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Russia building ties with N Korea

While the Bush administration wants to freeze economic ties with North Korea until the country puts its nuclear program under international controls, Russia's Far East is aggressively repairing and expanding its relationship with North Korea.

Invited by the North Korean government, teams of Russian engineers have in recent weeks inspected the cargo port of Najin, the oil refinery at the port and a stretch of railway that crosses the two countries' short common border at the Tumen River. All three facilities, built by the Soviet Union, have been in mothballs or lightly used in recent years.

Russian workers are scheduled to build the first highway bridge linking North Korea and Russia. To speed rail traffic, they will also renovate the railroad south to Najin, which is 40km from the Russian border. New fishing and seafood-processing joint ventures are planned. And with the inauguration two weeks ago of a new hydroelectric plant, the Russian Far East now produces 30 percent more electric power than it needs; planners are talking with North Korea and South Korea about distributing it through power lines down the Korean peninsula.

"We are almost destined for these contacts," said Victor Gorchakov, vice governor for foreign economic relations of the Primorye region of Russia. "We live here and are interested in a quiet and comfortable situation."

Speaking on Monday in Vladivostok, 120km from the North Korean border, Gorchakov expressed opposition to Washington's policy of containment.

"If driven into a corner, as they are now," he said of the North Korean government, "they will bite."

His comments came after the US, South Korea and Japan worked out a set of principles last weekend for an agreement to end North Korea's nuclear program. But the framework did not contain a schedule for delivering energy or economic aid to the North.

During the Communist era, economic cooperation between the Russian Far East and North Korea was intensive. But, for most of the last decade, Russian executives here saw North Korea, a nation of 22 million people, as dead economic space.

"As for business with North Korea, I, like many other people here, wouldn't want to invest," said Djambulat Tekiev, a local politician and the leading businessman in Khasan, the Russian district directly bordering North Korea. "I had one experience with trade with North Korea -- and they didn't pay."

Instead, Tekiev has set up a cargo and passenger ferry service on a route intended to bypass North Korea: the ferries sail twice weekly between Vladivostok and Sokcho, a South Korean port just south of the demilitarized zone, with a stop at Zarubino, a Russian town near the North Korean border.

Now, though, Russian officials say they detect moves toward markets and pragmatism in North Korea.

"There is a new generation of people," Gorchakov said, recalling two North Korean ministers who recently came here on separate visits. After describing their overseas experience and their drive to make business deals, he added, "There are quite a number of pragmatic people in North Korea."

The days of aid to North Korea on the Soviet scale are gone, Russian officials say; the plans for renovating the port, the oil refinery and part of the cross-border railroad depend on the Russians getting an ownership stake in the facilities or a guaranteed stream of revenue from them. Still, with complementary road, rail, port and energy projects planned on the Russian side, the investments would re-establish Russia's influence in Korea's northeastern corner.

The renewal of commercial ties appeals to Russian nationalists, who remember the cross-border solidarity of communist days. Last spring, members of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia demonstrated against the war in Iraq outside North Korea's consulate in Nakhodka, a port city near Vladivostok. Some carried signs reading "An attack on Pyongyang is an attack on Russia." The Liberal Democrats did unexpectedly well in parliamentary elections on Sunday, drawing 11.6 percent of the national vote.

But today, economic interests rather than ideology or geopolitics drive Primorye's projects with North Korea. For example, when the regional government recently decided to admit as many 5,000 North Korean workers on labor contracts, it was billed as a way to lower local food prices by stepping up farm production.

Rehabilitating the Najin refinery, closed for seven years, would spare the city from having to obtain its fuel supplies by rail from a Russian refinery 966km north of Vladivostok. Renovating the port of Najin, which can berth 17 midsize freighters at a time, would relieve cargo congestion in Vladivostok and Nakhodka, Russia's two principal Pacific ports. Russian repair and administration of the port would be paid for through fees.

"Our interest in the port of Najin is understandable," said Gorchakov, whose trip to North Korea in October was his first since the Soviet era. "Everything is clear for Russians in the port -- the machinery, the piers."

Renovating the railroad crossing has two aims -- first to allow Russia to make use of the port of Najin, and later to facilitate a plan to transship South Korean products to Europe by way of North Korea and the Trans-Siberian Railway.

On Saturday, South Korea and North Korea agreed to start building signal, communication and electricity systems for their own cross-border railway next spring, steps that could make inter-Korean train service possible late next year.

Though North Korea and South Korea remain at odds over a number of issues, their economic relationship has been quietly growing since 1988, and this year South Korea became North Korea's largest export market, surpassing China.
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