N. Korea aims to destroy armistice (2)

By Harvey Stockwin

This is the second of two articles on the North Korean strategy to demolish the armistice agreement and the United States' deficient response.

HONG KONG (JP): When a U.S. helicopter was downed last December, the U.S. had to rely on informal contacts at Panmunjom rather than the formal Military Armistice Commission machinery. It sought to cover up the absence of the latter, by evidently talking to news agency reporters about mythical meetings of a "United Nations Military Armistice Commission" when, in reality, there is no such institution.

The Clinton Administration, lopsidedly concerned with the problems posed by North Korean nuclear proliferation, appointed a proliferation specialist, Ambassador Robert Gallucci, to conduct negotiations with the North. As far as can be seen, Gallucci, not being well versed in Korean complexities, has never made an emphatic issue of the lengthening list of North Korean armistice infringements.

Consequently, by the time that the 45th anniversary of the outbreak of the 1950-53 Korean War rolled around, an utterly absurd situation had arisen: North Korea is getting free supplies of oil from the U.S. for its electricity grid. It has been promised two free nuclear reactors from a U.S.-Japanese-South Korean consortium, and is about to receive a gift of 150,000 tons of rice from South Korea and probably 300,000 tons from Japan -- and yet the North Koreans still continued to assault a major South Korean, American, and Japanese interest: the preservation of the Korean armistice. The North Koreans also still refuse to allow International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections of its former nuclear installations, which it claims to have closed while it awaits the gift reactors.

Equally questionable, no sooner had North Korea agreed to accept South Korean emergency rice supplies, that North Korea returned to its basic strategy of trying to isolate South Korea. The North Koreans insist that the armistice must be abrogated in order that it be replaced by a peace treaty between the U.S. and North Korea only.

In the North's view, it is the only legitimate Korean state, the sole Korean signatory of the armistice; because South Korea is an illegitimate "puppet" of the United States, it is fit and proper for the peace treaty to be a bilateral agreement between Pyongyang and Washington. Additionally, all U.S. troops must be withdrawn from South Korea as part of that treaty.

Hence, in the light of all this North Korean intransigence, the imperative need for either President Kim Young-sam or President Clinton to conduct themselves on the 45th anniversary as imagined at the beginning of this article.

President Kim could have passed the message that North Korea could either abrogate the armistice or receive free rice -- but it could not do both.

President Clinton could have bluntly laid it down that free oil, free nuclear reactors, and free rice required a basic minimum of North Korean diplomatic reciprocity, without which all three offers would be withdrawn.

It is faintly possible that there was some kind of diplomatic demarche with the North Koreans. News of their threat to abrogate was released on June 24. Also on that day, the first South Korean rice ship's departure was delayed for a day, ostensibly, according to the South Koreans, to suit North Korean "sensitivities".

Whatever happened in secrecy, the North did not carry out their threat and formally abrogate the armistice on the anniversary.

Instead it merely took the opportunity to reiterate its hard- line strategy in the pages of the Korean Workers Party daily newspaper Rodong Sinmun: "The situation urgently demands that a new peace mechanism be set up on the Korean Peninsula, so that arms buildup and recurrence of war may be prevented, and a durable peace and security be preserved".

Of course, the peace treaty promised in the armistice agreement in 1953 should be pursued. The trouble is, North Korea refuses to accept the obvious: that the primary negotiators of any such treaty must now be South and North Korea -- and until they do this, the 1953 armistice must remain in place.

Meanwhile, the continuing North Korean threat to unilaterally abrogate the armistice poses at least three threats to Korean and regional security.

First, it could, by itself, mean an increase of tension in Korea, consequent upon the sustained hostility between the two heavily-armed Koreas.

Second, it could lead to a dangerous situation arising should any armed incidents happen along the demilitarized zone, as they are bound to do, given the high level of tension and military preparedness there.

Third, unless firmly resisted by the United Nations Command and the U.S., the abrogation of the armistice could only lead to further North Korean intransigence. North Korea may be unable to feed its own people, but it still keeps one million heavily armed troops within a few miles of the armistice line which it threatens to reject.

At least the consistent North Korean strategy of hostility and intransigence is predictable and transparent.

It can be argued that the haphazard and unpredictable non- strategy of the United States is the real threat to peace. Mired in, even obsessed with the cliche that the "Cold War is over" the United States has rendered a sloppy and dangerous diplomatic performance in the Cold War in which it is still deeply entangled.

Window: Mired in the cliche that the "Cold War is over", the United States has rendered a sloppy and dangerous diplomatic performance in the Cold War in which it is still deeply entangled.