Here's a correspondence from B.J. Lee, Newsweek's reporter in South Korea:
Ostensibly, last week’s summit between South Korean President Roh
Moo Hyun and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il produced a major progress
in bringing the two hostile states together. In the second-ever summit
since their division in 1945, the two Koreas agreed to seek peace on
the Korean peninsula, by holding more frequent summits and pursuing
cooperation from the U.S. and China. The two Koreas are still
technically at war because no peace treaty was signed after the
1950-1953 Korean War. The South also promised to help revive the
North’s impoverished economy, by building roads, railroads, shipyards
and a special economic zone there. The two parties also agreed to set
up a joint fishing zone in a disputed sea area and start a freight
train service across the heavily armed border remaining as the world’s
last Cold War frontier. “North and South Korea shared the view they
must end the current armistice and build a permanent peace regime,"
said the joint declaration signed by the two leaders.
But the promises are all too familiar. As early as 1992, the two
Koreas signed a similar pact but its implementation has been at a
snail’s pace. President Roh himself confessed to “a wall of mistrust"
between the two Koreas. Any inter-Korean cooperation and reconciliation
is closely linked to progress in multinational talks on resolving the
North’s dangerous nuclear program. Although the six-party talks in
Beijing moved forward last week with the North promising to disable its
key nuclear facilities by year’s end, there are still many hurdles
before Pyongyang, which tested a nuclear warhead a year ago, completely
dismantle its nuclear program. The question still remains whether the
North would honestly report all its nuclear facilities and materials.
“A peace regime on the Korean peninsula is unlikely until the nuclear
issue is fully resolved,?says Lee Jung Min at Seoul’s Yonsei
University. “But Pyongyang has no intention of giving up its nuclear
weapons.?
There are other concerns. President Roh has only four months left in
office, meaning most of the accords have to be implemented by his
successor. But the conservative opposition camp currently enjoys
massive leads over the liberal ruling party in opinion polls.
The opposition group that has been critical of Roh’s soft policy
toward the North will probably scale back, if not scrap, a lot of the
agreements, if it wins in the December presidential election. That
would sadden Roh who is eager to make the summit his last legacy.
Unlike in the first summit in 2000 when Seoul paid half a billion
dollars to Kim under the table in return for agreeing to the meeting,
Roh apparently paid no cash this time. Instead, Roh pledged massive
business projects in the North that could altogether cost billions of
dollars ?a burden South Korean taxpayers have to bear. Kim Jong Il may
hate capitalism, but he knows how to capitalize on opportunities.
