Diplomacy at $3.99 a Minute
Update: My initial estimate appears to have been a bit on the low side:
Inter-Korean talks are pricey, with the current four-day session costing South Korea 400 million won ($395,804). Seoul would like to do it cheaper, officials say.
That comes to $68.72 per minute, not including any bribes or fertilizer shipments.
Original Post:
I was invited to go to hear Paula Dobriansky, the Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs, speak at the Hudson Institute on Monday, but I was just too busy at the office. As a result, I got to miss her say “outpost of tyranny.” The Chosun Ilbo is concerned for the future of diplomacy, but it need not be. Diplomatic semantics with a tough, calculating power like North Korea are much like “adult chat” lines: both are costly in time and money; both are mostly for those who have trouble forming meaningful relationships; and in both cases, the supplicant knows down deep that in his arousal, he is so very alone.
Incidentally, I do not speak from personal experience. Glad to have cleared that up.
The downside, as I’ve acknowledged, is that rhetoric–or as it’s known in South Dakota, “the truth”–could give P’yang an excuse to walk away and blame us for a breakdown (which is inevitable the moment we say “about those inspections”). That, of course, is an argument that has applied with diminishing force for the last decade, and isn’t terribly compelling in the retrospective light of North Korea’s intransigence, and the fact that it was still the United States that took the blame on the Korean Street. This criticism also implies some rational connection between our words and North Korea’s posture, which there really isn’t.
Just over a week ago, President Bush invited gulag survivor Kang Chol-Hwan to the White House and openly took pleasure in how much the very fact of the meeting would piss Kim Jong Il off. Days later, the latter proceeded to oddly describe W. as a “an interesting man, a good man, who could have a good conversation,” odd because conversation–even in his own native language–is not a skill for which our President is famed. Meanwhile, Mr. Appeasement himself, Chung Dong-Young, has returned from P’yang with bupkes. There is one small occasion for joy: Chung did at least raise, ever so meekly, the issue of accounting for long-held South Korean POWs, such as those who visited Washington last April.
Broader questions about human rights for the North Korean people, predictably, did not come up during Chung’s meeting with the North Koreans. Probably the most compelling human rights issue, given some of the alarming new reports about the return of famine, is improving fairness and efficiency in the distribution of food aid. How compelling? One senior defector gives us a preview of what might be in store:
“So many died at the time that there weren’t enough coffins for the corpses, so they used large steel pipes to hold dozens of bodies each and take them to the hills for burial. Once the bodies were unloaded they took the pipes back,” Kim said. “In 1996 and 97, people were stepping on bodies in the streets. In train station squares on some winter mornings there were dead people on the benches. Many died on trains and their bodies were dumped at the stations.” He said there were “no prospects” North Korea’s economy will recover because of the scarcity of raw materials and the extreme shortage of electricity.
The entire thing is well worth reading, despite the fact that Kim Dae Joong (the columnist, not the president) wrote it. And although Kim’s death toll figures are well above the worst-case estimates of death toll figures, the hideous picture he paints above is consistent with what Andrew Natsios (now Administrator of USAID) described in The Great North Korean Famine.
To sum up: showing the North Koreans respect gets you bupkes. Scaring the North Koreans gets you a slightly more polite version of bupkes. Getting real results would probably require scaring them much more than we have so far, but North Korea could easily prove me wrong. There is absolutely no legitimate reason for North Korea to continue closing itself to completely transparent food aid distribution. An opening that benefits North Korea’s hungry–including its gulag inmates–would be a real result that would speak volumes about its sincerity and deflate the most important human rights concern about this regime.
Photo: WFP / Gerald Bourke