The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (42 page)

In the spring of 1991, Kim’s other major ally, China, had forced him to reverse his long-standing opposition to dual entry with South Korea to the United Nations. Now Beijing was moving toward normalization of relations with Seoul. When Kim visited China in October, he was advised to open up economically as China had done and to undertake a rapid settlement with South Korea in the interest of regional peace and stability. Chinese leaders also urged him to give credence to Bush’s announcement that American tactical nuclear weapons were being withdrawn and to resolve the concern over the North Korean nuclear program as soon as possible. Even while Kim was still in China, his Foreign Ministry issued a statement welcoming the US move. After returning from Beijing, Kim convened a Politburo meeting, from which emerged new efforts at reconciliation with the South and the world outside.

Simultaneously, South Korea had been shifting toward a more conciliatory posture regarding the North in preparation for the final year of Roh Tae Woo’s presidency. High-level talks led by the two prime ministers visiting each other’s capitals had already begun in the fall of 1990. In a private conversation with the visiting North Korean prime minister in September 1990, Roh sent word to Kim Il Sung of his desire for a summit meeting as a step toward improved North-South relations. Kim responded, during the visit to Pyongyang of the South Korean prime minister the following month, that he was willing to meet if there was something important to be achieved, but not under other circumstances. After a year’s hiatus, which in the view of a senior South Korean participant, Lim Dong Won, was caused by the South’s tactical miscalculations, the talks resumed.

Starting with the October 22–25, 1991, prime ministerial meeting in Pyongyang, there was rapid progress. Before the southerners went home, the two Koreas had agreed in principle to work out and adopt at their next meeting a single document setting the terms for broad-ranging accord. When the northern team came to Seoul on December 10, it was prepared to compromise and, as southern delegates saw it, ready to sign an agreement. “This time we brought the seal with us,” said a visitor from Pyongyang, referring to the official stamp used to authenticate documents in Asia. This was an astonishing change from the months and years of sterile negotiations in which both sides had refused to budge from fixed positions.

The result of three days of intense bargaining was by far the most important document adopted by the two sides since the North-South joint statement of July 4, 1972. In the “Agreement on Reconciliation, Nonaggression and Exchanges and Cooperation Between the South and the North,” adopted and initialed on December 13, 1991, the two Koreas came closer than ever before to accepting each other’s regime as a legitimate government with a right to exist. The document portrayed the two Koreas as “recognizing that their relations, not being a relationship between states, constitute a special interim relationship stemming from the process toward unification.” The guidelines of the “special interim relationship,” if implemented, would have meant a nearly complete cessation of the conflict on the peninsula and a reversal of decades of policy on both sides:

       
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mutual recognition of each other’s systems and an end to interference, vilification, and subversion of each other

       
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mutual efforts “to transform the present state of armistice into a solid state of peace,” with continued observance of the armistice until this was accomplished

       
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nonuse of force against each other and implementation of confidence-building measures and large-scale arms reductions

       
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economic, cultural, and scientific exchanges; free correspondence between divided families; and the reopening of roads and railroads that had been severed at the North-South dividing line

Three separate subcommittees on political and military activities and on exchanges were authorized in the agreement, to work out the many details for implementing the accord.

North Korea refused to deal with the issue of its nuclear program in the reconciliation agreement but promised to work on a separate North-South nuclear accord before the end of the year. This was facilitated on
December 18, when Roh announced publicly that the American nuclear weapons had been withdrawn.

On December 24, at a North Korean Workers Party Central Committee plenum, Kim Il Sung praised the recent North-South nonaggression pact as “the first epochal event” since the start of inter-Korean diplomacy in 1972. The meeting, the first party plenum centered on North-South issues in nine years, ended with a public report that contained no criticism of South Korea or the United States.

The party meeting was significant for two other reasons, which may have been connected. Kim Jong Il, the son and designated successor to the Great Leader, was named supreme commander of the DPRK armed forces. And in parallel moves that could not have been made without approval of Kim Jong Il and at least acquiescence by the armed forces commanders he now headed, the plenum apparently gave party clearance for international inspection of the country’s nuclear program and for a bilateral nuclear accord to be worked out with the South. Selig Harrison of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was later told by a variety of North Korean and foreign observers that the plenum marked a conditional victory for pragmatists who argued for making a deal—compromising the nuclear issues in return for economic benefits and normalization of relations with the United States and Japan. Hard-line elements, according to Harrison, agreed to suspend the weapons program, but not to terminate it—being confident that US and Japanese help would not be forthcoming.

The promised nuclear negotiations between the two Koreas convened at Panmunjom on December 26. As with nonaggression accords, the North’s negotiators had instructions to make a deal. On the second day of the talks, they appeared with a written proposal incorporating most of the sweeping South Korean language and dropping several earlier propositions that were unacceptable to the South. At one point, the usually standoffish North Korean negotiators woke up their South Korean counterparts late at night for a series of one-on-one talks that made important progress. Some sensitive negotiations took place in whispered conversations in the corners of the meeting room, away from the formal conference table, with its microphones hooked up to offices in the two capitals.

A complicated issue for both Koreas was nuclear reprocessing. They were acutely conscious that nearby Japan operated reprocessing facilities for its civil nuclear program under arrangements with the United States that predate the time when Washington had focused on reprocessing as a proliferation risk. Some in the South were eager not to foreclose the option of a future reprocessing plant on economic grounds and, some Americans suspected, as a potential source of weapons material. However, Roh agreed
under heavy US pressure to an unqualified commitment to forgo nuclear reprocessing, on the grounds that it would better position the South to bargain against the North’s then-suspected reprocessing capability. As for the North, the giant structure being built to house its reprocessing plant at Yongbyon was nearing completion—the most recent US intelligence estimate was that it could be producing plutonium by mid-1992—but this did not seem to faze Pyongyang’s negotiators when agreeing to ban reprocessing. When Representative Stephen Solarz (D-NY) met Kim Il Sung on December 18 in Pyongyang, the Great Leader declared, pounding the table at the end of a long and contentious meeting, “We have no nuclear reprocessing facilities!”

Under the bilateral deal as negotiated, the South agreed to cancel the 1992 US-ROK Team Spirit military exercise in return for North Korean willingness to permit outside inspection of its nuclear facilities at Yongbyon. In retrospect, cancellation of Team Spirit was an ROK concession of crucial importance to the North’s powerful military, which had consistently resisted compromises affecting the nuclear weapons program.

In the final agreement signed on December 31, both North and South pledged not to “test, manufacture, produce, receive, possess, store, deploy or use nuclear weapons” and not to “possess nuclear reprocessing and uranium enrichment facilities.” Moreover, they agreed to reciprocal inspections of facilities of the other side, to be arranged and implemented by a Joint Nuclear Control Commission.

To achieve the agreement, North Korean negotiators were uncharacteristically willing to compromise, suggesting high-level instructions to do so. While the South was exultant at the results, some of its officials felt in retrospect they had pushed the North too hard. Riding together in a car from Pyongyang to Kaesong nine months later, after signing protocols flowing from the December accords, DPRK major general Kim Yong Chul (who remained one of the North’s key military negotiators into the mid-2000s, before being given an action-oriented assignment as head of the Reconnaissance General Bureau, charged with anti-ROK operations) complained to his counterpart, ROK major general Park Yong Ok, that 90 percent of the language originated on the southern side, and therefore “this is your agreement,
not
our agreement.” At that moment, the South Korean officer began to doubt whether the concessions that had been made could be actually implemented.

At the time of the signing of the agreement on New Year’s Eve, however, Kim Il Sung portrayed the North-South nuclear pact as a great victory. In a display of his enthusiasm, he dispatched a helicopter to bring his negotiators home from Panmunjom to Pyongyang in triumphant style. At the dawn of 1992, the
Economist
, the British weekly on international affairs, proclaimed that “the Korean peninsula looked a little safer this week.”

MEETING IN NEW YORK

Three weeks into 1992, the United States rolled out its biggest contribution to the positive trend: a bilateral American–North Korean meeting at the political level. Pyongyang had long sought direct discussions with senior levels in Washington, seeing the United States as the heart and head of the West, the superpower overlord of South Korea and Japan. Pyongyang also saw relations with the United States as an important victory in its zero-sum game with the South. And most important, Kim Il Sung sought a relationship with Washington, hoping the United States would act as a balancer and protector against what he feared were potential threats to North Korean security from either China or Russia.

In the fall of 1991, while exploring the range of incentives and disincentives that the United States could wield with the North, Washington officials had begun to discuss the possibility of a high-level meeting. The idea was highly contentious within the administration, but its advocates won approval to discuss it with the South Koreans, who approved it on the explicit condition that it would be only a onetime session that would not lead to further talks. Kim Chong Whi, Roh’s national security adviser, as well as State Department experts suggested that the meeting be with Kim Yong Sun, the relatively freewheeling Workers Party secretary for international affairs, who was close to Kim Jong Il.

In December American officials informed the North Koreans, through the US-DPRK political counselor channel in Beijing, that a high-level meeting might be held if Pyongyang agreed to meet its nuclear inspection obligations. In the opinion of several US officials, the promise that such a meeting represented was an important factor in the North’s decision to conclude the nuclear accord with the South and in its preparations to sign a nuclear safeguards agreement with the IAEA.

Shortly after 10:00 on January 21, 1992, Kim Yong Sun and several aides arrived at the US Mission to the United Nations to meet an American delegation headed by Arnold Kanter, the undersecretary of state for political affairs (and the third-ranking official in the State Department). Due to the intense antagonism to North Korea and the unprecedented nature of the meeting, there had been fierce debates within the administration not only about whether to have the meeting but also about what Kanter could say, and even whether he could host a lunch.
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The bureaucratic compromise, according to Kanter, was that “the meeting would happen, but I would take a tough line.”

Kanter’s “talking points”—normally stripped-down notes of the main lines of presentation—were reviewed and approved in advance by an interagency committee and then by the South Korean and Japanese governments. They became virtually a script he had to read, though he did so in the most conciliatory and inoffensive way possible. While urging North Korea to permit IAEA inspections and to give up the nuclear weapons option, Kanter was forbidden to spell out what North Korea could expect in return. He was specifically not permitted even to mention the word
normalization
of American–North Korean relations. Although he referred vaguely to future meetings between the two countries as the principal incentive for Pyongyang, Kanter was required by the arrangement with Seoul to rule out follow-up meetings of this group, making clear that the session itself was not the start of a negotiating process.

The well-tailored Kim Yong Sun, who was wearing a more expensive suit than any of the Americans, impressed Kanter as shrewd and worldly, although he had never been in the United States before. Although North Korea might be a hermit kingdom, Kanter concluded, his interlocutor was no hermit. Referring repeatedly to his intimacy with the Dear Leader, Kim Yong Sun said Kim Jong Il was now in charge of North Korea’s foreign relations as well as the military. In the meeting and in a lengthy private talk with Kanter, Kim Yong Sun pushed hard for an agreement in principle to another meeting, or at least a joint statement at the conclusion of this one. When both were refused, he seemed disappointed but not angry. Later in the year, as tension mounted between Pyongyang and Washington, Kim sent a personal message to Kanter through the Beijing channel, appealing for another meeting—but in the midst of an election campaign, this was rejected by the administration.