Back to square one: The never-ending story of talks with North Korea
Five years of nuclear talks extinguishes enthusiasm of HS Asia correspondent
By Sami Sillanpää in Beijing
According to Aristotle, a story needs to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. But then there are these stories that always come back to the beginning.
The drama of North Korea and its nuclear weapons aspirations, has not followed the logic of the great thinker of antiquity. Perhaps there is no logic. There is certainly no end in sight.
Journalists following foreign events develop perverse relationships with many things.
My own twisted passion for North Korea emerged in 2003, when I moved to Beijing to follow East Asian events for my work.
What a time it was! Plenty of dramatic news headlines. North Korea leaves nuclear non-proliferation pact. Expels observers! Starts up nuclear reactor”
Now, five years later the headlines of recent weeks seem strangely familiar.
North Korea is expelling monitors, is working on turning on a nuclear reactor, and the treaty on giving up nuclear weapons is falling apart.
I must admit that at this phase my enthusiasm is dwindling. It has started to feel that nothing in the world is as dull as the nuclear weapons talks of North Korea. This is already getting to be a joke at home. My wife starts to yawn already before I have finished saying the word “North...”.
The boredom comes from frustration. Whatever one writes about the isolated North Korea, one is always dependent on unreliable information.
Many experts have spent their whole lives on observing North Korea. Still, even they often have to answer: “We do'nt know. We can only guess.”
In assessing the state of a country, the habit has been to look at things like economic figures, the government’s latest decisions, or possibly the success of the grain harvest.
One thing that we do not know about North Korea is whether or not the country’s leader is alive.
Dictator Kim Jong-il had a stroke some time ago, say South Korean and US spies. He can still brush his teeth, says another, not especially reliable, source.
North Korea has denied that the Dear Leader would even be sick.
Now people are wondering what a report in the Friday edition of the official newspaper means. According to the report, Kim is “tired” after working hard all summer.
“While the rest of the world was on holiday, we saw a stream of news sent out into the universe about Kim’s endless visits during a long and difficult journey”, the newspaper wrote.
The North Korean media also reports to the universe that the Dear Leader also knows how to fly fighter planes and to compose operas.
What has Kim really done in the past few years? Not what was hoped for outside the country.
There was a time in which it was thought that North Korea would change.
In the autumn of 2005 North Korea opened its doors. I was there with an unprecedented group of dozens of foreign journalists that were allowed into the country.
We mainly saw monuments. Nobody was allowed to go anywhere without a minder.
Therefore, in the evening, when the sun went down and the streets of Pyongyang went dark - there is no street lighting - we all sat in the bar of the Koryo Hotel, which served a thick beer.
One evening a North Korean diplomat who had worked in Sweden sat at our table.
“Vi kan inte leva på det här sätt.” [We cannot live like this] he said in Swedish.
I answered that I also felt that this is not a way to live.
The diplomat said that North Korea plans to open up and to reform its economy by degrees, just like China.
This sounded optimistic, and many believed that this would happen. In Pyongyang we saw a commercial billboard - the first in the country.
South Korea was planning for new joint industrial projects in the north.
In Beijing I met a North Korean diplomat, who suggested that I start delivering Nokia mobile phones to Pyongyang. He said that the market for them was growing.
Things have been quiet. The North Korean economic boom never materialised.
There is still so little economic activity that millions are suffering from malnutrition, the World Food Programme says.
Ordinary North Koreans do not even have landline telephones. There is still only one street advertisement in Pyongyang, and the number of cars is not much greater. The handful of Westerners in the city - diplomats and aid workers - is smaller than before.
North Korea says that the development of international relations is impeded by the hostile policies of the United States.
Yes, but the fact that North Korea detonated an atomic bomb did not help the situation much.
On the other hand, nobody knows for sure if North Korea really has a nuclear weapon. It may be that the experimental detonation in the autumn of 2006 was a magnificent deception.
In any case a treaty was negotiated in Beijing last year, under which North Korea would give up its nuclear weapons, in return for energy and economic aid from the United States, and the possibility of establishing relations with the outside world.
That is the agreement that is now falling apart.
And it is not the only one of its kind. Treaties were drawn up under the same principle in the early 1990s.
That was a long time ago. It was a world without the Internet. North Korea still does not have it.
What have I learned about North Korea in five years?
I have learned that North Korea is not a story about a state. It is a story about a man.
It is not about the development of of the country or the country’s relations with the world; it is about Kim Jong-il and the attempt by his junta to stay in power.
The story will continue to make the rounds as long as Kim continues making the rounds, or at least as long as he still brushes his teeth.
Kim’s nuclear weapon, or even the mere fear of its existence, is a guarantee for his survival. With it, Kim can blackmail the world for electricity, food, and money, which keeps at least his inner circle alive.
Kim knows that an open world is not for him.
For that reason, the story of North Korea can continue only as it has so far. There will be a treaty, the treaty will be broken, there is a return to negotiations, and a new agreement.
There is no going to the extremes. None of the parties can seriously consider a war. A final accord cannot be relied upon.
North Korea has 23 million people. Or that is the estimate.
They also do not know the end of the story, but they do know the genre.
It is a tragedy.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 4.10.2008
SAMI SILLANPÄÄ / Helsingin Sanomat
sami.sillanpaa@hs.fi
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| 7.10.2008 - THIS WEEK |
 Back to square one: The never-ending story of talks with North Korea |
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