[Editorial] Carter’s mission

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter is returning home from North Korea, taking along a 30-year-old American who was convicted of illegal entry and put to hard labor in the North. While Carter achieved another feat in his humanitarian career, Pyongyang’s dictator Kim Jong-il fulfilled his vanity of having the globally revered 2002 Nobel Peace Prize winner plead for the freedom of a U.S. citizen on behalf of his country. Kim did not, however, meet Carter in person. Unconfirmed reports revealed that he was on a visit to China.　

State Department officials who visited Pyongyang to negotiate the release of Aijalon Mahli Gomes in early August came back empty-handed. Then the North Korean U.N. Mission in New York told the Carter Center in Atlanta that Gomes would be freed if Carter came to bring him home.

It was the second time for Carter to visit Pyongyang after he discussed a package to resolve the then emerging North Korean nuclear issue with Kim’s father in 1994. A summit between South Korean President Kim Young-sam and Kim Il-sung did not materialize because of the sudden death of the founder of the DPRK, but a deal was sealed in Geneva that year.

Under the “agreed framework,” the North would halt its nuclear program in exchange for energy aid and the construction of light-water reactors. The deal fell apart due to North Korea’s secret efforts to resume its nuclear program and there have been no serious direct talks between the U.S. and the North since.

Details of the conversation Carter had with North Korean leaders will not be available until after the former president briefs Washington officials, possibly President Obama, and we can only guess what message the North Koreans wanted to convey to the United States via the 85-year-old former president. Just a year ago, Kim Jong-il met Bill Clinton in Pyongyang as the latter came to get the release of two U.S. journalists who were convicted of illegal entry.

Taking place in the midst of a stalemate in the six-party denuclearization talks, Clinton’s venture and his “exhaustive talks” with the North Korean ruler for “a wide-ranging exchange of views,” as Pyongyang’s official media reported, drew international attention. Yet, there was no breakthrough in the protracted negotiations following the Clinton visit.

The history of Carter’s role in the previous nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula attracted interest in the former president’s second visit to Pyongyang, particularly because of Kim Jong-il’s specific invitation of his father’s guest after the lapse of 16 years. It came when worse tension prevails on the peninsula following North Korea’s torpedoing of a South Korean warship.

Still, the second annual get-together between the North Korean leadership and a former U.S. president has little likelihood of producing any remarkable outcome unless Kim Jong-il chooses to heed the call to rejoin the six-party talks, which the North has shunned since early last year. Since Carter’s plan to go to Pyongyang was revealed, State Department officials emphasized the private nature of his mission and warned against any speculation of a change in the United States’ tough stance on the North.

In its rock hard support of the South Korean stand, the Obama administration has another condition set for any form of direct negotiation between Washington and Pyongyang -- the North’s admission of its guilt in the sinking of the Cheonan. Kim Jong-il’s version of hostage diplomacy toward the U.S. will bear little fruit as long as he refuses to change his course of adventurism.