, Kim Jung-tae formed a 200-strong business association to press for Seoul’s ban to be eased, but has had no joy so far.

KoRes chafes too, for lost mines

It is not only private firms that are affected. Korea Resources Corporation (KoReS), a South Korean parastatal, held a forum in Seoul to express its concerns on April 15 – Kim Il Sung’s birthday, no doubt coincidentally. Kim Shin-jong, KoRes’ president, complained that having invested in 10 Northern projects, he now cannot even ascertain their status, much less visit.

The most advanced of these was a $10 million graphite mine near the DMZ, which had twice delivered supplies to the South – but none for over a year. In the same border province, South Hwanghae, KoRes also signed MOUs for coal mines at Ayang in Sinwon County and Pungchon in Yonan County, where the first joint drilling took place in October 2008. In the northeast, MOU was directly involved with three major mines in Tanchon, South Hamgyong Province – Komdok, Ryongyang, and Taehung – producing coal, zinc, lead, and the rare metal magnesite, used to line blast furnaces and found only in North Korea and China. By early 2008, the Tanchon project had had its third feasibility study, but it has since ground to a halt.

Three other mining JVs with the North involved Southern private capital. One was to supply the phosphate apatite, a key ingredient of fertilizer. The ROK imports all of its apatite, some from as far away as Nauru. Like KITA, the KoRes forum noted that the Lee administration curtailed cooperation with the North even before the Cheonan sinking – and warned that this creates openings for China. KoRes claims that annual Chinese imports of DPRK minerals have risen threefold in five years, from $300 million in 2005 to $900 million in 2010.

Hyundai is stripped of its tourist license, illegally

On March 1, an official of the DPRK Committee of Investment and Joint Ventures (CIJV), a body apparently growing in clout, told KCNA that North Korea “encourages foreigners to [invest] in the country … and neither nationalizes nor seize (sic) their invested properties.”

Hyundai knows different. The late Chung Ju-yung, northern-born founder of what used to vie with Samsung to be South Korea’s largest chaebol (conglomerate), threw his millions into the “sunshine” policy; investing first in Mt. Kumgang, a famed beauty spot on the east coast just north of the DMZ, and later in the KIC which he did not live to see in operation (he died in 2001; it opened in 2003). Tours to Mt. Kumgang, first by boat and later by road across the once impenetrable DMZ, during their first decade (1998-2007) took 1.95 million Southern visitors (and a handful of foreigners) to this Northern enclave. Hyundai Asan, the subsidiary formed to handle Hyundai’s Northern business, invested almost $700 million at Mt. Kumgang. A greedy Pyongyang not only charged a stiff license fee, but also expected Hyundai to pay all construction costs for port facilities, hotels, amenities, and more.

That was then. Mt. Kumgang has now stood idle for nearly three years since July 2008. The South suspended tours after a middle-aged female tourist was shot dead there in mysterious circumstances and the North refused entry to Southern investigators. Neither side has budged since and Hyundai is paying the price in lost revenues – and now stolen assets. In 2010, the North froze Hyundai’s and other ROK-owned property at Mt. Kumgang. Exactly a year later on April 8, the DPRK Asia-Pacific Peace Committee (APPC) said it will rescind Hyundai’s monopoly of Mt. Kumgang tourism, granted in 2002 and supposedly good for half a century until 2052. On April 29, over protests by both Hyundai and Seoul that this is illegal, the Supreme People’s Assembly Presidium formally annulled Hyundai’s rights. It decreed a new special zone for international tourism in the area, yet it is unclear what other operator or market can be found. (A Seoul magazine mentioned Kempinski, but the Thai-owned Swiss hotel chain is hardly likely to handle stolen property. China is an alternative as well as the only conceivable mass market, yet there is little at Kumgang to attract Chinese as opposed to Korean visitors.)

Seoul allows limited private aid

Recent months have seen much debate on how bad North Korea’s latest food crisis really is. (The [US] National Committee for North Korea [NCNK], a valuable and under-publicized resource on all things DPRK, has compiled a comprehensive collection of fact and opinion on this issue: (http://www.ncnk.org/resources/news-items/DPRK-Humanitarian-Updates .)

The UN deems the DPRK “highly vulnerable to a food crisis.” That was the verdict of a month-long Rapid Food Security Assessment Mission (RFSAM) conducted from mid-February to mid-March by three UN agencies: the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), World Food Program (WFP) and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF). They noted that the Public Distribution System (PDS) provides a meager 381 grams – half what is needed – and will run out of food in May. In the lean season (May-July) over 6 million people “are in need of international food assistance.” (http://home.wfp.org/stellent/groups/public/documents/ena/wfp233442.pdf )

On April 29, WFP and UNICEF launched a one-year $200 million emergency plan “to feed an estimated 3.5 million people in desperate need after crop losses and a particularly bitter winter.” It is unclear how this will be financed. UNICEF earlier reported that having sought $10 million for its work in North Korea last year, in the end it only raised a fifth of this. Undaunted, it has launched a $20 million appeal to fund work in five provinces with the worst malnutrition rates, targeting 165,000 pregnant or lactating women and 400,000 young children as the most vulnerable. For its part, WFP seeks to provide nearly 300,000 metric tons of grain plus 137,000 metric tons of fortified foods.

Humanitarian arguments aside, the former businessman Lee Myung-bak, who in December said he felt “that reunification is drawing near”, might be expected to show concern for the quality of human capital available to a future reunified Korea. (With as many as a third of the DPRK’s children stunted, much damage has already been done.) Yet having cancelled the rice (500,000 tons) and fertilizer (300,000 tons) that South Korea used to send to the North each year, what mostly emanates from official Seoul these days is the skeptical sneering of the well-fed. Two such arguments are that Pyongyang in fact holds large grain stockpiles in case of war, which it could dip into, or that it wants to amass supplies so as to celebrate Kim Il Sung’s centenary next year with a mighty feast, billed as a show of generosity by his son.

By April, for whatever reason, the ROK government had slightly relented and allowed a few NGOs to send aid to the North, albeit in quantities too small to make much difference. As of early May there were signs that official food aid may follow. For some it is already too late.

Foot and mouth: the South infects the North?

In 2007 when North Korea was struck by foot and mouth disease (FMD), South Korea sent veterinarians and medical aid. Now the DPRK is stricken again, but the ROK is in no mood to help – even though it may well be the source, having struggled since last November to contain its own nationwide epidemic that has seen 3.47 million cattle and pigs slaughtered. FAO said on March 24 that North Korea urgently needs animal vaccine and other materiel, costing just $1 million: small change to Seoul, as a more far-sighted government would have grasped.

Two birthdays are marked, but not yet a third

All this proceeded against a backdrop of the usual high days and holy days that stud the first tetramester of the year in North Korea. These already include two sacred birthdays, those of Kim Jong Il on Feb. 16 and his late father Kim Il Sung, North Korea’s founding “great leader,” on April 15. The latter, known locally as Sun’s Day, was marked as usual by an arts festival – the 27th of its kind since 1982 – with musical and circus performances by artistes from China, Russia, Bulgaria, Belarus, France, and Germany. Earlier, Kim Jong Il enjoyed special birthday performances of ice skating and of synchronized swimming. In the latter, dozens of nymphets with red fans lined up in the pool to form the numbers 2.16. (This can be appreciated by all at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfijyBNMt58, or at interminable length at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvaxyawknjc .)

There was also the usual festival of Kimjongilia – a begonia named in his honor by a Japanese botanist. In an especially harsh winter, scarce electricity went to heat greenhouses across the land – this is a competition: woe betide the work unit whose blooms are not up to par – for tens of thousands of these flowers. Naturally there is also a Kimilsungia flower, an orchid, with its own festival in April – but as yet no Kimjongunia. The “young general” too had his birthday in this season – on Jan. 8, when he probably turned 28. This is not yet a public holiday, as some had predicted. The North’s KCBS TV aired an hour-long documentary about his achievements the next day, but that was all. Or not quite all. On Jan. 8 South Korean rogue hackers hijacked the DPRK website Uriminzokkiri as well as its Twitter and YouTube accounts, posting a cartoon that showed Kim Jong-un in a sports car running over hungry citizens before meeting his comeuppance. Subtle it is not. This can still be seen (in Korean, but the images suffice) at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fg5y-kpVtSE

Another regular spring highlight is the annual session of what passes for a parliament in North Korea. The Supreme People’s Assembly (SPA) duly met on April 7. As usual, a single day sufficed to hear an economic report, which gave almost no information, and to approve a budget with no hard numbers, only percentages. There were also two significant personnel changes. Ri Myong-su, a general and a key aide to Kim Jong Il, was appointed as minister of people’s security. He replaces another general, Ju Sang Song, in post since 2004 but who on March 16 was unusually announced as dismissed by the National Defence Commission (NDC: the highest executive body, outranking the Cabinet) due to illness. Only a month earlier Ju had received his visiting Chinese counterpart, so this may conceal a purging.

Also Jon Pyong Ho, who has long run the armaments industry, was removed from the NDC. He was supposedly transferred, but no new post was mentioned – and he is 84. His successor is Pak To Chun; a former chief Party secretary in Jagang Province on the Chinese border, where many arms factories are situated. At 65 Pak is young by Pyongyang elite standards.

Neither Kim Jong Il nor Kim Jong Un attended the SPA. The former often does not bother to turn up, though he did last year; big meetings reportedly bore him. Against some predictions, Kim Jong Un received no further promotions. Unusually, both father and son were reported as elsewhere – giving on-the-spot guidance in Jagang during April 6-8. Kim Jong Il’s sister Kim Kyong Hui, since September a KPA general and a full Politburo member, as well as her powerful husband Jang Song Thaek who is a vice-chairman of the NDC, were also part of the party. The first family could hardly have snubbed their supposed legislature more openly.

Both Koreas snub Jimmy Carter

Former US President Jimmy Carter’s abortive visit to the two Koreas in late April belongs mainly under US-Korea relations. Here it is worth noting how firmly both Korean states rebuffed his good offices and those of the three distinguished European leaders who accompanied him on behalf of The Elders. They were Mary Robinson, one-time President of Ireland and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights; Gro Harlem Bruntland of Norway, a former head of the World Health Organisation (WHO); and Finland’s Martti Ahtisaari, the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize laureate for his peace-making efforts in the Balkans and elsewhere.

This was a high-powered team and perhaps too much was expected of it. The hope was that the visitors might be able to kick-start currently stalled nuclear and inter-Korean dialogue. This would have required all concerned – above all, the two Koreas and the US – at some level to tacitly acknowledge the impasse. They could have used Carter and his colleagues to send messages, or at least serious signals, which might have served to put talks back on track; the precedent of course being Carter’s famous first visit in 1994, which defused a nuclear crisis.

Kim Jong Il did not meet him then, nor last year when Carter returned to rescue an errant US Christian activist just as Kim headed for China. Now it was third time unlucky again. In fact North Korea’s handling of the whole visit showed scant respect. KCNA mentioned only Carter, not naming any of his colleagues. Its reports on the visit were minimal, some only a single sentence. Carter himself, now 86 and mostly upbeat as ever, described a “surprisingly negative and confrontational” diatribe from Kim Yong Nam, himself 82 and now titular DPRK head of state, that went on so long that his guests missed their lunch. (Kim, then foreign minister, did the same to Carter in 1994.) More at http://www.cartercenter.org/news/trip_reports/korean-peninsula-042211.html

South Korea was hardly more welcoming. President Lee did not make time to see the Elders, allegedly due to scheduling conflicts and despite their bearing an oral message, apparently from Kim Jong Il, offering unconditional talks. Carter caused anger with a sharp comment, made twice, that for the ROK and US to refuse food aid is a human rights violation. Critics felt that this was one-sided, oversimplifying the real dilemmas and complexities involved in both food aid as such (e.g., diversion risks) and overall inter-Korean relations more broadly. In what may have been a Pyongyang olive branch – barely a twig, in truth – Carter conveyed the North’s “deep regret for the loss of life” in the Cheonan and Yeonpyeong incidents. But South Korea needs more than that. Foreign Minister Kim Sung-hwan said stiffly that the North should contact the South directly; there was no need to use foreign intermediaries.

A change of tack?

Inter-Korean relations will not forever remain at their present impasse. Two years from now South Korea will have a new president, and there is every sign that he – or quite possibly she – will revert to a less hard line than Lee Myung-bak, even if the conservative ruling GNP retains power. Park Geun-hye, the front-runner, has in the past visited Pyongyang. Another likely GNP contender, current Seoul mayor Oh Se-hoon, on a visit to Harvard on April 19 criticized current ROK policy on the North as “somewhat rigid … we need to have strategic flexibility” and called for a renewed engagement approach. Amen.