South Korea Pushes to Engage the North, Rejecting U.S. Notion of a Quarantine

South Korea Pushes to Engage the North, Rejecting U.S. Notion of a Quarantine

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By JAMES BROOKE

Published: May 15, 2005

SEOUL, South Korea - For Bush administration strategists, a quarantine of North Korea means searching trucks, trains and planes for nuclear materials smuggled out of that impoverished country.

Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters

A truck crossing into South Korea from North Korea is disinfected to prevent the spread of bird flu.

But South Korea, an advocate of engagement, has already set up its own "quarantine" of the North. An outbreak of bird flu this spring at chicken farms near Pyongyang, North Korea's capital, forced South Korea to spray disinfectant on the steadily growing stream of buses and trucks crossing the border.

In April, when the two Koreas conducted their first zoo exchange, veterinarians quarantined the contribution from the Pyongyang Central Zoo - Asiatic black bears, African ponies and Siberian weasels.

This quarantine gap highlights a wider policy gap between Seoul and Washington.

Bush administration officials are frustrated with an 11-month-long boycott by North Korea of talks on its nuclear program and concerned that it may test a nuclear weapon. As a result, they are debating whether to seek United Nations authorization to empower nations to search cargoes leaving or entering North Korea for nuclear-related materials.

China, along with South Korea, one of the most important players in any quarantine of North Korea, is reluctant to pressure its neighbor to drop its nuclear weapons program. But if North Korea tests a nuclear weapon, Beijing's thinking could change rapidly.

South Korea, on the other hand, takes a different tack, seeking to enhance security on the divided peninsula by reaching out to North Korea, promoting trade, investment and economic interdependence. The quarantine of zoo animals imported from North Korea was adopted as a health measure to help nurture an experiment - road traffic between the Koreas.

Whether it is zoos trading llamas and hippopotamuses from South Korea for North Korean bears and lynx, or sending South Korean firefighting helicopters to douse fires on the northern side of the demilitarized zone that divides the countries, parts of the long fortified border now look less like the Berlin Wall and more and more like Swiss cheese.

"Pressuring them, containing them won't work, they won't budge," Ihm Seon Thaek, a South Korean bulldozer operator, said one recent morning as he awaited a bus to take him to his job at a new industrial park run by South Koreans in Kaesong, North Korea. "The solution is to have many Kaesongs. To have a lot of human contact."

Opened in December, Kaesong uses power and telephone service supplied by South Korea, and employs nearly 2,000 North Koreans and several hundred South Koreans. On the east coast, buses take an average of 19,000 South Korean tourists a month across the demilitarized zone to a North Korean resort - almost double the level of a year ago.

Cooperation between Communist North Korea and capitalist South Korea has progressed in fits and starts since a June 2000 summit meeting, when Kim Dae Jung, then president of South Korea, traveled to Pyongyang to meet Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader. Last July, relations went into a deep freeze, after North Korea protested South Korea's airlift to Seoul of about 460 North Korean defectors stranded in Vietnam.

But now, perhaps in reaction to the threat of increased American pressure, North Korea is responding again to Seoul's overtures. In March, in the highest level meeting since 2000, South Korea's prime minister, Lee Hae Chan, met with Kim Yong Nam, the No. 2 man in North Korea's hierarchy. Meeting at the Asia-Africa summit conference in Indonesia, the two posed amiably for photos and agreed to resume high-level talks.

In a first step, sports officials from the North and South met at Mount Kumgang, North Korea's mountain resort, to discuss the South's proposal to rebuild gymnasiums in the North and for both sides to create joint cheering sections for international sport events.

Then, a South Korean agricultural quarantine team drove to Kaesong to devise strategies to counter bird flu, an epidemic that forced North Korea to destroy 218,000 chickens this spring. Although the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has since announced that the bird flu outbreak had been contained, South Korea plans to ship to the North about $700,000 worth of testing kits, disinfectant sprayers and quarantine vehicles.

By 2008, South Koreans should be able to travel by train from Seoul to Beijing through North Korea to attend the Olympics, South Korea's unification minister, Chung Dong Young, recently told the National Assembly. Foreseeing no "technical" problems to traveling by rail through the North Korea, he noted that the South had submitted a plan to the North to spend $25 million to build six rail stations in North Korea.

Korean Talks Set to Resume

By The New York Times

TOKYO, May 14 - The two Koreas will renew their official dialogue on Monday, reviving a high level process frozen last summer after North Korea protested the airlift of about 460 North Korean asylum seekers from Vietnam to Seoul.

Meeting in Kaesong, North Korea, for two days, the delegations will be led by vice ministers. North Korea is expected to renew its appeal for 500,000 tons of fertilizer, almost double the annual level of recent years.

In turn, South Korea is expected to ask the North to return to six-nation talks over its nuclear program and for a resumption of Red Cross-supervised visits between family members separated since the Korean War ended in 1953.

At the same time, North Korea's state-run press attacked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. In recent days, Ms. Rice has declared that North Korea is a sovereign nation, while also noting that the United States has a strong military precence in the Western Pacific.

"Rice's reckless remarks self-expose that her loudmouthed recognition of the sovereign state and the like were nothing but a ruse to conceal the U.S. attempt at bringing down the regime of the D.P.R.K. and mislead the public opinion," a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry said in comments reported Saturday by the official Korean Central News Agency. North Korea's official name is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

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