More stick, less carrot to N. Korea

By Edward Neilan

TOKYO (JP): Sipping ginseng tea recently while watching the morning fog burn off across Tokyo Bay, I set aside the newspapers carrying dispatches from Korea.

I thought I heard an echo from yesteryear.

The old, white-haired man thrust his fist into the air, his face showing his notorious passion and obduracy, and shouted the slogan twice: "March north! March north!"

Late former South Korean president Syngman Rhee used that rallying cry, as much as anything, to get official Americans to pay attention to the fact that it was Seoul's country, not Washington's.

He had infuriated the United States brass at the end of the Korean War by unilaterally releasing North Korean prisoners-of- war who wanted freedom instead of repatriation to the north. Chinese and North Korean negotiators, typically, had insisted that what the communist governments wanted to do with the prisoners should take precedence over what the prisoners themselves wanted: freedom in the south.

As North Korean continues to control negotiations with South Korea and the United States through "food diplomacy", demanding more food as the admission ticket to four-way talks, we are reminded that incoming food and funds go first to North Korea's military.

Gen. John Shalikashvili, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the North continues to spend large amounts of money on military exercises so it can remain a threat.

It has played the game of "threat and talk" for nearly half a century.

Starving children in North Korea are somehow held up as the responsibility of South Korea and the United States. The patience of those two governments is as awesome as it is responsible, given that Pyongyang does its best to drive a wedge between the two. If Pyongyang can somehow establish formal diplomatic ties with the U.S., it may keep its fantasy game alive a few more years.

Meanwhile, experts continue to disagree on the question of food aid to North Korea.

"Humanitarianism means helping out people who are in trouble and dying," said Yasuhiko Yoshida, a professor of international relations at Saitama University. He advocates opening Japan's rice stocks and sending one million tons of rice on humanitarian grounds. He added that he is not happy about North Korea' privileged class alone enjoying comfortable lives and the undemocratic nature of the country.

But the three-time visitor to North Korea and a former International Atomic Energy Agency information official told the Japan Times (April 17, 1997) "it is imperative to help people who are starving."

The opposite view is taken by Katsumi Sato, head of Modern Korea Institute, a private think tank. He criticizes, particularly, massive remittances sent from Japan to North Korea each month by relatives and sympathizers, in effect propping up the regime.

Sato, whose blunt opinions have often angered the pro- Pyongyang General Association of Korean Residents in Japan (Chongryun) went on to say "Stop all international assistance and the North Korean government will collapse within a month. We should then assist a new government."

Sato is my man. He could sit at the same table with Syngman Rhee and Park Chung Hee and Alberto Fujimori. Set a place for Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

In the whirl of international bureaucracy and political pressures from far away, it is hard to get things done.

My own simplistic scenario for the end of the nearly five- decades-old Korean War is that North Korean Kim Jong-il should present his sword to South Korean President Kim Young-sam at Panmunjom one hot August afternoon. Then the North Korean people would be liberated and the journey to democratization could begin. The charade has gone on long enough.

To get from here to there, perhaps a little more stick and a little less carrot is required. I find myself agreeing with the Gaimusho (Foreign Ministry) that Pyongyang needs to account for earlier Japanese kidnap victims before massive food aid flows to the North. This is not a volleyball game but the ball is in the North's court.

"March north!" It has a nice sound, a political rallying cry for figurative action, not literal. Let's turn up the decibels on our side.

Of course, it is presumed that word has reached Kim Jong-il's bunker that if he tries a preemptive military attack on whatever premise, the show is over.

The writer is a free-lance journalist based in Tokyo.

Window: If Pyongyang can somehow establish formal diplomatic ties with the U.S., it may keep its fantasy game alive a few more years.