COMMENTARY
Korean journey to peace is slow
By Tom Plate
Peace on the strategically vital Korean peninsula still has a long way to go, but we may be getting there, step by halting step.
Associated Press
Step one is positive input from the Bush administration. Praise to the White House for ditching its nasty "thunder and lightning policy" toward North Korea, as it announced acceptance of Pyongyang's offer to resume official talks. That takes the administration a distance away from the president's "axis of evil" speech, which threw an immense dark cloud over South Korean President Kim Dae-jung's "sunshine policy" and went over with the South Korean public like the proverbial lead balloon.
Laser beams, a giant soccer ball mark the World Cup countdown in Seoul: Cooperation between Japan and South Korea in sports could grow to strategic links with profound regional implications.
In fairness to Washington, North Korea is one tough nut to crack. You don't have to be a parochial American who travels
beyond his ranch only rarely to despise a regime whose Communist-cockeyed policies have led to malnutrition and starvation and whose idea of diplomacy is to hide behind a rock, show the muzzle of a gun and shout stupid running-dog slogans.
Poor Kim Dae-jung, who has to leave office next year: In more than four years as the country's second non-military president, he has gotten precious little in return from Pyongyang.
But maybe his "sunshine policy," which helped garner him a Nobel Peace prize, is starting to warm North Korea just a little. In accordance with the North's promise to beam at least a slight ray of sunshine southward, hundreds of North and South Korean families have been meeting at a North Korean tourist site for long-delayed reunions. And so the clouds parted — at least a little.
His own people evidently didn't think too much of the judgment of the Nobel prize committee, but perhaps Korean public opinion will begin to put his flaws into more favorable perspective as Kim heads into the home stretch of his presidency, riding the excitement as co-host of the 2002 World Cup, starting soon in both Japan and South Korea.
These two nations and cultures have been at odds for decades, not least because of Japan's occupation of the peninsula, as well as its truculent reluctance to own up to the brutality of that 40-year-long nightmare.
Big historic divides and rifts die hard. Yet they can, eventually, die. Japanese investment in South Korea, whose economy is predicted to grow 4 percent to 6 percent, perhaps second this year in Asia only to China's, is on the upswing.
Tourism between the two countries is skyrocketing. And the two are cooperating closely — and so far effectively — as co-hosts of the 2002 World Cup, which for many Asians is the equivalent of three U.S. Super Bowls with a March Madness or two thrown in for frenzy.
Should a serious Japanese-Korean modus vivendi emerge from this cooperation and investment, the implications for Asia — and America — would be staggering.
U.S. fears of a giant China lording over the region could ease, allowing Washington to notch down the rhetoric — and even shave away at costly U.S. troop deployments.
Alas, the prospect of President Kim Dae-jung and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi going to Pyongyang together today seems more inconceivable than Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger going to China.
The recent family reunions took the Korean peninsula only part-way. To go the full distance, dramatic diplomacy is needed. A Nixon-to-China trip to Pyongyang for Koizumi and Kim — the leaders of modern Japan and Korea — is the stuff of which long epochs of peace can be made.
Tom Plate, a columnist with The Honolulu Advertiser and the South China Morning Post, is a professor at UCLA. Reach him at tplate@ucla.edu. He also has a spot on the Web.
