After a recent mission to North Korea, Peter Hayes, executive
director
of the Nautilus Institute, comments on his recent experience and the
current US-North Korean relationship. This article originally appeared
in the San Francisco Chronicle on October 16, 2000.
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North Korea is portrayed as the land of the living dead in the
United States. Americans have long held that North Korea's totalitarian
political system prevents it from changing -- economically, politically or
culturally.
The animosity continues on both sides:
-- The United States still lists North Korea as supporting international
terrorism.
-- North Korea's million-strong army is still deployed offensively, ready to
attack South Koreans and Americans, just as it has been since the Korean War
ended in 1953.
-- North Korea's long-range missiles are cited as reason for the United States
to deploy a proposed $60 billion National Missile Defense system. North Korea
has the capacity to develop crude nuclear weapons, and has threatened to do so.
Yet, North Koreans have broken with the stereotype twice this year. First, Kim
Jong Il, North Korea's "reclusive" leader, turned up in the flesh in
Beijing. He then publicly regaled South Korean President Kim Dae Jung in the
June summit in Pyongyang that initiated efforts to opening the border between
the two Koreas.
Second, Kim Jong Il's senior military commander Jo Myong Rok met with President
Clinton, Secretary of Defense William Cohen and Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright last week in Washington for talks officially
described as "very positive, direct and warm." Given the obvious
enmity on both sides of the Demilitarized Zone, why all this human contact? The
answer lies in realities that are best understood when standing on North Korean soil.
I just returned after two weeks in Unhari village in North Korea, where Nautilus
Institute, an American nongovernmental organization that works for peace, is
building windmills to generate electricity and to pump drinking water. Our
experiences on this mission illustrate why diplomatic meetings -- unimaginable
only a year ago -- are now taking place in Pyongyang, Seoul and Washington.
THE BEST EXPERIENCE: One man, unknown to me, introduced himself in Nampo, many
miles from Unhari village. He told me that his mother lives in one of the houses
lit by the American wind turbines. "Thank you," he said, "please come back and build more."
Of course, not everyone thinks that way about Americans. "My mother thinks
that all Americans are wolves and we are the prey," said another North
Korean, who is involved in the Nautilus wind power project. But
genuine cooperative projects can break down these stereotypes.
The word is out that the Americans are in town and that the
lights are on at Unhari village. Elsewhere, there is darkness due to the
collapse of the national power system. The wind-power system that we left behind
two years ago and repaired on this mission is highly valued by the villagers.
They know that the water-pumping windmill just installed will pump drinking
water when they need it. They trust that we will come back again -- before, this
was hard for them to believe. In short, North Koreans are changing their
perceptions about the external world -- especially America.
The North Korean government's desire for high-level official meetings with the
U.S. government reflects changes inside North Korea, not the other way around.
North Korea's newfound desire to look outside its
borders is rooted in reaction to the desperate situation inside the borders.
THE WORST EXPERIENCE: In spite of these changes, the barriers to communication
and cooperation remain immense. We saw thousands of small children mobilized to
work on a highway project by breaking stones with hammers. Some of the American
team cried as we passed them on the way to the village. Our two cultures have
fundamental differences about issues such as human rights and child labor. Those
differences will keep the United States and North Korea at arm's length for a
long time. Both sides will insist that intergovernmental agreements on security
issues, such as missiles and nuclear weapons, be based not on trust that each
side is living up to its commitments, but on verification. Meanwhile, it is
realistic to expect only minimal cooperative engagement between the two
governments, especially between the two armies.
The presence of American MIA recovery teams in North Korea today augurs well,
but is only a beginning. Even at the micro- project level -- like our windmill
project -- American nongovernmental organizations have to
verify that their assistance is going to actual humanitarian purposes. (In our
case, it is dictated by the terms of our official U.S. export license.) We
insisted that we see first-hand that the fluorescent light bulbs we supplied to
village households were installed and that our wind- power system was lighting
them.
Initially, the villagers resisted allowing us to do so but eventually agreed.
When we had finished constructing the new water-pumping windmill at Unhari, I
explained to the North Korean villagers and engineers why the Nautilus team had
left their families in the United States to come behind the DMZ to build
windmills. Peace is not the mere absence of war as negotiated between
governments. Peace is built from the bottom-up, brick by brick, person by
person, windmill by windmill.