Pyongyang ties need boost: Rudd - Australia-North Korea relations; Australian trade official Kevin Rudd

Business Asia, August 30, 1999

Australia needs to increase its engagement with Stalinist North Korea to help pull the "hermit kingdom" out of its shell, a north Asia expert says.

Kevin Rudd, the chairman of the Parliamentary Labor Party Policy Committee on National Security and Trade and a former KPMG China consultant, has called for an active policy of calibrated engagement to replace the policy of containment the West has applied to the rogue state.

Rudd, speaking at an Asia Society function, said the Korean peninsula situation was the most volatile of the unresolved disputes in the Asia-Pacific region.

Tensions increased late last year after Pyongyang test fired a ballistic missile over Japan, angering the United States and sending shivers through the region. Recent reports indicate a second test will take place.

Rudd said an escalation in conflict would affect our largest trading partners, and as such North Korea should be at the centre and not the edges of Australia's national interest.

"The energies of Australian foreign policy need increasingly to be directed towards a stable and sustainable peace in the Korean peninsula," he said.

"At the same time, Australian security policy needs increasingly to be mindful that this stable peace may not be attainable."

Rudd visited North Korea in May this year as part of a Labor Party delegation.

He said Western nations' decades-old policy of containment had not worked.

He has called for Australia to normalise its relations with Pyongyang and increase humanitarian aid as a way of helping reformists within North Korea gain popular support.

"There is no real evidence anywhere that the Kim Jong Il regime is going to fall apart any time soon -- in fact, it's unlikely to fall given that the regime's survival is the single core policy objective remaining among Pyongyang's political elite," Rudd said.

"If we have mainstream politicians, bureaucrats and business people from the West engaged in sustained dialogue, then there is at least some prospect of engineering some form of political change.

"We want to give the reformists something to hang their hat on."

Rudd, however, cautioned about being overly optimistic of achieving results.

"It is still worthy of experimentation," he said.

"People tend to forget that when Nixon visited China in 1972, it was a pretty scary place. A quarter of a century of sustained engagement later, and it is considerably less scary."