The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [84]
It is questionable how much sincerity was behind this maze of proposals and counterproposals in any of the capitals. Both the Reagan administration in Washington and Chun Doo Hwan's government in Seoul were leery of becoming involved in formal talks with Pyongyang. A window on Kim Il Sung's private thinking is provided by his conversation with Eric Honecker in May 1984. Kim confided that a major aim of his tripartite-talks proposal had been to make it more difficult for Reagan to increase U.S. troop strength in South Korea. Besides, he told Honecker, "with these talks [proposals] we want to expose the United States excuses" for staying in Korea. "To show the world that the United States does not want reunification, it is necessary to keep making new peace proposals. This is also necessary to encourage the South Korean population in their struggle."
FLOODS AND FACE-TO-FACE TALKS
The leaderships and publics of both North and South Korea saw the struggle for influence and supremacy on the peninsula as a zero-sum game, in which any gain for the South was a loss for the North and vice versa. Moreover, for both regimes, considerations of "face" or prestige were often more important than issues of substance. Thus North-South discussions in the public arena tended to bear fruit only when both countries could credibly claim victory, which was uncommon. A parallel secret dialogue between Pyongyang and Seoul, only hints of which were made public when they occurred, was less constrained but often even more difficult, because the issues involved were more important.
In early September 1984, discussions between North and South were given sudden and unexpected momentum by an act of naturetorrential rains and landslides in the region near Seoul that killed 190 people and left 200,000 homeless. North Korea, in a gesture implying superiority, grandly offered to send relief supplies to its better-heeled cousins in the South. To everyone's surprise, Chun's government did not spurn the offer but prepared to receive rice, cement, textiles, and medical supplies. "Along a worn concrete road gone to weeds, hundreds of North Korean trucks entered South Korean territory today carrying the first supplies to pass between the two countries since the Korean war ended 31 years ago," wrote The New York Times' Clyde Haberman, who was on the scene at the DMZ. Some of the rice turned out to be wormy and the cement nearly unusable, but the South did not highlight the deficiencies or complain, even as Pyongyang hailed the flood relief in Nodong Sinmun headlines as a "Great Event, the First in the History of Nearly 40 Years of Division."
As the relief goods were delivered, the chairman of the North Korean Red Cross Society urged that success in this venture be used to launch "multisided collaboration and exchange." Capitalizing on the moment, the South proposed, and the North accepted, the opening of North-South economic talks and the resumption of the Red Cross talks.
With this surprising beginning, the North and South in a period of a little more than a year held thirteen public discussions, including five economic meetings, three Red Cross meetings, three working-level Red Cross contacts, and two preliminary contacts for a North-South parliamentary exchange proposed by Pyongyang. In September 1985, thirty-five South Koreans were permitted to cross the DMZ to visit family members in Pyongyang, and thirty North Koreans crossed in the other direction to meet family members in Seoul. After years of formal meetings, most of them sterile recitations of fixed positions, the emotional reunions of even a few divided families seemed at last to be a tangible payoff for the intra-Korean talks and a promise of better times to come.
Unknown to all but a few on each side, the progress was facilitated by secret talks at a high level, which had also resumed late in 1984 and