A Times Editorial

Korean hopes

While this week's meeting between the leaders of North and South Korea was promising, the effort to reconcile the two countries should proceed with caution.

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 17, 2000

One promising summit can't erase decades of partition and paranoia. Still, this week's historic get-together between the leaders of North and South Korea hardly could have gone better. No one would have dared anticipate the evident pleasure South Korean President Kim Dae Jung and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il took in one another's company.

Their agreement to work toward reunification -- first for thousands of separated families and eventually for their divided nations -- gives hope that one of the world's most dangerous hot spots can finally begin to cool down.

Of course, that optimism could unravel with one wrong move from a Pyongyang regime that has mastered the art of self-destructive irrationality. After 50 years of stalemate, the effort to bring peace and reunification to the Koreas should proceed not with great leaps of faith but with cautious steps: the reunion of families long divided between North and South; the rebuilding of links of communication and transportation across the world's most heavily defended border; the establishment of broader aid programs for the economically desperate North.

These and other overtures can further the process of normalizing life in one of the strangest and most insular societies the modern world has known. The mysterious Kim Jong Il displayed a reassuring lucidity and sense of humor during his first extended appearance on the world stage, but the Stalinist state created by his father is still solidly in place.

If Kim Jong Il wants to win international trust and respect, he will have to take concrete steps to ease his regime's stranglehold on its people, dismantle its nuclear program, reduce the size of its conventional military machine and cease its provocations in the region.

If North Korea begins to live up to the commitments it made this week, this summit will be remembered as a triumph for Kim Dae Jung. As a younger man, he risked his life in pressing for true democracy in South Korea, and he has long advocated a more aggressive pursuit of reunification with the North. No previous South Korean leader would have had the credibility to engineer such a breakthrough.

For now, though, the euphoria surrounding the successful summit should not obscure reality. Absorbing the North's crushing social and economic problems will be a long and difficult task even in the best of circumstances.

In the meantime, more than a million troops continue to stare at each other across the 38th parallel. For Americans, the future of 37,000 U.S. troops still stationed in South Korea -- and the future of our strategic interests in the Pacific rim -- depend on a rational and verifiable easing of tensions between the Koreas.

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