South Korea balks at hostage hard line

A South Korean Christian woman prays during a service demanding the safe return of South Koreans kidnapped in Afghanistan at a church in Seoul Sunday, July 29, 2007. The family of a South Korean pastor killed in Afghanistan asked Saturday for a delay in the repatriation of his body, saying they want it flown home only when 22 other hostages are released from Taliban captivity. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)


South Korea balks at hostage hard line

By Donald Kirk

WASHINGTON - The crisis of the Korean hostages captured by Taliban forces in Afghanistan hits South Korean leaders where they are most vulnerable.
Seoul might have preferred not to have sent troops to either Afghanistan or Iraq, but did so under US pressure. As long as the United States is keeping 29,000 troops in South Korea, on guard against a perpetual threat from the North, the Americans believed their Korean friends could show their gratitude by joining the grand alliance in the Middle East.
Now President Roh Moo-hyun, the left-of-center leader whose policy of rapprochement with North Korea has won only reluctant US support, is caught between the need to show firm resolve against a terrorist threat and the desire to appease the Taliban, who have already killed one of the hostages and are holding 22 others.
On Wednesday, the bullet-riddled body of 42-year-old pastor Bae Hyung-kyu was found in the Qarabagh district of Ghazni province, where the South Koreans were abducted on July 19.
The quickest way to deal with the Taliban would be to arrange an enormous payoff and speed up the withdrawal of South Korea's 200 troops - medics and engineers - from Afghanistan. That solution would be fine by the same South Korean leftists who oppose the dispatch of Koreans to the Middle East and who have been calling for US troops to get out of their country. But it is politically impossible.
While conservatives have been steadily gaining strength in South Korea over the past two or three years, Roh has to come across as a man of firmness in the face of the enemy. That position is all the more necessary considering that the hostages are all members of a Christian congregation that had gone to Afghanistan on a do-good "volunteer" mission.
The prayers of the Christians, many of them deeply conservative and quite hostile toward the present government, are echoed by statements from the Blue House, the center of presidential power, decrying the killing of Bae and warning of unstated consequences for those "held responsible".
Suddenly, the South Korean government finds itself attempting to negotiate with an enemy far different from the North Koreans. The bottom line, though, is the same - the Taliban hold hostages and warn against killing them, while North Korea, in the conservative view, holds the South hostage while holding out the threat of a nuclear war.
Through it all, the anti-Roh media keep up a litany of complaints over how the government is dealing with the hostage-takers. Most recently, the government came under fire for the "botched" deal to release eight of the 22. Apparently the hostage-takers called off the release after spying armored vehicles arriving at the scene of the handover. The fear was that the same vehicles could take off in hot pursuit of the Taliban.
South Koreans find it easy to dismiss the nuclear standoff as a matter of secondary importance, remembered when the North fires off a few missiles or tests a nuclear warhead, but the hostage crisis is something else.
The possibility of imminent death of a delegation that consists mostly of rather young women dispensing medical aid is more personal and compelling than the diplomatic maneuvering that led to the signing of an agreement for North Korea to get rid of its nukes and shut down its single, worn-out 5-megawatt reactor.
If the Korean War goes down in US history as "the forgotten war", so the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula is sublimated if not forgotten while South Koreans focus on a rising stock market - and televised images of the hostages as they gathered with smiles of optimism before their bus was hijacked last week.
The hostage issue is laden with implications for the US-Korea alliance. Admiral Timothy Keating, chief of the US Central Command, responsible for the whole Asian region, did not help much by saying his forces would be "quick to respond" to a request for help from South Korea. Exactly what could Americans do that they aren't already doing to find the hostages?
For US President George W Bush, though, a show of willingness to help is the only option for an unpopular administration that would prefer to forget Korea while focusing on Iraq.
The US administration over the past five years has climbed down from the seemingly tough policy of the early years when Bush, in his State of the Union address of January 2002, included North Korea in an "axis of evil" along with Iran and Iraq. That remark - and other aspersions that he cast on North Korean leader Kim Jong-il - provoked an outcry in South Korea.
The US and South Korean governments appeared on a collision course in which astute diplomacy was needed on both sides to bridge differences between a government in the United States that wanted to prove its toughness and one in South Korea in search of reconciliation and North-South rapprochement. The hostage crisis in Afghanistan raises some of the same familiar issues.
US liberals have clearly driven the neo-conservatives in the White House and elsewhere in the administration into silence and acquiescence. The most talkative hardliner, John Bolton, who browbeat his critics as under secretary of state for arms control and then as ambassador to the United Nations, is now a voice on the sidelines since the Senate refused to approve his UN reappointment. He speaks from his pulpit at a conservative think-tank, denouncing US diplomatic efforts on North Korea, but no one heeds his advice.
Bolton was a victim not just of his own bullying style but also of his incredible failure to perceive the mood in South Korea. This correspondent vividly remembers a couple of his visits to Seoul in which he paraded in front of the media, confident that he had persuaded senior South Korean officials to go along with sanctioning the North in the UN and had overcome differences between Washington and Seoul.
Now the issue is what the US is doing to persuade South Korea to tough it out on the hostages. US military people, of course, see the taking of hostages as a tactic that cries out for defiance.
Similarly, it could be argued that no one should have been intimidated by the North's missile tests and single underground nuclear test. The test-firing of a long-range Taepodong on July 4, 2006, was a failure, as seen in the missile's descent into the waters off the North Korean east coast soon after its launch, and the nuclear test of last October 6 was so small as to raise suspicions that it too had been a failure.
The sad truth, moreover, is that North Korea still holds the club of nukes and missiles over the heads of negotiators, despite the shutdown of the reactor at Yongbyon, and is still capable of spinning out counterfeit US$100 bills - and currencies of other countries - on its press in Pyongyang.
The reason the US has not addressed these problems definitively is that Bush could not risk a two-theater war - a conflict on the Korean Peninsula at the same time as that in Iraq. The liberal moderates have won out, and the diplomatic drive to bring North Korea to its senses goes on with full approval of Bush, though probably not that of Vice President Dick Cheney, the hardest hardliner.
Negotiations with the extremist Taliban are considerably more difficult, if only because no one knows quite who they are and with whom to talk. Like Bush, Roh cannot risk confrontation with an enemy on two fronts - with North Korea on the Korean Peninsula and with the Taliban in Afghanistan. If he appears weak on North Korea, however, he may still want to show resolve in Afghanistan and leave a legacy of toughness against an enemy - not the North, but an enemy nonetheless.

Journalist Donald Kirk has been covering Korea - and the confrontation of forces in Northeast Asia - for more than 30 years.
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