hankyoreh

By Park Hyun, Washington correspondent and Seong Ho-jin, staff reporter

With the situation on the Korean peninsula deteriorating to the point where it is anyone’s guess what will happen next, more people are calling upon the US and South Korea to engage in immediate talks with North Korea.

In an editorial printed on Apr. 4 (EST), the New York Times wrote that North Korea’s rhetoric is gradually becoming more aggressive, and that the US is responding by increasing its military presence in Northeast Asia. “It’s clearly time to find ways to calm the crisis,” the newspaper urged.

The newspaper also offered some possible ways of achieving this. “Secretary of State John Kerry’s declaration on Apr. 2 that the United States would negotiate seriously on denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula was helpful,” the editorial said. “But it could prove more useful to encourage Ms. Park, who has talked of engaging the North, to take the lead.”

The US government also seems to be carefully moving to moderate the level of its response to the North.

“Clearly, we have this very negative pattern of aggressive rhetoric,” said Victoria Nuland, spokesperson for the US Department of State, in the regular press briefing held on the same day. “We have to take it seriously. But we also continue, with our colleagues, with our counterparts, with our allies, to leave open the opportunity for a different course for the new leader of the DPRK, and a course that could bring his country out of isolation if he chose to do the right thing.”

Quoting officials in the administration, the American media said that the US has decided to temporarily suspend the strategy of using sophisticated weaponry in shows of force. This is linked to concerns that the military tensions on the Korean peninsula could suddenly move in an unexpected direction.

In the Korean political world, some are suggesting that an envoy should be dispatched to the North to defuse tensions on the Korean peninsula.

“Now is the time to think seriously about sending an envoy to North Korea to seek a breakthrough for reopening inter-Korean talks,” said Moon Hee-sang, chair of the Democratic United Party (DUP) Emergency Measures Committee on Apr. 5. “I think that plausible candidates for the envoy would be a diplomat that the North Koreans could place some trust in, a domestic political figure who is not in office right now. It could also be Park Jie-won or Mun Seong-geun.”

Park Jie-won is a lawmaker with the DUP, while Mun Seong-geun is the former member of the DUP’s high council.

Gil Jeong-woo, a lawmaker for the Saenuri Party (NFP) on the National Assembly foreign affairs and unification committee made similar remarks. “A envoy to North Korea would be a messenger sent to bring about a resumption of talks,” Gil said. “There is no reason to delay proposing talks to the North or having informal backroom discussions.”

Though the crisis on the Korean peninsula is intensifying and North Korea has blocked South Koreans from entering the Kaesong Industrial Complex, the government has said that it will not take the step of shutting down the complex for now.

“We don’t think that the workers currently at Kaeseong are really in any physical danger,” Unification Minister Ryoo Kihl-jae said in an Apr. 6 meeting at the Seoul Foreign Correspondents’ Club. “At this stage, we are not considering the option of closing the complex.”

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