hankyoreh

the memoir by former President Lee Myung-bak.

Facing criticism for the descriptions of confidential aspects of South Korea’s relations with North Korea and foreign countries that appear in the memoir of former president Lee Myung-bak, titled “The President’s Time”, Lee’s aides have been responding by making one-sided claims of debatable accuracy.

On Feb. 2, Kim Du-woo, former Senior Secretary to the President for Public Information who oversaw the writing of Lee’s memoir, appeared as a guest on a KBS radio show. When asked why Lee did not move forward with a summit proposed by North Korea, Kim said, “North Korea was asking for US$10 billion as a condition for the talks. If the talks didn’t come off, the South Korean public would still have had to foot the bill. In that case, we probably would be standing before a hearing or facing an investigation by a special prosecutor right now.”

According to the memoir, in the fall of 2009, North Korea offered to hold a summit in exchange for US$10 billion, funds it would then use to set up a national development bank. This appears to be the section Kim was referring to.

But neither Lee’s memoir nor Kim’s remarks provide the historical context for the claims they are making, which makes them prone to misinterpretation, experts say.

In a telephone interview with the Hankyoreh on Feb. 2, a source familiar with North Korea who was deeply involved in these negotiations said, “North Korea told us they wanted to set up a financial institution similar to South Korea’s development bank [KDB], and they asked us to help them. But this was not a precondition for holding a summit.”

“Since it would have been hard for us to help North Korea set up the bank without American help [given the great amount of capital required], the idea was that we would help North Korea raise funds internationally if the summit was held. If North Korea had kept making such absurd demands, discussion of the summit probably wouldn’t have continued through 2011,” the source said.

During an interview with a monthly magazine in February of last year, former Labor Minister Yim Tae-hee, who took part in behind-the-scenes negotiations with North Korea in Singapore in Oct. 2009, was asked about rumors floating around that Pyongyang had wanted compensation for a summit.

“If North Korea had made that kind of request, President Lee would never have allowed the negotiations to go on. The fact is that Kim Yang-gon, Minister of North Korea‘s United Front Department, never made such a request,” Lee said, strongly denying such rumors.

The claims made by Kim and in Lee’s memoirs are based on ignorance about North Korea’s negotiation strategy, some experts say.

“North Korea’s strategy is to make the most extreme demands during the early phase of defining the agenda for the talks and then back off later. But South Korea tends to make more reasonable demands up front because of public pressure to achieve its goals,” said one government official who was frequently involved with negotiations with North Korea.

The very fact that the Lee administration took the extreme demands that North Korea made initially at face value illustrates the administration‘s faulty understanding of the North.

In addition, the other forms of aid requested by North Korea - 100,000 tons of corn, 400,000 tons of rice, 300,000 tons of fertilizer, and so on - were to be received in exchange for granting South Korean requests such as allowing South Korean abductees and prisoners of war to visit South Korea, the source familiar with North Korea emphasized.

Consequently, these experts say, North Korea’s demands were not so much a precondition for the summit meeting as they were part of the process of hammering out the agenda items for that meeting.

In addition, the memoirs do not mention the weaknesses of the Lee administration’s intelligence assets in North Korea. Until corrected by the Chinese Foreign Ministry, the Lee administration mistakenly assumed that it was not Kim Jong-il, but Kim Jong-un, who was visiting China in May 2011. And when Kim Jong-il died in December of the same year, the Lee administration was completely in the dark about it for 51 hours and 30 minutes.

In short, figures from the Lee administration are focusing solely on North Korea’s excessive demands while concealing their own failures.

By Yi Yong-in, staff reporter

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]