North Korea announced on Sunday that it will send a five-member delegation to talks in the border village of Panmunjom on Tuesday, the first formal contact between the two Korean nations in over two years.
According to South Korea’s Yonhap News, the North indicated that its delegation will be led by Ri Son-gwon, who is the chairman of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea. South Korean Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon will lead his country’s team.
North and South Korea are also both sending the number-two officials in their respective unification organizations and their sports ministers to the meeting, which will primarily concern North Korean attendance in the 2018 Winter Olympics.
Yonhap notes there has been some controversy over the status of Ri Son-gwon and the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea, which the North Koreans often refer to by the much more ominous name “Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland.” It is not a government body in the same sense South Korea’s Unification Ministry is; it is more like a working group of the Communist Party which spent much of the past decade lobbing vicious insults at the previous president of South Korea, Park Geun-hye.
The South Koreans have evidently decided to grant the CPRK a level of official recognition North Korea does not formally convey because the North regards South Korea’s government as illegitimate.
“Ri is known as a veteran negotiator with much experience in inter-Korean talks. He has lead the North’s delegations for various cross-border military talks since 2006, when he started representing Pyongyang at working-level dialogue sessions with the South,” Yonhap reports.
Unfortunately, Yonhap adds that Ri is also close to Kim Young-chol, a high level official in the North Korean Communist Party and architect of the 2010 torpedo attack on the South Korean warship Cheonan where 46 South Korean sailors were killed.
North Korea denied responsibility for the attack and accused South Korea of fabricating evidence to the contrary. Ri is one of the officials who did the denying. Ten minutes into a North-South meeting in 2011, Ri shouted, “We are completely irrelevant with the Cheonan warship incident!” and stormed out of the room.
“Basically, the two sides will focus on the Olympics. When discussing inter-Korean relations, the government will seek to raise the issue of war-torn families and ways to ease military tensions,” South Korea’s Unification Minister Cho said of the upcoming talks.
U.S. President Donald Trump said he was “100 percent” behind the talks after speaking with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, adding on Sunday that he “would love to see them take it beyond the Olympics.”
CNN suggests the South Korean Unification Ministry has a tall order on its hands as it contends with North Korean intransigence on nuclear weapons, Pyongyang’s persistent fantasies about “unifying” the peninsula by conquering South Korea, ideological differences that offer virtually no support for a unified political system, and a younger generation that has no memory of a united peninsula.
Also, analysts carefully note that the two Koreas have grown much further apart than the two halves of Germany ever really did, and South Korea would be very hard pressed to absorb the starving, brainwashed, and terrorized population of North Korea even in some far-fetched best-case scenario where the Kim regime threw in the towel and relinquished power.
Regarding the Winter Olympics, the Associated Press points out that North Korea is “weak in winter sports” and “currently has no athletes qualified to participate in the Pyeongchang Games.” North Korean officials are trying to arrange a workaround with the International Olympic Committee, and if Tuesday’s talks go well, South Korea will probably back their effort.
The AP sees tough sledding ahead for the other issues South Korea would like to discuss, such as reunifying families separated by the division of the Korean peninsula:
North Korea could demand some rewards in exchange for those steps, such as the revival of stalled cooperation projects that are lucrative for the North or the suspensions of annual U.S.-South Korean military exercises that it calls a rehearsal for an invasion.
The drills’ suspension is something that South Korea cannot accept in consideration of its relations with the U.S., its main ally, which is seeking increased pressure and sanctions on the North.
The Trump administration has agreed to delay upcoming springtime drills with South Korea until after the Olympic Games. But Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has insisted the delay is a practical necessity to accommodate the Olympics, not a political gesture.
An agreement by South Korea to revive a jointly run industrial park or a tourism project could also draw criticism from abroad that it violates U.N. sanctions because they would result in South Korean money being sent to North Korea, critics say.
The Washington Post quotes analysts who believe North Korea is serious about getting something accomplished at the meeting, rather than just playing for time. These analysts believe dictator Kim Jong-un will be monitoring the talks and could intervene at any time.
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