Dienstbier in Korea

28. 3. 2010

The former Czech foreign minister was in Seoul last week on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations with Korea, a relationship he helped implement just three months after the new democratic government took hold in the Czech Republic in 1990.

While in town, Dienstbier visited the last bastion of the Cold War where North and South Korea stand face-to-face on their respective sides of the Demilitarized Zone.

"We know what this kind of zone is because we had a similar line for half a century," he told The Korea Herald.

"But of course it was not the same because here is a vast area and there are thousands of mines planted in the fields, which was different from our country." Yet the barbed wires, the machine guns and watch towers still brought back vivid memories for the former journalist, writer, politician, and former Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic.

"We got rid of it 20 years ago but now the younger people don't know what it was like," he said.

Today, the boundaries surrounding the Czech Republic are gone. Instead they are a proud member of the European Union and part of the Schengen space, a borderless zone consisting of 25 European countries.

"I'm old enough to be used to everything so I don't have a lot of emotions," Dienstbier said when asked what he felt upon viewing the division between the two Koreas.

"It is a sad thing," he added.

As a former foreign minister for both a communist regime and a democratically elected country, Dienstbier does not see how it is possible to persuade North Korea into joining the new century.

"North Korea is a completely specific regime, there is no possibility of dialogue, and they can accept something during the negotiations but don't feel that they should respect it," Dienstbier said.

He added that the main problem Western countries have in dealing with North Korea is their lack of understanding when Pyongyang's promises are not kept. For example, North Korea promised to denuclearize their country only to test such a weapon, twice.

"I must say it is very difficult to understand that mentality. Why make promises they don't live up? Why don't they do like the Iranians, just say and do it." Due to their communist past and their democratic responsibility, the Czech Republic has played pivotal roles in Middle Eastern affairs by opening dialogue between countries like Israel, Syria and the Palestinian Authority.

But in the case of North Korea, this is not an option even with an embassy in Pyongyang.

"Nobody really knows what the situation is in North Korea," said Dienstbier. "Is it really such a totalitarian control of society or not? If there is an underground movement, we don't know. It's hardly possible to believe that this kind of totalitarianism can function. It never functioned in China, Russia (former Soviet Union) and Czechoslovakia."

Although there were thousands of North Korean students that studied in Czechoslovakia from 1948-1989, there is no contact with a single one of them at the Czech Embassy in Pyongyang. "When they return home, we hear nothing from them," he said. "The Czech Republic and the world really do not know what is going on" in the hermit kingdom.

With Fidel Castro's Cuba, Czechoslovakia had a deep and friendly relationship, but with North Korea their relationship was a technical, diplomatic relationship, "nothing more."

Dienstbier was one of the prominent Czech intellectuals around the Charter 77 who were preparing democratic political changes. He was sentenced in 1979 to three years in prison together with five other members of the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted.

Dienstbier was one of the prominent Czech intellectuals centered around Charter 77, a human rights movement based on International Covenants on Human Rights with the goal of preparing democratic political changes in Czechoslovakia.

He was sentenced in 1979 to three years in prison together with five other members of the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted. Regarding sanctions against North Korea with the aim of starving them into change, Dienstbier stands against popular conception.

"I was always against sanctions and embargoes because it always punished ordinary people."

He used a quote from former Polish Information Minister Jerzy Urban who served under Polish President Wojciech Jaruzelski to prove his point.

"Urban said on television as he smiled, 'The government will always have something to eat.' Cynical answer to threats of sanctions," said Dienstbier.

As foreign minister, Dienstbier witnesses such exercises in the Balkans and Iraq. Dienstbier said sanctions create a black economy where even decent people and decent mayors of cities have to participate just to get valuable supplies for their people.

"A regime can use it as a form of propaganda against the West also." Dienstbier was also appointed by the United Nations as a special rapporteur for human rights in the former Yugoslavia, and was opposed to the NATO bombing of Serbia and Kosovo.

Yoav Cerralbo

Vytisknout