Summit reactions fall along political lines

The news that South and North Korea are committed to establishing a peace regime on the peninsula and finally ending the Korean War, lent an air of relief and cautious optimism to an inter-Korean summit that seemed fraught with uncertainty just a week ago.
Coupled with Wednesday’s announcement from Beijing of an implementation framework for disabling the North’s nuclear capability, it would seem that President Roh Moo-hyun’s risky gambit of holding a summit with Kim Jong-il as his term winds down has paid off.
“The summit produced better results than many earlier predicted, especially in economic cooperation and peace,” Kim Yeon-Chul, a professor at Korea University, told AFP.
Taking place just two months before a presidential election in which Roh’s liberal allies are trailing badly, reactions to the summit agreement also fell along predictable political lines.
Liberals hailed the meeting, calling it a “historic turnaround” in relations between the two countries. Conservatives, who largely opposed holding the summit and saw it as a political stunt by Roh, were more downbeat in their assessment.
“Calling for four-way talks to end the war is revolutionary,” enthused presidential hopeful Lee Hae-chan, a former prime minister running for the United New Democratic Party nomination.
UNDP hopeful Chung Dong-young, a former unification minister under Roh, said the agreement “will turn the divided Koreas back into a unified power.”
Lee Myung-bak, the Grand National Party candidate who is dominating the polls so far in the race for president, said Seoul dropped the ball on human rights and the nuclear issue.
“It is regretful that those two matters were not dealt with more thoroughly,” Lee said. North Korea, he added, made no fresh commitment to end its nuclear ambitions. “There should be no rush to make a peace declaration without nuclear dismantlement,” Lee said.
Other observers differed on who gained the most from the summit, with some feeling that Seoul did not get hard answers from Pyongyang on a number of questions.
“One of the agreements says that there will be frequent summit meetings to discuss pending issues, but it does not say when or whether Kim Jong-il will come to Seoul,” said Paik Hak-soon, a North Korea analyst at the Sejong Institute in Seoul.
Paik was encouraged by the agreement to create a zone of peace in the Yellow Sea, but he was disappointed that Seoul did not push Pyongyang further on denuclearization.
Yoo Ho-yeol, a professor of North Korean studies at Korea University, thought the agreement was clear on what the North was getting from the summit, while the benefits for the South remained vague.
“What the South gets has been defined as a subject to be discussed later,” said Yoo. He also said that the desire to seek talks with China and the United States to formally end the Korean War may not be realistic. “The United States has already said it will not come to the negotiating table unless the North drops its nuclear program,” Yoo said. He also questioned why there was a promise to hold military talks next month in Pyongyang, instead of at the traditional venue in the truce village of Panmunjeom.
The agreements on tourism and air travel seem substantive, said political scientist Jo Dong-ho from Ewha Womans University, but he worries that the economics of the decisions were overruled by political calculations. “These things should be approached from an economic viewpoint,” Jo said, accusing the government of focusing solely on the public relations value of the deals. “Building a direct air route to Mt. Paektu can be a burden, just like other projects we have pushed forward for the North.”

By Im Jang-hyuk JoongAng Ilbo / Lee Min-a Staff Writer