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By Root 1968 0

politics in the early 1970s, Kim Dae Jung had outspokenly advocated a policy of easing North-South tension and engaging the North. For many years he was accused of pro-communism by military-dominated governments, but he persisted in his views. Now as president, he set out three principles in his inaugural address: "First, we will never tolerate armed provocation of any kind. Second, we do not have any intention to undermine or absorb North Korea. Third, we will actively push reconciliation and cooperation between the South and North beginning with those areas which can be most easily agreed upon." His administration established a program of engaging the North through positive gestures and lowered barriers to trade and other official and unofficial interactions. He reiterated this program, which had become known as his "Sunshine Policy," at the fiftieth anniversary observance. By then it had been sorely tested by the absence of progress in official relations with the DPRK and by public dismay over another failed North Korean submarine incursion, and the discovery of the body of a North Korean commando off the South Korean coast three weeks later. Kim Dae Jung persevered in his engagement policies, even though it appeared for many months that there was little sign of progress on a governmental level.

When I first saw Kim as president in March 1998, a month after his inauguration, he told me, "We're now waiting for the North Korean attitude. I think there is discussion among the North Korean leadership about how to change their policy toward South Korea." The following month, at Pyongyang's initiative, official bilateral talks were held in Beijing but they broke up without results because the South insisted on reciprocity, in the form of guarantees of reunions of divided families, in return for 200,000 tons of fertilizer it was willing to provide. The North, however, insisted on obtaining the aid without conditions.

An important element in Kim Dae Jung's policy was the separation of politics from economics, which in practice meant permitting ROK businessmen to pursue deals with the North, even though there was little or no progress on intergovernment relations. This proved to be a key in preparing the way to broader contacts.

North Korea, meanwhile, continued to suffer devastating problems. As a result of failed policies, its economy continued to shrink in 1997 for the eighth consecutive year since the collapse of its alliance with the Soviet Union. An International Monetary Fund mission that visited Pyongyang in September 1997 issued a confidential report, on the basis of data largely provided by DPRK officials, that the economy had suffered "a severe contraction," with total national output in 1996 only half of what it had been five years earlier. Industrial output had fallen by two thirds, according to the report, and food production by 40 percent. Estimates of starvation varied widely, but U.S. Census Bureau estimates suggested that about 1 million North Koreans died as result of famine between 1994 and 1998.

Kim Jong II, after the completion of a three-year mourning period for his father, was elected general secretary of the Workers Party in October 1997, placing him officially at the top of the political hierarchy he had headed since his father's death. All signs, however, suggested he was relying less on the party for control and governance than on the military from his posts as supreme military commander and chairman of the National Defense Commission.

16

TURN TOWARD ENGAGEMENT

or most of the half century since the creation of its regime, North I Korea's role on the world scene was that of menace to the peace. Its attack across the thirty-eighth parallel that started the Korean War, its massive and forward-deployed postwar military force, its practice of terrorism and its bristling vocabulary of threats made it a pariah state to be dealt with disapprovingly and as little as possible by most of the nations of the world. Beginning with the death of Kim Il Sung and the evidence of its poverty and deprivation