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Posted on 07/11/2003 8:13:58 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
More in U.S. Calling for Regime Change
by Joo Yong-jung (midway@chosun.com)
WASHINGTON - The emphasis of Washington's North Korean policy appears to be shifting gradually toward regime change, as more officials conclude that anything short of that will fail to conclusively solve the nuclear crisis. At the same time, American policymakers are striving to ensure that the North's nuclear ambitions and human rights abuses are high-profile issues.
The Republican policy committee in the U.S. Senate recently brought a Japan-based opponent of the Kim Jong Il regime to the United States for a week and introduced him to several high-ranking officials. Park Gap-dong is the joint chairman of a civic group called the Chosun Democratic Unification and Nation Saving Front; in the years before the Korean War he operated underground in the South as the chief of Namgodang, or the South Workers Party. He settled in the North during the war but was soon purged from the party by Kim Il Sung and defected to Japan, where he organized the Chosun front. In the decades since he has been working to topple the Pyongyang government.
During his stay in Washington, Park met several congressmen and policymakers in the George W. Bush administration. Park also attended a seminar held by the American Foreign Policy Council on Wednesday, where he said, "We have to prepare for the collapse of the North Korean regime; if the United States takes military action the Kim regime will collapse in three days."
Another Washington nonprofit organization, the National Endowment for Democracy, will recognize other opponents of the Kim Il Jong government when it gives out its annual Democracy Awards next week. Yun Hyun, director of the Seoul-based North Korean Human Rights Citizens Alliance, will be honored, as will defectors such as Kang Chol-hwan, Ahn Hyeok and Lee Sun-ok. A seminar held in conjunction with the awards ceremony will feature presentations with titles such as "concentration camps," "famine" and "refugees: desperate human rights crisis in North Korea."
Senators such as John Kyl and Sam Brownback, both Republicans, will deliver speeches at the seminar.
Concerns by U.S. politicians and various other organizations about the defector issue have suddenly increased this year. An active discussion is taking place, following the Senate's passage of a bill to receive defectors as refugees; the same bill is now triggering discussion in Congress.
America's religious and human rights organizations are busy forming a North Korean freedom alliance group, which should be operational by the end of this month. They are even planning a "safe harbor" campaign, designed to encourage high-ranking officials and scientists from the North to defect. Congress and the State Department are also pushing to increase the number of hours that Radio Free Asia is broadcast; now it is only four hours a day.
Though the Bush administration has repeatedly stressed its commitment to a peaceful, dialog-driven solution to the North Korean situation, behind this are mounting claims that the only way to solve the problem is regime shift. At the seminar that Park attended, a professor at Pennsylvania University's Asia institute, Arthur Waldron, reminded the audience about the horrible nuclear confrontation between the United States and the former Soviet Union, and asked them what decisive event ended it. The answer was the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The question of whether to strive for regime change, an option that is gaining favor among conservatives in the United States, will have to be faced by Seoul as the friction between Washington and Pyongyang over the nuclear issue heats up. For its part, North Korea is approaching a crossroad where it will have to choose whether to try a China-style reform and abandon its nuclear program or continue its policies, braving war with the United States.
The situation on the peninsula is becoming one in which there will be no more space for shallow optimism or patchwork hopes.
Nothing is more loyal than the push of a button, and Kim values loyalty (to himself) above all. If Kim were to order an attack on the south, there's no way of really knowing which generals would obey and which would 'not get the message in time'. At the higher levels, they know that they are cannon fodder in a hopless war. They also know that great rewards can be attained by waiting the fight out and cutting a deal. Not so with nuclear weapons. Once Kim has them online and ready, then the number of people he has to trust are reduced vastly.
Only regime change will pry the nuclear weapons out of Kim's cold dead hands. Nothing else.
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