S. Korean grain shipment to N. Korea highlights debate over aid

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- It sounds like a donation designed to yield political as well as humanitarian fruit: the planned dispatch of 500,000 tons of South Korean food aid to impoverished North Korea.

But South Korean officials insist that the shipment, announced last week, was not a giveaway but a loan, albeit on generous terms. One percent annual interest, a 10-year grace period, repayment in 30 years.

The debate in the South over how to define the aid, the latest gesture of warmth between two countries that were once enemies on the battlefield, reveals an undercurrent of edginess about how to deal with the North.

MESSAGE BOARD North and South Korea

South Korean President Kim Dae-jung has won widespread praise for his extraordinary steps toward reconciliation with Pyongyang, most notably his June summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. Critics, however, say the South is ceding too much in its pursuit of peace.

Hence the grumbling over the food aid, which opposition leaders cite as another sign that the communist North is dictating the terms of the rapprochement with the South for its own benefit.

The government hailed the shipment, which was announced Thursday during inter-Korean talks on the South Korean resort island of Cheju, as a pioneering economic deal that will help unite the two nations.

"The agreement has opened a formal business relationship between the two Koreas," said Lee Kwan-sei, chief spokesman for Seoul's Unification Ministry.

Skeptics said it was unlikely that the North, which has been dependent on outside food aid since 1995, would ever pay back the South. They accused the Seoul government of trying to disguise the fact that the grain was a handout.

"We don't know whether the food goes to the needy or the military," Lee Han-koo, a legislator with the main opposition Grand National Party, said Friday.

And, he said, "We should get something in return from the North like signing a peace treaty or allowing more family reunions."

Most South Koreans support their president's efforts to remove the threat of war with North Korea, which has lingered for five decades since the Korean War left millions dead. The North retains a vast military, though much of its equipment is dated.

The mood on the peninsula has improved markedly in the last few months: border liaison offices reopened, a round of reunions of separated family members was held, preparations are under way to reconnect a cross-border rail line that was severed shortly before the Korean War.

But questions linger about whether the isolated North is sincere about improving relations or just trying to extract concessions from the South in order to guarantee its own survival. These days, Kim Dae-jung's detractors accuse him of being a dupe.

"I think he is selling out the nation," Kim Young-sam, a former president and longtime rival of Kim Dae-jung, said in an interview last week with foreign reporters.

During his 1993-97 tenure as South Korea's leader, Kim Young-sam failed to improve ties with North Korea, and his bouts of anti-North rhetoric were often cited as an impediment to reconciliation.

Kim Dae-jung, a former opposition leader who was branded a communist sympathizer by past military-backed governments, has consistently tried to engage the North in order to reduce tension.

His efforts have yielded unprecedented rewards this year, but he is under pressure to demand reciprocity from the North. South Korea repatriated several dozen ex-communist spies to the North in early September, but has yet to forcefully demand the return of several hundred Korean War-era POWs believed held in the North.

Also, President Kim has often said that Kim Jong Il told him at their summit that he understood the need to maintain a U.S. military presence on the Korean peninsula for regional security.

The South Korean government billed the reported comment as a breakthrough in mutual understanding, but North Korean media have on several occasions repeated their old demand that U.S. soldiers get out.

"The United States must abandon its anachronistic Korea policy and the design to permanently occupy South Korea and go home at an early date," read an editorial carried last week by KCNA, the North's foreign news outlet.

(ct/choe/twx)

Copyright 2000 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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U.S. State Department
Korean Central News Agency (KCNA)
Korean Information Service
South Korean government
North Korea: Politics and Government
North Korea
UniKorea

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