S. Korea's hope horror for North

S. Korea's hope horror for North

By Bill Tarrant

SEOUL (Reuters): It is South Korean President Kim Dae-jung's dream to witness reunions among family members, separated when the Korean peninsula was divided into communist North and capitalist South after World War II.

It is one of North Korea's worst nightmares.

Just as they did 14 months ago, talks in Beijing between the rival Koreas over humanitarian aid broke up over the issue of family reunions.

In one of the most emotional issues left from the 1950-1953 Korean War, millions of now elderly family members are stranded on either side of the heavily militarized armistice line dividing the peninsula.

"The family reunion issue is the most important pending goal in our contacts with the North," President Kim declared last week before flying to Washington for talks about North Korea with President Bill Clinton.

But the last thing North Korea wants to see is a bunch of prosperous-looking South Koreans, plump grandchildren in tow, meeting kin across the border whose diet includes bark and grass and whose own children's growth has likely been stunted by malnutrition after four years of famine-like conditions.

That sort of meeting would never come to pass, of course.

"North Korea would allow a limited number of families with strong loyalties to the regime," said Moon Chung-in, director of the Unification Institute at Yonsei University. "They'd be well- dressed and well-fed and praising (North Korean leader) Kim Jong- il's leadership."

Kim Dae-jung's sunshine policy of engagement is based on the idea North Korea can be gradually reformed by increased contacts -- business, social, sporting and cultural -- with the South.

His model is the detente policy of the United States and its NATO allies which gradually succeeded in tearing down the Iron Curtain, symbolized by the Berlin Wall, a decade ago.

That ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet bloc.

And that's exactly what Kim Jong-il fears.

The Stalinist regime in the North is buttressed by a climate of fear about the external threat posed by the "U.S. imperialists" and their "puppets" in the south, analysts say.

Hardly a day goes by without some bombast in the state-run media about the latest plans for a U.S. invasion, whose code name North Korea says, is "Operation Plan 5027-98".

The official Korean Central News Agency on Monday, for instance, published an "open questionnaire" to President Kim Dae- jung, accusing him of starting last month's naval clash in the Yellow Sea to trigger a wider war.

"The government...in league with the U.S. and Japan...is attempting to ignite a war while putting the operation plan 5027- 98 into practice with the (Yellow Sea) conflict as an occasion," it said.

Seoul says Northern patrol boats crossed the Yellow Sea boundary and after an eight-day standoff fired on its warships.

One North Korean torpedo boat was sunk, several other gunboats were damaged and as many as 80 North Koreans were reportedly killed in the most serious naval clash between the two countries since the Korean war.

One theory doing the rounds in Seoul is Pyongyang provoked the clash so it could have an excuse to scuttle the family reunion issue in Beijing.

North Korea came to Beijing because it desperately needed the 200,000 tones of fertilizer for its ravaged farmland that Seoul has offered in exchange for talks on reunions. South Korea has delivered 100,000 tones.

"It's kind of a catch-22 situation for the North," prof. Moon said. "They want the fertilizer but they have to do something on reunions."