Though most media focused on Carter, he was accompanied by three (less elderly) European former heads of state or government: Ireland’s Mary Robinson, also a one-time UN High Commissioner for Human Rights; Gro Harlem Bruntland of Norway, a former head of the World Health Organisation (WHO); and Finland’s Martti Ahtisaari, the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize laureate for his peace-making efforts in the Balkans and elsewhere.
This was a high-powered team. Much, perhaps too much, was expected of it.
The Korean peninsula at the moment appears an intractable Gordian knot that cries out to be cut in one fell swoop. This time, the implicit hope was that all concerned — above all, the two Koreas and the US — might at some level tacitly acknowledge the impasse; using Carter and his colleagues to send messages, or at least serious signals, which could serve to put direct dialogue back on track.
Carter famously did just that on his first trip to North Korea, back in June 1994 meeting with North Korea’s founding leader Kim Il-sung. Then too his visit was nominally private, but he achieved a breakthrough: defusing a serious nuclear crisis and even averting war. Carter hoped also to meet the Great Leader’s son and heir apparent, but Kim Jong-il did not oblige him. (This would become a pattern.)
Since then Carter has been back once to North Korea, last August: to rescue a US Christian activist, Aijalon Gomes, who had illegally entered North Korea from China. This visit echoed one by Bill Clinton a year earlier, when he brought home two US journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who had also illicitly crossed the border while filming in China. Hopes that Carter this time might bring out Jun Young-su, a US-Korean businessman held in the DPRK (having entered legally) on charges of missionary activity, proved unfounded.
Kim Jong-il had hosted a dinner for Clinton, but a year later he left on a sudden trip to China — his second in four months — just as Carter arrived. The latter thus had to make do with Kim Yong-nam, now the DPRK’s titular head of state.
Now it is third time unlucky. Before his latest visit Carter expressed a hope to meet not only Kim Jong-il, at last, but also the new heir-apparent: the recently unveiled Kim Jong-eun. In the event he saw neither of them: a considerable and doubtless a considered snub. Yet again he was fobbed off with Kim Yong-nam, and also with foreign minister Pak Ui-chun, who is a nobody.
In fact Pyongyang’s handling of the whole visit could hardly have been more disrespectful. The official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) named only Carter, but none of his distinguished colleagues. Further, KCNA’s reports on the visit were minimal in the extreme, six snippets totalling 282 words.
By contrast, a single KCNA report on Carter’s visit last year was longer than all these put together (461 words). Almost as large this time, at 265 words, was a gratuitous item quoting a Beijing spokesman, Hong Lei, who confirmed that China’s foreign minister Yang Jiechi had met the Elders on 26 April.
Conceivably, more than meets the eye might be going on behind the scenes; so post-mortems may be premature. Yet on the face of it this was a sadly squandered opportunity. Pyongyang manifestly was not interested — but why, exactly? And in that case why bother to permit this visit at all, if only to downplay and cold shoulder it with such ostentatious rudeness?
As usual both domestic and external factors are in play. Domestically, the Kims may be preoccupied with the delicate tasks of effecting Kim Jong-eun’s succession and gearing up for Kim Il-sung’s centenary in April 2012. Less than a year from now, by its own vow, North Korea will be a ‘great and prosperous nation’ (kangsong taeguk). How they will pull off such ‘grand magic’ remains to be seen.
Internationally, Pyongyang has different priorities right now. A flurry of activity suggests they are gearing up for Kim Jong-eun’s first acknowledged visit to China. (He went last year with his father, but this was not announced). If so, the Elders’ timing may have been a distraction.
Alternatively, Pyongyang could be cross, on several counts. Unlike in 1994 when he took a senior State Department Korea hand with him, this time Carter’s visit had very little Washington input. He bore no known message from Obama. Why then should Kim Jong-il waste his time?
The DPRK may also have looked askance at the Elders’ agenda. The group voiced a range of concerns, without clarifying which took priority. Carter’s urgent pleas for food aid will have pleased Pyongyang as much as they riled Seoul. But mention of human rights will not have gone down well, while the nuclear issue remains central yet intractable.
Importantly, it was not only North Korea that ‘dissed’ the Elders. South Korea was pretty dismissive as well. This was in part Carter’s fault, for sharp comments made both in Beijing beforehand and in Seoul afterwards. In the latter, he said: ‘For the South Koreans and for the Americans and others to deliberately withhold food aid to the North Korean people because of political or military issues not related is really indeed a human rights violation.’ It would have been wiser had he balanced this with recognition of the DPRK regime’s own culpability for its people’s hunger. Simply criticising the US and South Korea sounds one-sided, and it sparked a predictable backlash.
But some were rooting against him anyway. The hardline rightists who hold sway in Seoul for now have not forgiven Carter for his bid when president to cut US troop numbers in South Korea, even though he was eventually dissuaded from this.
President Lee Myung-bak, who had other things on his mind — his ruling Grand National Party did badly in by-elections on 27 April — did not see the Elders. In Seoul they met with the unification and foreign ministers.
Bizarrely, just before leaving Pyongyang Carter and co were called back to hear a personal message from Kim Jong-il read out to them: ‘He specifically told us that he is prepared for a summit meeting directly with President Lee Myung-bak at any time to discuss any subject directly between the two heads of state.’ That too brought yawns in Seoul. The North has said for months that it wants talks, but the South deems this pointless absent an admission and apology first for its two fatal attacks last year: sinking the corvette Cheonan in March, which it still denies, and shelling an island in November (it says the South provoked this).
Optimists seized on a phrase where Carter reported the North as expressing ‘deep regret for the loss of life on the Cheonan and …Yeonpyeong Island.’ Yet this fell short of an apology, and its status — who said it, in what context — is obscure. Seoul needs more than this. The Elders will next brief leaders in Washington and Europe, but to what avail is yet to be seen.
In sum, North Korean politics and foreign policy all marked time in April. Hopes of spring in these spheres were thwarted: all seemed frozen fast. That cannot endure forever.
Aidan Foster-Carter is honorary senior research fellow in sociology and modern Korea at Leeds University, and a freelance consultant, writer and broadcaster on Korean affairs.
A longer version of this article first appeared in, and is used with the kind permission of, NewNations.com.