Cold War has aftermath in Asia-Pacific

Cold War has aftermath in Asia-Pacific

The latest incidents on the Korean peninsula show how much the security situation in the Asia-Pacific region is determined by conflicts left over from the Cold War, writes Walden Bello in this Inter Press Service commentary.

MANILA: Like the Taiwan Strait crisis, the latest incidents on the Korean peninsula remind us of the extent to which the security situation in the Asia-Pacific region continues to be determined by conflicts left over from the Cold War.

North Korea's apparent motive in announcing that it will no longer respect the rules governing the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) established by the Armistice of 1953, is to pressure the United States to sign a peace treaty that would end what is technically a state of war between the two nations that has lasted 46 years.

To all who would like to leave the Cold War behind, this should not seem unreasonable. By comparison, the United States and Japan signed a peace treaty in 1951, six years after the cessation of hostilities in Pacific War.

The problem in Korea, however, is that neither Washington nor Seoul really want a normalization of relations with North Korea.

A dehumanized North Korea allows the South Korean establishment to counter pressure from its population for reunification of the country. It also provides the U.S., increasingly seen by a majority of South Koreans as the main obstacle to reunification, with an excellent excuse to maintain its 35,000 troops on the peninsula.

Indeed, the North Korea "threat" is a central justification not only for U.S. Army presence in South Korea, but for the maintaining of almost 43,000 troops in Japan and for the forward deployment of the massive floating base that is the Seventh Fleet.

U.S. policy toward North Korea since the end of the Cold War would justifiably alarm that country:

Immediately after the U.S. victory over Iraq in the Gulf War in 1991, General Colin Powell, then head of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the press that "I'm running out of devils... I'm down to Fidel Castro and Kim Il-Sung."

Then the Commander in Chief of U.S. Forces in the Pacific, testifying before Congress, identified North Korea as "the greatest immediate danger to regional security".

In 1992, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon's first post-Cold war defense guidance has identified the Korea peninsula as the site of two out of seven scenarios of post-Cold War conflict in which U.S. forces may be involved.

At the height of U.S. accusations that North Korea intended to use the five-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon to reprocess nuclear fuel in order to develop nuclear weapons, South Korea and U.S. military circles actively discussed the option of air strikes or commando attacks to "take out" the reactor.

Just as North Korea entered negotiation with Washington to address the nuclear reactor question in Geneva, President Bill Clinton said at the G-7 Summit in Tokyo in July 1993, that the United States "would retaliate quickly and overwhelmingly if (North Korea) were to ever use, to develop and use, nuclear weapons. It would be the end of their country as they know it".

Normalization of relations between the United States and North Korea appeared to be a possibility after the conclusion of the Geneva agreement in October 1994. This committed Pyongyang to seal the suspected reprocessing facility at Yongbyon and to give up development of graphite-based nuclear reactors in return for being provided with light-water reactors (which are much less easy to use for weapons production) and oil by the United States and a consortium of countries.

But even as Pyongyang was negotiating with Washington in 1994, the United States was taking action that could only heighten North Korea's insecurity.

A Patriot anti-missile defense battalion was designated for deployment near Seoul, with another U.S.-based battalion tapped to reinforce it in the event of an emergency. Aircraft maintenance crews were bolstered in both South Korea and Japan. And Pentagon officials openly considered reversing President George Bush's policy of withdrawing tactical nuclear weapons from U.S units deployed abroad and reintroducing them in Korea and aboard U.S. ships in the Sea of Japan.

Instead of rewarding North Korea for agreeing to give up its nuclear energy program, Washington revealed that a military buildup of its forces on the Korean peninsula was an essential part of its new strategic posture in the Asia-Pacific. Shortly after the signing of the Geneva Accord, the Pentagon Strategy Paper (the so-called Nye initiative) released in February 1995 announced, "We are... prepositioning military equipment in South Korea to increase our capability to respond to crisis."

North Korean hopes that the Geneva Accord would lead to normalization were further dashed this year when General Gary Luck, the commander of U.S. forces in South Korea, told the U.S. Congress that the collapse of the Pyongyang regime was "a matter of when, not if".

From this assessment by such a strategically placed official North Korea could only conclude that Washington's current policy toward it is not to normalize relations but to hasten Pyongyang's collapse or at least to do nothing to prevent it.

In its rush to portray North Korea's latest moves in the DMZ as another crazy move by a mad-dog regime, the Western press does not even consider the possibility that one of the messages that Pyongyang might want to communicate is that, contrary to Gen. Luck's assertion, North Korea is far from collapsing.

The world's response to this latest crisis in the Korean peninsula is not what Washington might have hoped for. In South Korea most citizens are likely to criticize both Washington and Seoul for provoking North Korea's moves by not being serious about normalization and reunification.

And inside the United States, sentiment against continuing military commitments abroad continues to grow.

Most Asians simply want a comprehensive peace agreement that would formally end the Korean war, provide for significant demilitarization of the Korean peninsula, get U.S. troops out of South Korea, and pave the way for the reunification of the Korean nation.

It is time for the United States to give Koreans the opportunity to work out their problems by themselves, and stop dragging the rest of us back into confrontations that belong to the past.

Walden Bello is co-director of Focus on the Global South, a program of the Chulalongkorn University Research Institute (CUSRI) and the author of several works on regional security.

-- IPS