The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [123]
On his plane en route to Pyongyang, Shevardnadze worked hard on his brief and his tactics. He decided to tell North Korean foreign minister Kim Yong Nam in a one-on-one meeting at the start of his talks, then to try to persuade Kim Il Sung, later in the visit, to accept the Soviet reversal calmly.
In the one-on-one meeting he had requested, Shevardnadze gave the bad news to Foreign Minister Kim. He argued that North Korea would benefit from Moscow's diplomatic relations with Seoul because Soviet officials would be able to talk directly with the South on North-South issues, the problem of U.S. troops and nuclear weapons, and other topics of importance to Pyongyang. Kim responded with passion against recognition of the South, saying it would reinforce the division of the country and severely aggravate relations between Moscow and Pyongyang. He asked that it be reconsidered.
After more than an hour of private discussion, the two ministers brought the other members of the two delegations into the large, highceilinged conference room. With the obligatory portrait of Kim 11 Sung peering down at them, the two delegations were placed on op posite sides of a highly polished conference table, marked by North Korean and Soviet flags. Shevardnadze repeated the decision he had brought from Moscow and elaborated the reasons for it. He said the Soviet Union could not ignore such an important country as South Korea, which had become a major economic and political factor in the region and the world. He insisted that recognition of the South would not change the nature of Soviet relations with the North nor Moscow's views on Korean unification. Specifically, he declared, all Soviet obligations toward North Korea, including the 1961 treaty of alliance, would remain in force.
There were three microphones on each side of the long conference table, and the Soviet officials noticed that the Korean foreign minister spoke into his microphone as if he were addressing an unseen audience of greater importance than the delegation in front of him. At first he said he was not ready to reply to Shevardnadze's presentation but would do so later. Then, after being handed a note by an aide who entered the room from outside, he pulled out a prepared document and launched into a lengthy and bitter response, which featured the following points:
• Establishment of ties between the Soviet Union and South Korea would give international legitimacy to the permanent division of Korea. Formal recognition by Moscow would be fundamentally different from and more serious than that by other nations because the Soviet Union, along with the United States, had been responsible for the division of the country in 1945, and because the Soviet Union had been the first to recognize the DPRK as the sole legitimate state in Korea.
• Recognition by Moscow would embolden South Korea to try harder to destroy socialism in the North and swallow it up, along the lines of the East German scenario. It would lead to deepening confrontation in the peninsula.
• If Moscow recognized another part of Korea as legitimate, Pyongyang would be free to recognize other parts of the Soviet Union, which would create trouble for Moscow. (According to one participant, Kim named several places where Pyongyang might establish diplomatic relations, including Khazhakstan and other Central Asian republics of the USSR and the Baltics, which were straining to obtain independence.)
• Soviet recognition of the South would destroy the basis of the 1961 security treaty. Then the North would feel free to take its own actions in the Asia-Pacific region and not be obligated to consult the USSR in considering its policy.
• With the alliance a dead letter, North Korea would consider itself no longer bound by pledges not to create any weapons it desired. (On this point, some Soviet participants recall Kim specifically threatened to create nuclear weapons, but in any case the meaning of his words was clear.)
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