• English Site
• > World
• > North Korea

Kim Jong Il Basks in the Sunshine

North Korea Comes in from the Cold

By Wieland Wagner

After unsuccessfully trying to blackmail South Korea and the international community, North Korea's bizarre dictator Kim Jong Il is pursuing economic rapprochement with the South. Even the US appears to be forgetting North Korea's role in the "axis of evil."

The contrast couldn't be more jarring. The beach is filled with happy vacationers, children splash around in the water and loudspeakers blare a current hit song: "I saw you and I fell in love." But behind this summer idyll is a monstrous barbed wire fence that seals off a stretch of the South Korean coast several kilometers long, as if it were some giant POW camp.

For decades, residents of Sokcho, a beach town on South Korea's northeast coast, have lived with the absurd contradiction between two worlds that couldn't be more different. The Stalinist gulag of Kim Jong Il begins a few kilometers north of here. The fence is meant to deter the spies the 65-year-old North Korean dictator occasionally dispatches by sea to the capitalist South.

Every now and then, something happens that raises hopes that something could change about this Cold War, which has prevailed on the Korean peninsula for well over half a century. At the start of this year, South Korea tore down a large section of the fence and replaced it with a wide boardwalk, thereby extending the section of beach open to the public. Sokcho has been hopping ever since.

The border to the hostile North, on the 38th parallel, is become slightly more porous. Tensions between the two nations are relaxing in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that divides the two countries -- an area that former US President Bill Clinton once called "the scariest place on earth."

In May, for the first time since the Korean War, which raged from 1950 to 1953 and cemented the country's partition, the two hostile nations allowed a trial run of two train routes across the DMZ. In addition, about 1,000 South Korean tourists and businesspeople cross the heavily fortified border each day on two roads that run parallel to the rail line.

The North Korean despot is extracting a high price for all this rapprochement. In return for the historic trial run of trains across the border, Seoul had to promise the ailing communist regime $80 million worth of raw materials for the production of shoes, soap and textiles.

The two Koreas are taking an exceedingly cautious approach to easing tensions. Kim Jong Il has, at least temporarily, abandoned his attempts to blackmail his neighbor and the United States with nuclear threats. North Korea tested a nuclear weapon in October 2006, thereby joining the exclusive club of nuclear powers. In response to pressure from the United States and Japan, and even with the approval of North Korea's closest ally, China, the United Nations imposed economic sanctions on North Korea's megalomaniac Dr. Strangelove.

Despite -- or perhaps because of -- the increased tensions, South Korea has held fast to its "Sunshine" policy, which former President Kim Dae-jung launched, seeking to emulate former German Chancellor Willy Brandt's overtures to East Germany, known as Ostpolitik. The policy has essentially been continued by Kim's successor, Roh Moo-hyun, 61, even in the face of deep misgivings on the part of the United States.

But now even US President George W. Bush seems to have come to terms with North Korea's Kim, the sunglass-wearing, bouffant-sporting aficionado of Hollywood movies. It's something of an ironic twist, given that until recently North Korea was still considered a rogue nation and part of Bush's "axis of evil." The US president made it clear that he despised Kim, and he also showed little liking for South Korean President Roh, who was seeking reconciliation with the North.

But Bush sees the world differently now that Iraq has become a permanent fiasco. Easing tensions on the Korean peninsula could go down in history as one of the few foreign policy successes of the Bush administration.

First Washington saw to it that $25 million in assets frozen in a bank in Macau -- money Kim's mafia-like empire had allegedly earned with drug smuggling and US dollar counterfeiting operations -- were released. Then Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, the head of the US delegation to the six-party talks aimed at resolving the North Korean nuclear crisis, traveled to the North Korean capital Pyongyang for talks.

In return, the "Dear Leader" ordered his Yongbyon nuclear reactor shut down in July. And, as if to signal that there will soon be more to celebrate, he has even invited the New York Philharmonic to perform in Pyongyang. Perhaps it will be playing an overture to an historic reconciliation, because the United States is even considering normalizing diplomatic relations if North Korea truly abandons its nuclear program.

After many years, the United States and South Korea, both for different reasons, have a common interest in North Korea once again. The White House wants to prevent Kim from selling his weapons of mass destruction to terrorist networks like Al-Qaida, while the Blue House -- as the presidential palace in Seoul is known -- is eager to prevent a collapse in the North that could plunge the prosperous South into chaos.