Commentary

01st November 1998

New world order - business, banking

By Mervyn de Silva

The post-war world witnessed the dra-matic break-up of many nation-states. Race and religion were the divisive forces, which some observers would prefer to call demonic. In what was often called the Indian sub-continent, we had the examples of Pakistan and later Bangladesh.

In two other regions an ‘ism’, an ideology, called communism led to “East” and “West” Germany, and in East Asia, South and North Korea. With far-sighted leaders like Willy Brandt, in the FRG and the more intelligent members of the Communist Party elite in the GDR realising that the Soviet Union could not subsidise its East German ally for all time, re-union was inevitable.

North Korea did not take the East German route.The North Korean communists are apparatchik of the Stalinist type. They are not scared easily by threats or diplomatic gestures intended to soften them up.

Despite border incidents, which they claim were provocative, and part of a plan by the leadership in Seoul, the party bosses in Pyongyang, have kept their cool.

And the border posts on northern territory are heavily manned by a well-armed elite corps as this writer was told by his South Korean escorts.

In a briefing at the Foreign Office in Seoul, he was also told that whenever the tough commissars and the generals decided to “escalate North-South tensions for some reason not too easy to divine, the commissars would “organise a border incident.”

Of course the word “escalation” had not yet become a cliche in the international affairs conflict studies discourse.

So, what has provoked the North Korean leadership to warn that the US-South Korean ‘war games’ could threaten the ongoing “peace talks”, a fairly major step in any conflict resolution exercise? Why should the United States which has placed “conflict resolution” as an important item on the Clinton administration agenda seem less than enthusiastic.?

Yes, President Clinton is preoccupied with domestic affairs, if that expression is not open to misunderstanding. It is the impeachment we have in mind.

An embattled President Clinton does not conform to the behaviour pattern described so well by Godfrey Hodgson, the British journalist who was based in Washington for nearly twenty years?.

Beseiged by domestic problems, the man in the White House turns reflexively, Hodgson observed, to the less perilous problems of foreign policy.

So, why should President Kim Dae-Jung, hardly one year in office, risk the promising chances of a peace accord with the communist regime in the north? It was just ten months ago that President elect Kim Dae-Jung approved the decision of President Kim Young Sam to pardon two jailed ex-Presidents Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo who were serving long prison sentences for treason and graft.

They had been charged of taking bribes .... hundreds of milions of US dollars in bribes from businessmen. They had also played a part in the 1979 military coup. The timing of the announced US-South Korean naval exercises has made the North Korean leadership extremely suspicious. Official spokesmen in Pyonyang made it clear that the “timing” of the joint exercise made its objective abundantly clear ........ sabotage the peace negotiations. Unpardonable, KCNA, official news agency observed only to end the communique with the word “treachery”.

True, words, words, only but the tone of the message cannot be ignored.... particularly when it chose to refer to other countries..... the United States the sole superpower and Japan, the economic superpower.

The Soviet Union has broken up, China has adopted market economics and the Great Teacher Chairman Mao’s “little Red book” is rarely seen. The return of Hong Kong is the last chapter, if not page in Mao Tse-Tung’s tomes.

That leaves North Korea, the last brigade of Marxism - Leninism, Mao Tse-Tung and of Kim Il-Sung.

And so we turn to Japan or Japan Incorporated, the clearest illustration of the post-Cold War transformation of power. Economics in command, not politics or armouries.

Japan Inc. looks self-assuredly to the first decade of the 21st century. Hence the “new partnership” it seeks with South Korea, says Michiyo Nakamoto. On a visit to Tokyo recently the South Korean President Kim Dae Jung said that the new relationship his visit represented was “a new age in the relations between the two countries”, countries that symbolise the change in the nature of power...... neither tanks nor planes but the economic performances, and trade in a fiercely competitive market.

Hulftsdorp Hill

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