The Progressive ResponseVolume 4, Number 45
Editor: Tom Barry (IRC)
Table of ContentsI. Updates and Out-TakesPROGRESS ON THE KOREAN PENINSULA?
II. Self-Determination Crisis WatchHIT LIST IN PAPUA
III. Outside the U.S.PRISONERS OF CONSCIENCE
IV. Letters and Comments
I. Updates and Out-TakesPROGRESS ON THE KOREAN PENINSULA?
It was a striking juxtaposition, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il sitting side by side at a display of mass gymnastics in Pyongyang this last October. "Spectacular and amazing," Albright called the coordinated movements of the 100,000 performers. When a picture of the August 1998 Taepodong rocket launch was displayed, Kim Jong Il confided that it would be his country’s first and last such launch. The North Korean leader was a man with whom she could do business, Albright concluded at the end of her visit. The U.S. and North Korea, technically at war for over fifty years, had never before been on quite such cordial speaking terms. North Korea has recently stepped up its efforts to normalize relations with the United States. In September, North Korea’s second-in-command Jo Myong Ro traveled to Washington to meet with top U.S. officials, including President Clinton. When Albright followed up on this initiative, Kim Jong Il kept a top-ranking Chinese delegation waiting in order to spend additional time with the U.S. delegation. Both Jo and Kim indicated that North Korea would be willing to negotiate away its long-range missile capacity. With Albright and Kim toasting each other’s health and with Clinton planning a visit to Pyongyang, the two countries seemed poised to end mutual hostilities. But then the Clinton administration squandered the momentum. The pool of U.S. journalists came away from Pyongyang with their worst prejudices confirmed, Albright scrambled to defend her reticence on human rights issues during her trip, pundits lambasted Clinton for overreaching himself in Korea to save his foreign policy legacy from the flames engulfing the Middle East, and follow-up bilateral talks in Malaysia failed to yield an agreement on the missile issue. With the U.S. presidential elections in a procedural cul-de-sac and Clinton’s visit to Pyongyang postponed, U.S.-North Korea relations remain stalemated. Albright’s visit to Pyongyang, while a step forward for U.S. policy, demonstrates how out of step the U.S. is in relation to many of its allies. Since the summer Britain, Germany, Canada, Belgium, and the Netherlands have all extended diplomatic recognition to Pyongyang, following earlier moves by Italy, Australia, and the Philippines. But the true path breakers have been the Koreans themselves. Since the June summit between the two Korean leaders, events seem to be moving rapidly on the Korean peninsula. In August and December, family members divided by the Korean War had tearful reunions in Seoul and Pyongyang. At the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics in September, the audience applauded wildly as North and South Korean athletes marched together. Economic agreements between the two countries have led to South Korea’s provision of 500,000 tons of grain to North Korea and the launching of a new currency to facilitate inter-Korean trade. The two countries have begun clearing mines in one part of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) to prepare for a rail link. The South Korean firm Hyundai is backing a major industrial complex near the North Korean city of Kaesong that will eventually be home to over a thousand firms. South Korean President Kim Dae Jung’s "engagement policy," coupled with his overall human rights record, in September even received the world’s highest honor, the Nobel Peace Prize. North-South reconciliation has certainly encountered speed bumps and setbacks. In September, South Korea repatriated 63 former North Korean spies, but North Korea has made no reciprocal move. Despite the new legal and political foundation for inter-Korean trade and investment, there has been no rush to invest in the North. The major chaebols (business conglomerates) are in trouble, with Daewoo bankrupt and Hyundai just barely holding on. The awarding of Kim Dae Jung’s Nobel prize led to a brief honeymoon period between the major South Korean political parties. But now the honeymoon is over, and the opposition has even accused the president of delivering the country into the hands of Kim Jong Il. The peace prize itself may impede rather than hasten reunification, since it was awarded to only one side, and, as Kim Dae Jung readily admits, the "summit was not just my own work." The U.S., South Korea, and Japan continue to coordinate their strategies toward North Korea. But as Kim Dae Jung has demonstrated, there is still considerable room for distinctive approaches. In its waning days, the Clinton administration can still improve on its policy of engaging North Korea. Toward a New Foreign Policy Before a new administration is sworn in, the Clinton administration can take an important step to build on the momentum of both the June inter-Korean summit and the October visit of the U.S. secretary of state. Bill Clinton should visit North Korea. The groundwork has been laid by Madeleine Albright, and Kim Dae Jung has encouraged Clinton to go. Considering how much power is vested in the top position in North Korea, a two-day discussion between the U.S. and North Korean leaders could make advances that months of lower-level negotiations might not achieve. Clinton need not agree to any package deals that won’t pass congressional approval. Even without a deal, the symbolic act--like his recent visit to Vietnam--would greatly enhance chances for peaceful reconciliation in the region. Tackling simple things first, the U.S. should rapidly conclude a deal that removes North Korea from the "terrorism list." A deal on the remaining obstacle--several Japanese Red Army hijackers hiding out in North Korea for the last 30 years--is within sight, if both the U.S. and Japan are willing to compromise. The Japanese authorities, who jailed one returning hijacker for only three years, are ready to negotiate. Once this obstacle is removed, the U.S. should separate politics from economics and help broker the significant economic aid that North Korea needs to rebuild its economy. The missile issue will take more time, but here too the U.S. can make progress. North Korea has indicated on several occasions that it is willing to cut a deal. In 1993, Israel offered $1 billion in investments and assistance, if North Korea canceled the sale of 150 missiles to Iran. But Washington stepped in to disrupt the deal. Today the U.S. is more willing to entertain the money-for-missiles option. North Korea’s opening bid of $3 billion over three years in exchange for freezing its missile program could be negotiated down, especially in combination with a U.S. offer to send a North Korean satellite into space. Kim Jong Il, who first broached this possibility with Russian President Vladimir Putin in July, seems to take the prospect very seriously. Critics worry that the U.S. might unwittingly provide military secrets to North Korea. But if Washington can determine that Boeing didn’t provide sensitive data to Russia and Ukraine for their October 1999 commercial satellite launch, it could do the same with North Korea. Negotiations on the missile question would proceed more quickly if the U.S. acknowledged the myth of North Korean military strength. North Korea, still struggling with a severe food crisis, is running low on energy, spare parts, and ammunition. It can barely conduct military exercises, train its fighter pilots, or test its weapons. It can afford the illusion of a missile program but not an actual missile program. A rocket launch reportedly costs between $200 million and $300 million. The North Korean military budget is approximately $1.4 billion. When NATO attacked Yugoslavia, the Serbian military dressed up logs to look like missiles in order to fool U.S. bombers. North Korea is practicing this trick on a national scale. Since a strong military is a point of pride with North Korea, the U.S. should not publicly emphasize North Korea’s diminished capacities. Instead it must encourage every opportunity for North Korea to transfer precious resources to economic development, a process that will most likely take place in a less threatening environment. The United States and South Korea need not compete in a zero-sum game in their overtures toward Pyongyang. Nor should they collaborate in a lowest-common-denominator approach by restraining each other’s rapprochement policies. Both countries can instead play mutually supportive roles. To be most helpful, the U.S. should let Koreans themselves take the lead in resolving their own conflicts. Fortunately, this process has already begun. Encouraged by the June summit, various civic actors in South Korea are making contact with their Northern counterparts. Trade unionists met at the end of November; women will gather on the first anniversary of the June summit; scientists are working on a joint project to clone rare Siberian tigers. Washington can best encourage these initiatives by sending President Clinton to Pyongyang to accelerate the process of normalizing relations and formally ending the Korean War. After that, the U.S. should loosen the screws of its containment policy, open up the flow of multilateral assistance to North Korea, and then step back to give Koreans on both sides of the 38th parallel a chance to get to know each other better.
(John Feffer <eaqiar@aol.com> works for the American Friends Service Committee in the East Asia Quaker International Affairs Program based in Tokyo. He travels regularly to North and South Korea and China to encourage dialogue on peace and justice issues.)
II. Self-Determination Crisis Watch
HIT LIST IN PAPUA Developments in Papua are rapidly unfolding. In the wake of the Pacific Islands Forum's unprecedented statement last month urging Jakarta and Papuan independence activists to engage in peaceful dialogue, New Zealand Foreign Minister Phil Goff opened the space for his government to play a mediating role in the conflict by facilitating the long-stalled dialogue between Papuans and the central Indonesian government. Washington, too, is publicly urging the parties to pursue dialogue and to refrain from violence. At the same time, indicators suggest that the military is preparing for a territory-wide crackdown. According to human rights monitors in Papua, the Indonesian military has prepared a list of individuals who it believes are independence activists. The list reportedly includes church officials, community leaders, human rights monitors, and others. Such a development is chilling, given the military's preparation of a similar "hit list" during Indonesia's 1965-66 Year of Living Dangerously. That list, prepared with assistance from the U.S. Embassy, targeted individuals who were members of Indonesia's largest grassroots political party, the Indonesian Communist Party, as well as others suspected of Communist sympathies. U.S. Embassy officials report checking off the names as these individuals were killed or sent to prison camps. Conservative estimates place the number of civilians killed during the Indonesian regime's bloodletting at 500,000. In connection with Papuan plans to commemorate, on December 1, the 39th anniversary of the territory's declaration of independence and the inaugural raising of the West Papuan Morning Star flag, provincial police arrested and detained for questioning five members of the Papuan Presidium Council. Authorities have indicated the men will be charged with subversion. In recent weeks, the Indonesian military has stationed 37 warships off the coast, has brought in well over a thousand additional troops, and has been carrying out paratrooper exercises and overflights by U.S.-supplied Skyhawk jet fighters in urban areas. And the military has just announced that it will send troops into Papuan villages to carry out "social programs," a move questioned by human rights monitors concerned that the military will intimidate and carry out acts of physical violence against Papuan civilians. Top Indonesian military officials have announced publicly that they will employ force in suppressing expressions of support for Papuan independence. If past military behavior is the standard, then the use of force will be extrajudicial, arbitrary, excessive and disproportionate, and directed against unarmed and peaceful civilians exercising their rights to free expression and assembly. In violence connected with police actions to lower the Morning Star flag on December 1, ten civilians reportedly have been killed. Criticizing the imprisonment of the five Papuan Presidium Council members, the U.S. State Department spokesperson said the detentions "should have no place in today's open and democratic Indonesia. We certainly regret the tragic loss of life. We call on the government of Indonesia and the people of Irian Jaya to exercise restraint and refrain from acts of violence." (Abigail Abrash <aea@igc.org> is a visiting fellow with Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program. She has monitored human rights issues in Indonesia, with a special focus on Papua, since 1993.)
III. Outside the U.S.
It is barely a year since President Abdurrahman Wahid ordered the release of all remaining political prisoners from Indonesian jails under a general amnesty program. The president then lived up to his image and reputation as a humanist, a man whom many people at home and abroad hoped would lead Indonesia through the transition from an authoritarian to a democratic regime. In the envisaged civil society, or what we fondly call the New Indonesia, no person would ever be condemned to jail for his or her political beliefs. The nation has certainly had enough of that. For more than four decades, under the successive regimes of presidents Sukarno and Soeharto, many people were sent to jail for political dissent. Some were imprisoned for speaking out against the regime, others, like many East Timorese, Irianese (West Papuans), and Acehnese, for demanding an independent state. Some of these people were jailed without trial, and others were tried in courts under circumstances that could hardly be described as fair. Many others were less fortunate: they were summarily executed. Such intolerance for political dissent blemished the otherwise impressive
contributions of Indonesia's first two presidents to the nation-building
process: Sukarno for leading the nation to independence, and Soeharto
for lifting the nation out of abject poverty. But during the course of
their reigns, both men resorted to repressive means and persecuted their
political opponents. Now, President Abdurrahman seems to be making the
same mistake. He has started arresting political dissidents, and may soon
put them in jail. Last week, the police arrested five leaders of the Papuan
Presidium Council--Theys Hiyo Eluay, Thaha Moh. Alamid, Don Flassy, John
Mambor, and Herman Awom Their arrests bore all the hallmarks of the Soeharto regime. They were charged with crimes supposedly committed some time ago. Police invoked either the subversion law--Soeharto's favorite tool to suppress dissidents--or an article in the Criminal Code pertaining to the spread of hatred against the government, a tool dating back to the Dutch colonial regime. The six men arrested had one thing in common: they were preaching peaceful methods in their struggle for independence or, in the case of SIRA, a referendum of self-determination. There are many in Irian Jaya and Aceh who have taken up arms in this struggle, but they have not been arrested, even as the military claims to know the precise location of the jungle hideout of the Free Aceh Movement. It appears the government considers these six men potentially far more dangerous than the armed separatist guerrillas precisely because they use peaceful democratic means, not bullets, in their struggle for freedom. This is a far more effective weapon in influencing public opinion and gaining widespread support, both at home and around the world. Indonesia's own history, from the independence struggle of the early years of Sukarno and M. Hatta, testifies to the importance of winning the public opinion campaign. Ironically, by arresting the Papuan Presidium Council leaders and the SIRA chairman, the government has only strengthened these men’s standing in national and international public opinion. If these men are tried, convicted and sent to jail, they will become the first political prisoners, or prisoners of conscience, under the Gus Dur regime. If and when this happens, the government will no longer be able to take for granted international support for Indonesia's territorial integrity. We can be sure the international community will reassess its position with regard to Indonesia's claims over Aceh and Irian Jaya if Jakarta reverts to the old ways of abusing people's basic democratic rights. -- from The Jakarta Post
IV. Letters and CommentsYour articles on North Korea are too one-sidedly soft on North Korea. North Korea is a tyranny, and many of its policies vis-a-vis its own people and its neighbors in the international community are completely indefensible. Unilateral dismantling of the quite appropriate sanctions we have evolved to respond to those policies will NOT assist in their further dismantling. Indeed, now is the time to negotiate very hard with the North Korean leadership on many important issues. Where is the incentive for further change if we dismantle our sanctions, and unilaterally abandon with them our leverage! -- John Lyle <johnlyle@hotmail.com>
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