Pingpong North Korean style

NY TIMES NEWS SERVICESEOUL , SOUTH KOREATHE TINNY LOUDSPEAKERS FELL SILENT ALONG THE 238KM DEMILITARIZED ZONE THIS PAST WEEKEND AS NORTH KOREA SHUT DOWN A C
Friday, Aug 08, 2003, Page 9

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The tinny loudspeakers fell silent along the 238km demilitarized zone this past weekend as North Korea shut down a cross-border propaganda barrage by radio and megaphone that it started in 1970.

Seeking make friends and influence countries before six-party talks over its nuclear bomb program, North Korea is trying to ease tensions with the South, making clumsy overtures to Japan and even trying to temper its trademark anti-American vitriol.

"Ultimately the North Korean game is to split South Korea and other countries away from the US," Marcus Noland, a Korea expert at the Institute for International Economics, said from Washington. "Ultimately the North Koreans want their charm campaign to soften up South Korea and other countries and make them less likely to back the US in any kind of coercive diplomacy."

North Korea still engages in a nasty tit-for-tat with the US but even so tries to limit the damage.

On Sunday, a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman called a top Bush administration official a "scum and human bloodsucker." But in the next breath, the diplomat emphasized in an interview with North Korea's news agency that there was "no change" in North Korea's intent to join the nuclear talks with the US, which are expected to be held in Beijing early next month.

North Korea was responding to a speech delivered here last Thursday by John Bolton, an undersecretary of state, in which he lambasted the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, by name 41 times in a 25-minute speech.

"While he lives like royalty in Pyongyang, he keeps hundreds of thousands of his people locked in prison camps with millions more mired in abject poverty, scrounging the ground for food," Bolton said of the North Korean leader. "For many in North Korea, life is a hellish nightmare."

In response, the North Korean spokesman said, "On the basis of a serious analysis of Bolton's outcries, in the light of his political vulgarity and psychopathological condition, as they are quite different from the recent remarks of the US president, we have decided not to consider him as an official of the US administration any longer nor to deal with him."

In addition to preparing to negotiate with Bolton's colleagues, though, the North Koreans are preparing a kind of "pingpong" diplomacy for the US public. In two weeks, North Korea's top gymnasts are to fly to Anaheim, California, to compete in a qualifying championship for the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece.

Turning Japanese public opinion, North Korea is suddenly focusing on the 10-month drama of seven children who have been unable to follow their parents to Japan. The parents are Japanese who were kidnapped by North Korea many years ago and then finally acknowledged and allowed to return to Japan. On Sunday, the parents in Japan received their first letters and photos from their children, who remain in North Korea.

While parents said they were happy to see photographs of children they had not seen since October, they said they doubted the spontaneity of the letters, which contained appeals to the parents to return to live in North Korea.

"I got the impression she was told by the North Koreans to write this way," Kaoru Hasuike said Sunday of the letter from his 21-year-old daughter. "It's a shame, and I'm furious. I can't help but think our parent-child ties are being exploited."

Hitomi Soga, whose husband, Charles Robert Jenkins, a former American soldier, also remains in North Korea, told reporters Sunday that the smile on the face of her 20-year-old daughter looked forced.

The North Koreans may have better success easing tensions with South Korea.

In the last six weeks, North and South Korea formally relinked their cross-border railroads, and a South Korean company inaugurated what could be a US$5 billion industrial park in an area of North Korea about 80km north of here. The two countries closed the ceremonies to foreign reporters, fearing that publicity over these steps toward inter-Korean integration would irritate the US in a time of nuclear tension.

This summer, charter flights from Seoul have left regularly for Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, carrying South Korean teachers on fact-finding missions on one occasion and South Korean aid workers on another.