Clouds of good cheer billowed out from Pyongyang and Beijing this week, giving rise once again to the hope that maybe, just maybe, peace is at hand on a Korean Peninsula freed of nuclear arms.
Amid this optimism, it may be curmudgeonly to say so but the history of dealing with North Korea over six decades justifies a dose of skepticism. That path is strewn with North Korean deception, lies, broken promises, assassinations and attempted assassinations, kidnappings, other violence and no small amount of belligerent bluster.
In Pyongyang, a summit meeting between President Roh Moo-hyun of South Korea and Kim Jong-il, who was billed as Chairman of the North Korean National Defense Commission, produced an agreement declaring "a new era of national prosperity and unification."
In Beijing, representatives of China, South Korea, North Korea, Japan, Russia and the US produced a consensus on actions in the Six Party Talks, "the goal of which is the verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in a peaceful manner."
Diplomatic declarations often suggest that what was not said could be even more significant than what was.
Roh and Kim said, for instance, they would make "joint efforts" to find a solution to the nuclear problem on the Korean peninsula.
The "nuclear problem" is that North Korea has pushed ahead with acquiring nuclear weapons to the point of having tested a nuclear device a year ago.
Kim and Roh said nothing about North Korea giving up its nuclear weapons or shutting down its nuclear facilities as demanded by the other five nations in the talks.
Moreover, the Foreign Ministry of China and the US State Department each released statements on the outcome of the four days of negotiations in Beijing.
The North Koreans, as has often been their practice, said nothing, which left them open to issue their own interpretation of what was agreed later, as they have in the past.
Further, the "fact sheet" from the State Department included a curious provision, saying that actions to shut down the North Korean nuclear plant at Yongbyon were "to ensure that the DPRK [Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, the official name for North Korea] would have to expend significant time and effort to reconstitute its ability to produce weapons-grade plutonium."
That sounded as if the US had given up on making the shutdown of Yongbyon "irreversible," as Washington once demanded, and left a hole through which the North Koreans could slip if they sought to rebuild their capacity for making nuclear arms.
On another issue, Roh and Kim agreed they needed to "put an end to the existing armistice mechanism and build a lasting peace mechanism."
A touch of history is required here. At the end of the Korean War of 1950 to 1953, North Korea, China, and the UN Command led by the US signed an armistice, not a peace treaty. Technically, the Korean War is still going on.
More to the point, South Korea is not a party to the armistice because the formidable Syngman Rhee, then president of South Korea, refused to sign it. It is therefore up to the North Koreans, Chinese, and UN/US to work out a peace treaty, which was left out of the Roh-Kim agreement.
President Roh pressed US President George W. Bush, when they met in Washington last month, to state clearly that the US would negotiate a Korean peace treaty.
Bush demurred: "We look forward to the day when we can end the Korean War. That will end -- will happen when Kim Jong-il verifiably gets rid of his weapons programs and his weapons."
Richard Halloran is a writer based in Hawaii.
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