Airport Incident Indicative of Syndrome in U.S.-North Korean Relations 
Northeast Asia Peace and Security Network
 *****SPECIAL REPORT*****
 September 8, 2000

Dr. Mark P. Barry is Senior Research Fellow with the Summit Council for World Peace, an association of former heads of state and government in  Washington, D.C. He met North Korea's late President Kim Il Sung in 1994.  His opinion piece is a commentary on the "airport incident" in Frankfurt, which led to the DPRK delegation returning home instead of attending the UN Millennium Summit.

 WASHINGTON, September 6 - It was an accident waiting to happen. On Monday, North Korea's number 2 leader and de facto head of state, Kim Yong Nam, and his entourage angrily turned around and flew home, skipping the United Nations Millennium Summit of World Leaders, after a U.S. airline subjected them to aggressive security procedures prior to boarding a connecting flight to New York from Frankfurt, Germany. Yet, in the span of U.S.-DPRK relations, nothing about this incident is surprising. It is reminiscent of Washington's oftentimes botched handling of policy toward North Korea in the 1990s, in which significant opportunities were squandered that could have led to improved communication and reduced tensions between the U.S. and the North.

 As a consequence of this incident, several crucial summit meetings are now cancelled that could have contributed toward peace and stability on the Korean peninsula:

 Kim Yong Nam was to have met South Korean President Kim Dae Jung on the sidelines of the U.N. summit, a meeting that could have served as a reassuring follow-up to June's historical inter-Korean summit; moreover, his absence dampens the atmosphere in which the General Assembly is to issue a statement supporting Korean rapprochement. Likewise, Kim Yong Nam was invited by President Clinton to attend a reception and dinner for foreign leaders, the first occasion for any senior North Korean leader to meet an American president. The invitation was made despite North Korea's presence on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism - an indication of Washington's willingness to improve relations. Lastly, Kim was to have met with Japanese prime minister Yoshiro Mori in what would also have been the highest-level contact ever between the two countries, who are struggling over normalizing relations.

 The North Korean entourage says it was forced to undergo body searches by American Airlines personnel, but the airline says its security procedure was far less invasive. What is clear is that the airline was following routine security procedures for passengers from a designated terrorist state.

 The problem is this was North Korea's nominal head of state, who, because he was en route to the United Nations, should have been exempt from such procedures. Apparently, the State Department was not clearly alerted by the DPRK delegation that it was taking a U.S. carrier to New York, and the Clinton administration failed to request special treatment of the delegation by the airline. When the North Koreans submitted to the excessive security procedures, then learned they had missed their flight, they interpreted their treatment as harassment and decided to return to Pyongyang in protest.

 As cantankerous as North Korea can be, its decision to give up these summit opportunities in New York was surely driven not just by anger but by the desire to increase pressure on the U.S. to remove the North from its terrorist list - a pivotal negotiation in which little progress has been made. Removal from terrorist designation is the key to North Korea's joining international financial institutions like the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. U.S. objections to DPRK membership in these institutions are mandated by federal law as long as North Korea is branded a terrorist state; thus, the U.S. holds the key to the North's potential access to massive aid money.

 But it didn't have to work out this way. North Korea cancelled attending the U.N. summit not before its delegation left home, but only after unexpectedly severe - and undeniably diplomatically embarrassing - security treatment by U.S. airline personnel en route to New York. Why was the State Department apparently in the dark on the specific travel arrangements of the most important DPRK delegation ever to travel to America? And why weren't federal agents dispatched to facilitate the North Koreans boarding the airliner to ensure that no mishap occurred? The details of trust-building - so vital in negotiating with the North - were, not surprisingly, lost by the wayside.

 Sadly, in the last decade North Korea has tended to disappeared from American radar, and moments of potentially great opportunity have been lost. In 1992, a Bush administration undersecretary of state met with senior DPRK party official Kim Yong Sun (the right-hand man to current North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Il) in New York, but refused to agree to a regular series of high-level dialogues that might have prevented the escalation of the nuclear issue which brought the U.S. to the verge of war with the North by June 1994. In May 1998, former defense secretary William Perry, as coordinator of U.S. policy toward the North, met with Kim Yong Nam in Pyongyang, but no follow-up visit -reciprocal or otherwise - was ever scheduled anywhere. The U.S. evidences an aversion to regular, senior-level dialogue with the North. This airport incident is symptomatic of the consequences of American "incrementalism" in policy toward the North, which awaits DPRK reciprocity in individualized piecemeal matters, without ever offering the North a strategic package deal. Usually, only minor progress is made over large stretches in time in seemingly endless mid-bureaucratic negotiations.

 This policy approach persists today even after the historical inter- Korean summit, and as the Clinton administration relegates relations with the North to the back burner in favor of more immediate crises. Ironically, the Administration case for national missile defense (NMD) has rested on the assertion that North Korea will present a direct missile threat within five years. If true, then why has diplomacy towards the North not been managed with more strategic priority and energy?

 ROK President Kim has a right to be angry with Bill Clinton and it will not be surprising if he raises a storm over this airport incident on Thursday when the two meet. The U.S., whose 37,000 troops protect South Korea, has still not adjusted to the new peninsular realities in the post-Korean summit environment, and persists in dealing with North Korea as if we are still in the cold war era.

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