You have to marvel at a country that, when looking for a way to show its commitment to peace, chooses to blow something up. That’s North Korea, which this week detonated the cooling tower at its controversial Yongbyon nuclear reactor as a way of saying, hey, we’re laying off the nukes. As a result, the U.S. has removed the DPRK from its list of states that sponsor terrorism and lifted some economic sanctions.

Not everyone believes the explosion means much, which is no surprise, given the North’s history of grandstanding, bloated rhetoric, lying and misguided attempts at image management. There are skeptics who say getting rid of the tower, which the New York Times calls a “technically insignificant structure, easy to rebuild,” is pure theatre, signifying nothing about more important disarmament efforts and perhaps suggesting that the North has done what it intended to at Yongbyon: produced enough nuclear weapons that the plant is no longer needed.

Still, at the risk of sounding like an optimist (a term deployed with palpable disdain in a National Post editorial on the matter), it’s remarkable that the regime has made any concessions at all, considering how much posturing and ch’emyon — what we know as “saving face” — has played into Pyongyang’s foreign policy over the decades. Instances of North Korean leaders making public offers to reduce their military strength, to admit or hint at wrongdoing, or to do pretty much anything to make it easier for anyone to infer pernicious intentions in the DPRK’s nuclear program are incredibly rare. The demolition of the tower is unnecessary spectacle, but it accompanies a move of at least some substance: the handing over to China of a 60-page partial account of the North’s arms programs. It’s a small step, it came four months late, and the report is said to be missing key information about a suspected uranium enrichment program, the possible role the DPRK had in the construction of a Syrian nuclear facility, and the nuclear arms it already possesses.

Still, jumping to condemn it — to suggest, as the Post does, that the move is irrelevant because the DPRK has been “lulling the U.S. and others into a false sense of security while building a deadly nuclear arsenal that threatens the security of South Korea and Japan as well as the West” — is both unhelpful and inaccurate; the threat North Korea poses to the world has been amply broadcast, and the U.S. especially cannot be said to have any sense of false security regarding North Korea, given the attention they’ve paid it during the so-called war on terror (recall that the North was included, for no apparent reason, in George Bush’s infamous and asinine “axis of evil”). Furthermore, no one knows for certain how many weapons North Korea has, and even when the North rattles its sabers — as it did in 2006 by announcing its first successful nuclear test — the implicit threat to the West is always undercut by doubts about its possessing missile technology capable of delivering any nuclear warheads further than Asia.

Throughout his life, the DPRK’s Great Leader Kim Il Sung insisted that he had no interest in making nuclear weapons, claiming that the North’s nuclear ambitions were strictly civilian. His son, Dear Leader Kim Jong Il, has been more openly belligerent about the military aspect of the North’s nuclear program, spurred on, no doubt, by equally belligerent provocation from Washington. However deep the North’s desire for and successful production of nuclear weapons goes, it’s wise to take whatever can be taken from this latest show of openness, its willingness to negotiate and to blow up parts of its own reactor. The nuclear situation on the Korean peninsula has reached crisis proportions before, notably in 1994; in Don Oberdorfer’s The Two Koreas, which offers a detailed background of the Korean nuclear issue, Oberdorfer tells of how disagreements over International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections brought the region dangerously close to a devastating war. He notes that the crisis was averted through a combination of force and diplomacy, but there’s no doubt that they key moment in the standoff was an unofficial visit to Pyongyang by former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, during which he convinced Kim Il Sung to back down on the nuclear issue in exchange for direct talks with Washington. The States’ military buildup and preparations for war played a role in intimidating the North (they also helped cause the crisis), but it was dialogue that ultimately averted a war.

I recall watching an early debate among the U.S. democratic candidates in which the moderator contrasted Clinton and Obama’s approaches to foreign policy: “Ms. Clinton says you can’t just sit down and talk to terrorists; Mr. Obama says, why not?” If the North wants to talk — even if they’re talking bullshit — it’s better than having them be the reclusive, insular and isolated nation they’ve been for the last forty or fifty years. There aren’t many things George Bush has done that I have thought were a good idea, but removing the DPRK from its list of states that sponsor terrorism is one. (The outrage the move has caused among hard line conservative Republicans only affirms my belief.) I can only hope that whoever wins the White House in November continues to try and initiate dialogue with Pyongyang, to convince it to gradually offer up more details about its nuclear program, to help its leaders understand that isolation is not in anyone’s best interests, and, to tell it that, if it feels it necessary, to feel free explode more of its own equipment for our amusement. Who knows — maybe we could even reach a point where Kim Jong Il will offer to muss up his hair on CNN. Imagine the television moment that would produce:

Wolf Blitzer: Mr. Kim, it’s been suggested that you’re hiding uranium enrichment facilities in your pompadour, but you’ve come to show us that’s not the case.

KJI: That’s right, Wolf. I will now run an afro pick through my hair to prove that it is not, in fact, harbouring any weapons of mass destruction.

IAEA: Are all the teeth on that pick? Excuse me, sir, but we’d like to inspect it.

Conservative Republican Commentator: And what about those nits? Are you training them as suicide bombers to ship to Syria?

KJI: Piss on you. You’re trying to annex my hair to turn it into a puppet of the evil imperialist American empire!

Wolf Blitzer: Next up on Larry King: rock icon Tommy Lee talks about his newest penis tattoo.

On second thought, maybe it’s best to be safe and stick with explosions.

* * *

Meanwhile, South Korea is seeing its own kind of explosion, in the form of renewed protests over American beef. For awhile, it looked as though public anger at ROK President Lee Myung-bak was subsiding, and the candlelit vigils that consumed Seoul’s streets throughout early June were starting to dwindle.

Enter U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who was in Seoul over the weekend for talks on North Korea, and who (surprise!) also happened to bring up the beef issue, assuring Koreans that U.S. beef isn’t a breeding ground for scary, beetle-sized cows bent on chewing Korean brains into cud. Rice remarks came just two days after the government once again moved to resume beef imports from the U.S., and the one-two punch stoked the coals of fury in the South Korean capital, sending thousands of protesters into the streets yet again.

The demonstrations have reached new levels of violence, with people wielding sticks and pipes to batter police buses (and police) and force their way towards Cheong Wa Dae, where Lee Myung-bak is stewing in the juices of his unpopularity, and probably throwing a lot of fits over the sorry shambles his presidency has become. Police, who took some criticism earlier this month for using water cannons against the protesters, started spraying again, this time using fire extinguishers and water coloured with dye, supposedly to make it easier to identify those committing destructive acts (although how you can attain precision aim with a gushing, high-pressure spume of water is beyond me). Hundreds are sustaining injuries, the government is threatening a tougher crackdown, and even the conservative newspapers whose offices have been vandalized by protestors are pissed at the Lee administration for showing no balls and caring “only about how to protect Cheong Wa Dae after compromising with the demonstrators.”

One of the more interesting stories to emerge from the beef storm is the shift that’s taking place in the media sphere, as South Koreans have begun turning away from established newspapers and TV stations in favour of citizen journalist projects like OhMyNews (which comes in Korean or English). This is not a new story — the Internet as alternative news source thing has been around for almost a decade now — but it’s of particular note in SK because of the wide availability of the Internet (94 per cent of Korean households have Internet access) and the high speed of most connections, which make it possible for people to get updates frequently and almost as soon as the news happens. There’s been some suggestion that the protests originated in chat rooms, where hysteria over tainted beef spread quickly and soon turned into suggestions to take to the streets — especially among teenagers, those most rational and clear-headed folks, who supposedly began fearing killer beef would be used in their school lunches.

The developments have been both celebrated by those who see it as proof that corporate media is losing its dominance, and denounced by those who worry about the mob mentality that can plague online discussion and influence impressionable youth. An unfortunate potential result is the imposition of tighter policing of the Web by the Korean government, who are obviously looking into the role the Web is playing in their tarring and feathering with great interest.

All in all, it seems as though something will have to break soon, if Seoul is to avoid becoming perpetually clogged with angry people and riot police. Perhaps Lee should take a cue from his partner in unpopularity to the North, and blow something up as a show of good will. My vote? A giant cow piñata stuffed with kimchi. Recall the scene from Ghostbusters II in which Ray, Egon, Peter and Winston solved the problem of a city-wide case of chronic uncontrollable rage by hosing down New York with emotionally responsive pink slime and marching the Statue of Liberty through the streets to the tune of a cheesy Jackie Wilson crowd-pleaser. As the song clearly states, the Ghostbusters are who you should call when there’s something wrong, and if they think mixing slime and patriotism is a good way to combat bad vibes, Lee would be foolish not to seize upon the brilliant luck of having both in one delicious substance.

Tags: international, korea

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Posted on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 11:02 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.