YEARENDER: North Korea shows signs of opening to the outside world

Dec 11, 2007, 5:03 GMT

Seoul - Riding on the crest of a thaw in its relations with the United States, communist North Korea engaged this year in a flurry of diplomatic activities.

The moves raised expectations in Washington and Seoul as well as in other capitals of the region that the poor, but nuclear-armed, country is moving to come out of its long an obscure isolation.

Multilateral efforts aimed at ending North Korea's nuclear weapons programme have also helped to open a new path of dialogue between Pyongyang and the outside world.

The constant support of China, North Korea's traditional ally, for the efforts was seen as being decisive to find a breakthrough in the so-called six-party talks.

'In the past, North Korea often spoke of their isolation as a great benefit for their country,' the US envoy for the nuclear talks with North Korea, Christopher Hill, told reporters in early November.

'I think they've understood it now as something that is actually harming them, and that the best-case scenario for what they're doing is to believe that perhaps it is part of an overall effort to open up,' he said.

Following the agreements at the six-party talks - which include both Koreas, the US, China, Japan and Russia - North Korea allowed a group of nuclear experts from the US into the country.

Their task is to observe and to cooperate with North Korean technicians to disable the key facilities at the Yongbyon nuclear complex, located north of Pyongyang, until the end of this year. North Korea also said it would disclose its whole nuclear programme until then.

As part of its intensifying diplomatic activities, North Korea sent senior officials to countries in Southeast Asia, Africa, the Middle East as well as Russia in recent months.

This year, Pyongyang restored diplomatic ties with Myanmar and Nicaragua. It has also established diplomatic relations with five other countries, including Montenegro, the United Arab Emirates, Swaziland, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic.

North Korea also appears to have strong interest in Vietnam's economic development. Vietnamese communist party leader Nong Duc Manh visited North Korea in October, the first-ever visit in 50 years by a top Vietnamese leader to the North.

Later the same month, North Korea's Prime Minister Kim Yong Il visited Vietnam to sign agreements on various cooperation projects between the two sides. The visits led to speculations whether North Korea considers following the Vietnamese way of reforms.

New tones of engagement with the international community have even emerged from North Korea's usual hard-line official media.

The Workers' Party daily Rodong Sinmun, criticizing isolationism, said in an article published at the end of October: 'The time has passed when we had to carry out production and construction with our bare hands. Korea lives in the world ... We disregarded modern science and technology and resort to past experiences. But that has nothing to do with today's self-reliance efforts.'

Above all, the summit between the leaders of North and South Korea in October - only the second such meeting ever - raised the prospect that the Cold War on the Korean peninsula could finally come to an end.

Many experts believe that international pressure to give up its nuclear programme and its dilapidated economy leaves North Korea little choice to open itself to the outside world and seek investment from the wealthy neighbour in the South.

At their summit last month South and North Korea agreed on a package of new joint businesses and projects, including a joint programme to modernize a highway and a railway line in the North as well as building a shipyard in the country.

North Korea also agreed to expand its tourism business with South Korea. It will, for the first time, allow direct flights from Seoul to Paekdu Mountain at the border to China.

Uncertainties, however, still exist on whether the latest efforts to bring about a permanent détente and openness in North Korea will succeed.

'North Korea has shown contradictory signs,' Park Hyeong Jung, a researcher at the state-run Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul, said.

On one hand, North Korea clearly shows that it wants to improve its relations with other countries, he says. 'On the other hand, there is an internal fear of opening up.'

He cited reports from South Korean groups, including non-governmental organizations with steady contacts in the North, which indicate moves that go the opposite direction.

According to those reports, for example, the North Korean leadership tightened its crackdown on South Korean videos and cell phones spreading throughout the country.

'The government sent special groups to crack down on 'any anti-socialist' activity,' Park says.

Park thinks that not everyone in North Korea agrees that openness is a good idea and that the organizations within the regime follow different objectives.

He said that the ambitious inter-Korean economic projects could be started and further expanded only in accordance with the progress in North Korea's change in economic policy and institutions, which should promote economic growth and attract foreign capital.