Two weeks ago at the first meeting of Asian and European Political Parties in the Asia-Europe Political Forum (AEPF) held in Seoul, July 6-10, 2017, we listed the major conflict areas in Asia and some of their extensions in Africa and at the same time pointed to some of the successful but seldom mentioned geo-political settlements in explosive conflicts in the region including some of the solutions that we thought could be useful.
Today it is correct to say that the most dangerous of the conflict areas in Asia and in the world is the continuing confrontation between South Korean and U.S. forces on one side with those of North Korea across the 38th Parallel, which slices the two Koreas at the waist, with the nuclear-armed North under the young President Kim Jong-un, supported but also restrained to some extent but perhaps not controlled by the People’s Republic of China.
Over the years since the Korean Armstice of July, 1953, which ended the Korean War without a formal peace treaty, the threat of new fighting has always plagued the peninsula. The Philippines bravely sent three Army battalions to help South Korea over three years since 1950, barely five years after the end of a crippling World War II in our own country in 1945.
Over the years, an explosion between South and North has always threatened intermittently. But today a new war is even more dangerous, more fatal because it is clear nuclear weapons are now available to both sides.
At the conference in Seoul which we presided, we recalled that in 1990, as a young Congressman, we led a small Philippine Congressional Mission to Pyongyang, and we had an almost one-and-a-half hour meeting with the founder of North Korea (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, DPRK) Kim Il Sung, who led the North Korean Armies which fought the U.S., U.N. and South Korean forces in 1950-53 since the founding of North Korea in 1945, following the partition in the peninsula.
Then with us were the late Congressman Miguel Romero, businessman Len Oreta, the late President Corazon Aquino’s brother-in-law, Education Undersecretary Nestor Kalaw, and we were later joined by Kiyoshi Wakamiya, the Japanese journalist who later accompanied the late Sen. Benigno Aquino on his last fatal plane trip to the Philippines on August 21, 1983.
When we asked him then about persistent reports that he planned to attack and invade the South, the North Korean leader replied in serious terms: “If we attack the South, the South will be destroyed but we in the North will also be destroyed”.
His tone was indicative of how the leaders in Pyongyang regarded the seriousness of an all-out war with the Americans and with the Koreans in the South.
We had recalled earlier in this column that our conversation went so well that we asked him for a written assurance that he would not extend material assistance to the New People’s Army (NPA) in the Philippines and he did, and we then journeyed back to Manila via Beijing, and feeling elated, we proudly presented his letter to a then pleased President Corazon Aquino and Foreign Secretary Raul Manglapus in Malacañan Palace. Over the years, Pyongyang kept his word of their non-involvement with the Communist NPA.
In a couple of weeks as he promised, and on our invitation, he sent to Manila then North Korea Vice-Premier Kim Dahl Hyun who set the schedule for the exchange of notes formalizing diplomatic relations between North Korea and the Philippines. We distinctly remember his last day’s visit in Manila because in that afternoon the Mt. Pinatubo volcano erupted and the gray ash rained over us all the way to Manila.
We also remember that the day before we took Vice-Premier Hyun on a helicopter visit to Corregidor and on the World War II island fortress, he suggested to us that we consider building a connecting bridge with enclosures between Bataan province to Corregidor to Cavite province, which links could be opened or closed to let ships in and out as needed, so Manila Bay could then be part of a large reclaimed area for development as the North Koreans did with a successful similar project in North Korea (food for thought!)
Our friend, Kim Il Sung, has since passed away and was succeeded by his son Kim Jong Il who also led North Korea in many tense sessions with the South but did not live long enough. Today his 33-year-old son, the first President’s grandson, Kim Jong Un, is leader of a nuclear-armed North, over whom China apparently does not have overwhelming influence, since he has inherited and also built his own strength, developed a large army and created his own nuclear weapons and is today developing an inter-continental ballistic missile delivery system, already in an advanced stage, within easy reach of Japan and Guam, with its large U.S. bases, and farther, to the distant frontline areas of the U.S. in Alaska (range 6,700km).
We believe therefore the time has come for direct face-to-face talks, perhaps no longer avoidable, not through intermediaries, between a U.S. President and the young North Korean leader, in Beijing or in Hongkong, both reachable by train, the preferred means of transport by the North Korean leaders as far as we could remember.
We could also urge as well the revival of the long-postponed 6-Party talks among the U.S., North Korea, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia to help the process but there is no substitute now to direct talks.
The case is difficult but successful direct talks have been done before between the two Germanys and the two Vietnams, which have been both long united, and as we pointed out before, an inter-Korean family might perhaps emerge someday united in a unique, federated system under common inclusive or alternating leadership which could lead to a modern prosperous first-world power in Northeast Asia, or with an accepted separate North, which later could join an ASEAN Plus 4.
In Seoul, in an earlier conference not too long ago, we told our friend, former U.S. Ambassador to the Six-Party Talks Joseph De Trani, South Korea’s religious and economic leader Sun Myung Moon and now his widow, Madame Hak Ja Han Moon, that the Universal Peace Federation (UPF) under President Thomas Walsh and its network which includes the Washington Times, could perhaps revisit their friendships in Pyongyang. The late Reverend Moon, born in Pyongyang, a religious Christian leader with an influential global following, became a successful business leader in Seoul and in the U.S., built a hotel and automobile factory in Pyongyang, which he both later donated to the North Korean government. The goodwill remains and the Moon family and the UPF can avail of their useful links in Pyongyang. The International Conference of Asian Political Parties (ICAPP) could also rekindle its ties with the Korean Workers Party, the only political party in the North.
It is now clear that the conversations between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jingping although helpful in other ways have so far failed to get any positive response from the young North Korean leader. Other sincere initiatives have failed over the years and the danger today continues to mount.
We believe the time has now come for the U.S. President and the young North Korean leader to meet face to face, and subsequently to be joined by the new South Korean President Moon Jae-In to try to settle the mounting crisis in direct talks, for there seems to be no other workable alternative. The U.S. and China might offer to supply some of the North’s petrol requirements; Japan and South Korea might establish economic joint-ventures in the North; Russia and China can help build a railway across North Korea all the way to Pusan in the South, linked with the Caucasus and Europe.
In the latest move, President Moon offered rare direct Seoul-Pyongyang military talks at the Panmunjom truce village on the militarized inter-Korean border in the 38th Parallel but has elicited no response. Also, the Seoul Red Cross proposed an early August meeting to discuss “reunions of families reported by the 1950-53 Korean War”. These two proposals have good value and are workable.
But we believe only direct U.S.-North Korean talks will be the ground-breaking first choice for the North Koreans. Even Mr. Trump says direct talks with the North is now possible.
