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The more secretive the state, the greater the diplomatic importance of political funerals. In the final years of the Soviet Union, Western statesmen relied on a succession of state funerals to find out what was happening. It took the death of King Hussein of Jordan to coax the elder President Assad out of Damascus and into a new reconciliation with Amman. And yesterday in Seoul the North Koreans, for the first time, sent a high-level delegation to join the many thousands mourning the death of Kim Dae Jung, the former South Korean President who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to reach out to the communist North.
The delegation marked an abrupt and puzzling change of course in Pyongyang. After months of deliberate diplomatic and military provocations, the North Koreans appeared at the weekend intent on defusing tensions. The close associates of Kim Jong Il paid a formal visit on President Lee Myung Bak, the South Korean conservative who swiftly abandoned his country’s former “Sunshine Policy” on coming to office and insisted that North Korea must prove its commitment to nuclear disarmament agreements before it could expect aid. The delegation, which included the head of the party’s intelligence agency, did not attend the funeral itself, and apparently was not promised any softening of the line in Seoul. But its senior official said they were returning to Pyongyang “in a positive mood”.
Until this month the peninsula was as tense as at any time in the past three years. Having already pulled out of most intra-Korean projects and abandoned reconciliation talks with the South, North Korea test-fired missiles this year, conducted an underground nuclear test, renounced the six-power talks on its nuclear programme and issues a series of belligerent warnings to Washington and Seoul. Most analysts, struggling to interpret the events, suggested either that Kim Jong Il, in poor health after a stroke last year, was deliberately creating an atmosphere of crisis to secure the succession for his son, or that a power struggle had already begun with the hardline factions in the military staging provocations to bolster their claims.
The change came last month, when Bill Clinton made a dramatic visit to Pyongyang to secure the release of two American women sentenced to long periods of hard labour for straying across the frontier into the North. The former US President was received warmly by the North’s secretive rulers, was pictured with Mr Kim but said little about the substance of their talks. It was supposed widely, however, that he urged the North Koreans to rejoin the six-nation talks, despite their insistence only a month earlier that they would not do so. And he would have made it clear to the ailing dynast that Washington was not going to abandon this format or negotiate directly and alone with Pyongyang.
The message may have got through. If so, repairing relations with the South would be a logical face-saving way of reversing course. That, in turn, would allow Mr Lee to soften his line on re-engaging the North, which could then be presented in Pyongyang as a diplomatic victory. Pyongyang has reopened a North Korean mountain resort to South Korean tours recently. Gestures are important precursors in Asia. The hope now is that substantive policy will follow.
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