Asia view: War-torn past still mires two Koreas

By VAUGHAN YARWOOD

New Zealand's last remaining diplomatic black hole in the Asia-Pacific region was plugged last week with the announcement by Foreign Minister Phil Goff that official links had been established with North Korea.

The move is part of a concerted strategy among Western countries of engagement with Pyongyang to help smooth the reconciliation process on the war-torn peninsula.

Mr Goff was at pains to avoid the initiative being reduced to an empty gesture, and stressed to his North Korean counterpart the need for meaningful progress on issues such as arms control and atomic energy safeguards.

He also expressed a hope that economic ties between the two countries would grow as North Korea's economy strengthened.

Neither is likely any time soon.

For one thing, North Korea's industrial base is rapidly collapsing.

Eventually, new industries may migrate north from South Korea, as they have to mainland China from Hong Kong. But for now the outlook is bleak.

In the 1960s, this could not have been predicted. North Korea then was more industrialised than the agricultural South and politically more stable.

But the collapse of the Soviet Union cut the economic lifeline on which the reclusive North depended. In 1996 devastating floods swept away vast tracts of arable land and ushered in an era of famine, in which an estimated three million people have died.

Pyongyang's determination to resist Chinese-style revisionism has been coloured by centuries of foreign domination.

Set like a dagger amid the three great powers of China, Russia and Japan, the peninsula has long been a potential springboard for attacks by one country against the others. Hence the North's siege mentality and its enthusiasm for charismatic leadership, military force and doctrinal purity.

From that perspective, South Korean leader Kim Dae Jung's conciliatory sunshine policy was always going to look subversive, as was the rather obvious ploy by Hyundai's crusading founder, Chung Ju Yung, to woo the Stalinist North through his tourism venture.

Both were less successful than their supporters might claim. North Korean leader Kim Jong Il has proved adept at extracting concessions from the West without giving much in return.

Even last year's agreement to boost the economy throughout the peninsula by developing economic integration has been interpreted by Pyongyang as a willingness by the South to divert resources north without any reciprocal obligation.

In the face of widespread impatience with the North's intransigence and growing concern about the likely cost to the South of reunification - estimated at up to $US3170 billion - Kim's sunshine policy now looks shaky.

Moreover, with the United States adopting a hard-line attitude to the North, and with Chung dead and Hyundai in financial chaos, the South Korean leader has lost key backers for his programme.

Minor gains have been made, including agreements on the rebuilding of a railway and construction of a highway linking the two states.

But the North remains wary of any talk about reciprocity or engagement, seeing them as signalling the South's desire to absorb the North.

The underlying obstacle to reconciliation, however, is the North's Cold War strategy of reunification by military conquest.

In recent years, it has merely adapted the existing plan to new circumstances and has earned a living, of sorts, by military extortion through the manufacturing of regional instability.

Just as the South strove to build its businesses into conglomerates too big to fail, so Kim Jong Il may be gambling that North Korea can be made too lethal to fail.

But the fate of Daewoo, Hyundai and other chaebols has shown that gigantism is no guarantee of survival. The same lesson will inevitably be learned about military brinkmanship.

But perhaps not soon enough for Mr Goff.