Four power talks 44 years late

HONG KONG (JP): Long overdue talks on the most crucial East Asian security issue begin in New York's Columbia University this morning.

But it will be a minor miracle if the four-power discussions quickly lead to a major lessening of tensions in the enduring Cold War on the Korean peninsula.

The talks will be between third-tier diplomatic officials of North and South Korea, China and the United States. Strictly speaking, the four-power talks are 44 years late, since they should have started no later than October 1953, according to the terms of the Korean Armistice signed in July of that year.

The armistice committed all the combatants in the Korean War to start negotiating a peace treaty within three months. No serious effort has been made so far to fulfill that pledge.

The New York meeting will be a talk about talks, with the objective being to "discuss and decide procedural matters for the Four Party plenary session, including the date, venue and agenda".

In theory, decisions should be quickly forthcoming. Now, as throughout the last 44 years, all parties would stand to benefit from a reduction in the tension which inevitably accompanies the huge armed forces based on either side of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) which separates North and South Korea.

Now, too, in theory at least, the time is ripe for North Korea to abandon some of the intransigence which has characterized its security posture in the past. The North's economy is no longer a socialist showcase but is instead in a ramshackle state. A famine looms, and parts of the half-nation are already in the grip of it.

The dire straits in which the North Korean people are placed has won little sympathy from the outside world mainly as a result of the political intransigence and military assertiveness displayed by the North's hardline regime.

The United States and South Korea are perfectly willing to provide increased aid and investment if the Cold War atmosphere is radically reduced. The rest of the world will almost certainly feel greater sympathy for the North Korean plight if some flexibility is quickly displayed at the negotiating table.

All that has to be agreed is the date for peace treaty negotiations, the venue and the agenda (reduction of forces on the DMZ, then the peace treaty itself).

In practice it will come as a complete, though welcome, shock if North Korea quickly displays an accommodating approach.

Much more likely, time will be taken as the North revives and repeats its longtime argument that the peace treaty should be between the North and the United States only.

On the one hand, Pyongyang has always maintained that its socialist paradise is the only legitimate Korean state on the peninsula.

On the other hand, the North Koreans can point to the fact that South Korea was not a signatory to the Armistice, which was only signed by North Korea's Marshal Kim Il-sung, China's commander Marshal Peng Teh-huai, and the United Nations commander, U.S. General Mark Clark.

The South Koreans did not sign the armistice because they refused to agree to the division of Korea. Because of this refusal, the North Koreans formally terminated their participation in the armistice institutions in 1993 when a South Korean was appointed to represent the United Nations Command at the Military Armistice Commission.

The Americans, as ever, are hopeful that the North Koreans have been forced by circumstances into a change of heart. The South Koreans are much more suspicious that any North Korean negotiating tactics will in fact indicate a more positive peace- seeking strategy.

Whatever else they do, the North Koreans will probably use any chance they get to try and drive a wedge between the U.S. and the South Koreans. It remains to be seen if China will use the talks to display more clearly to East Asia and the wider world that it really does seek regional peace and stability.