[Editorial] North in transition?

Amid the general bleakness in inter-Korean relations, there are reports of some signs of change in the North. For one, Pyongyang has refrained from verbally attacking President Lee Myung-bak from the beginning of this month. Since the summer of 2008, North Korea’s official mouthpieces had called President Lee a variety of names in denouncing his shutting down economic and humanitarian aid programs for the North.

The absence of abusive propaganda could be related to the North’s current need for flood relief materials ― from South Korea in their most realistic calculation. Or it could have something to do with Pyongyang’s ongoing Washington diplomacy, which cannot expect to progress without Seoul’s cooperation. A brief meeting between South Korean Foreign Minister Kim Sung-hwan and his Northern counterpart Pak Ui-chun in Bali, Indonesia, last month led to a visit to Washington by the North’s First Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye-gwan who met Stephen Bosworth, the special envoy on North Korea.

Seoul has decided to send $5 million worth of daily necessities to the North via the Red Cross sometime in September. It must be far below what Pyongyang expected after a flood disaster which was apparently more severe than in the South. In Red Cross talks, the Northern representative asked the South to provide food, construction materials and equipment “generously.” Yet, Seoul would not return to the past aid level of 500,000 tons of rice and 300,000 tons of fertilizer until and unless Pyongyang apologizes for the deadly attacks in the West Sea last year.

The world knows that North Korea is destitute with languid agriculture and manufacturing industries. Yet, it has somehow eked out a survival economy, maintaining minimum provisions for the civilian sector while securing enough for the military, including the nuclear and missile development programs. These days, the Kim Jong-il regime is concentrating human resources on the development of information technology, even in the area of Internet hacking. Kim was recently seen encouraging workers at an “independently-developed” LED TV plant.

In an unusual step to show that it is a normal state, North Korea offered correspondents from the Associated Press an opportunity to make a tour of the countryside late in July, freer than in any of their previous visits without the company of an official guide. Jean H. Lee, AP’s Seoul bureau chief, concluded that “North Korea is a country in transition; you can see it on the streets.”

At Pyongyang airport, “we could barely get past all the boxes of South Korean-made Samsung TVs that North Koreans were lugging back from their travels. Cell phones jangled from everywhere,” she reported. More than 535,000 North Koreans now use cell phones, compared to 70,000 in 2009, though most of them can only make domestic calls.

The scenes of Pyongyang in the AP dispatch, including a crowded amusement park with rides imported from Italy, youngsters crazy about Mickey Mouse backpacks, women getting perms and plastic surgery to look like those in Beijing and Seoul, and drivers arguing with traffic police in a clogged Pyongyang street, do not match well with its officials’ desperate begging to the outside world for aid. But these can be collectively interpreted as signs of change if they take place in a country in transition.

We in the South have anticipated internal changes in the North to bring about changes to inter-Korean relations; either a radical one leading to a political catastrophe or a gradual transformation with material advancement achieved through economic reform and opening. What we are witnessing from the North, via the international media reports, indicates a change that perhaps follows the direction charted by its leadership.

Government authorities and civilians in the South should now ascertain where the North is heading to and decide to what extent they should engage the North, starting with the question of providing relief for flood victims. While we need to maintain the multilateral framework for the denuclearization issue, changes in the North call for a more flexible and practical approach on our part with a broader perspective envisaging peace, stability and unification.