Kim Young-joo voted in the election in 2015
Text/Tin Estate
According to rodong sinmun, an organ of the Workers' Party of Korea, on December 15, Kim Young-joo, 101, former minister of the Guidance Department of the Labor Party organization and former honorary vice chairman of the Permanent Committee of the Supreme People's Assembly, has recently passed away. The current supreme leader of the DPRK, Kim Jong-un, laid a wreath in front of Kim Young-joo's spirit on the 14th. Rodong Sinmun commented that Kim Young-joo has long held important posts in the party and the state, "selfless struggle for the implementation of the party's line and policies, and contributions to accelerating socialist construction and consolidating and developing the North Korean-style state social system." ”
Kim Young-joo has not appeared in public for a long time since his appearance in north Korean local elections in 2015, but for dual reasons, he has always been the focus of attention on both the north and the south of the Korean Peninsula. First, he was the younger brother of Kim Il Sung, the first generation leader of North Korea; second, he served as chairman of the Korean-North Coordination Committee in 1972, starting the earliest high-level dialogue between the North and the South after the Korean War.
At a difficult time of breaking the ice, he first reached an agreement with the South Korean side to cease hostilities and was responsible for the opening of the first telephone hotline in Seoul and Pyongyang. Regrettably, however, the goals he worked on 50 years ago have so far not been fully achieved in the North-South dialogue.
Kim Ying-chung (left), Kim Il Sung (middle), Kim Jong Il (right)
The First Dialogue between the North-South Red Cross Society was held in September 1971
Pioneered a number of "firsts" of peacemakers
Kim Young-joo was born in 1922 in Manjeongdae, North Korea. According to the New York Times, he joined guerrillas in northeast China as a teenager to participate in the War of Resistance Against Japan. Around 1941, Kim Young-joo came to the Soviet Union to study at the Faculty of Political Economy of Moscow State University, and later attended the graduate class of the Moscow Higher Party School.
According to North Korean information collected by the South Korean government, Kim Young-joo returned to North Korea and became the head of the Organization and Guidance Department of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party in 1961, was first elected as an alternate member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party in 1966, and became a member of the Politburo in 1969.
After Kim Young-joo became famous for his involvement in the Inter-North Korean dialogue, the New York Times combed through the ranking of his reports in North Korea's state media and found that he ranked 47th among North Korean leaders in 1961, 24th in 1967, 12th in 1969 and 6th in the Politburo after 1970.
Soon after Kim Young-joo entered North Korea's core leadership, there was a major change in the long-hostile North-South relations on the peninsula. On August 15, 1970, South Korean President Park Chung-hee delivered a Comeraton speech proposing "peaceful coexistence" between the two Koreas and seeking negotiations with North Korea. This is the first time since 1945 that a South Korean president has taken the initiative to propose a North-South reconciliation. In April of the following year, the then Dprk Foreign Minister Heo Yeon proposed to convene a political consultative conference between the two sides of the peninsula. Four months later, In his speech, Kim Il Sung said that "the North Korean government is ready to meet with southern dignitaries at any time."
Park Tae-kyun, a professor at Seoul National University and a well-known Korean historian, pointed out that the major changes in North-South relations at that time in a short period of time were related to the great geopolitical changes in Northeast Asia. As U.S.-China diplomatic relations "broke the ice," U.S. President Richard Nixon demanded a conciliatory gesture against Pyongyang by the communist-hostile Park Chung-hee government, and also made a decision to dismantle U.S. troops in South Korea. In the face of changes in the international situation, the korean and Korean governments are looking for new ways to get along.
However, the DPRK and the ROK have no experience in dialogue and engagement, and it is obviously inappropriate to send foreign ministers and foreign ministers to attend intra-peninsula negotiations. At the time, South Korea was under the Park Chung-hee junta, and the CIA was the most powerful department to undertake the initial secret contact mission. Therefore, the high-level representative sent by the ROK side was Lee Ho-rok, then minister of intelligence. It is worth mentioning that the tradition of the Ministry of Intelligence (now the National Intelligence Agency) in charge of the North-South High-level Dialogue has continued to this day, and the current director of the National Security Office of the Blue House, Xu Xun, is the representative of this channel.
At that time, North Korea did not have a direct counterpart with the South Korean Intelligence Department. Finally, in 1972, Kim Young-joo, then head of the Organization and Guidance Department of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party, issued an invitation to Lee Ho-lo. From May 2 to 5, Lee Camero came to Pyongyang to meet with Kim Il Sung and Kim Young-joo respectively. From May 29 to June 1, Because Kim Young-joo was "in poor health," Park Sung-chol, second vice minister of the DPRK cabinet, returned to Seoul as his representative to meet with Park Chung-hee and Lee Hau-rook.
For the first time since the armistice, there will certainly be some interesting misunderstandings in the inter-Korean high-level dialogue. Kim Joon-yeol, a representative of the South Korean side, later recalled that when he talked to Kim Young-joo and Park Sung-chul, he "had to answer questions", but when he "gossiped" about the age and family of the other party, the Representatives of the DPRK side avoided talking about it. However, in order to promote reconciliation, the representatives of the two sides did not disclose these small differences at that time.
With the direct involvement of the leaders of the two sides, the talks progressed more rapidly than the delegates expected. By late June, the two sides had reached consensus on the principles of North-South peaceful dialogue. In contrast, the preparatory phase of the North-South Red Cross Dialogue, which took place during the same period, lasted eight months. Since then, "high-level first" has become the norm of contacts and dialogues between the North and the South.
Kim Young-joo and Lee Ho-rook's efforts don't stop there. The two sides agreed that a two-member North-South Coordination Committee should be established and that these consensus and dialogue mechanisms should be fixed through an unprecedented joint document. To date, no document has revealed who made the proposal first in the negotiations. What is certain is that Kim Young-joo and Lee Ho-ro signed a joint statement at the same time on June 29 and made it public on July 4. This is the famous "July Fourth Joint Statement" in the history of the Korean Peninsula.
As a joint document issued by the governments of the South and the North for the first time since the Korean War, the July Fourth Joint Statement affirmed the three principles of "independence, peace, and great national unity" put forward by Kim Il Sung for the peaceful reunification of Korea, and put forward seven contents, including stopping armed provocations, opening direct telephones, promoting negotiations between the North and South Red Cross Societies, and establishing a dialogue mechanism. At the time, these were new solutions that had never been heard of; today, the measures mentioned in the July Fourth Joint Statement remain the goals of the ongoing efforts of the governments of both Koreas.
In 1994, Kim Young-joo (right) attends the funeral of his brother Kim Il-sung
Facilitating a new round of "condolence dialogue"?
After the signing of the July Fourth Joint Declaration, Kim Young-joo and Lee Ho-rok met twice in the name of the two chairmen of the North-South Coordination Committee, and since then, deputies and lower-level representatives of the two sides have made three contacts in a year, and Kim Young-joo's deputy is Liu Zhangzhi, director of the Liaison Department of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party. Later, the information declassified by the ROK side showed that at that time, the DPRK side proposed to solve the military issue first, and the ROK side advocated economic and cultural exchanges first, and the two sides failed to reach a consensus, but when Kim Young-joo and Lee Hau-rok met directly, they still reached an agreement on stopping hostile broadcasting on the 38th Parallel and distributing hostile leaflets.
However, the duration of this exposure is less than a year. On August 8, 1973, agents of south Korean intelligence ministry kidnapped South Korean democrat and presidential candidate Kim Dae-jung in Japan. On the 28th, Kim Young-joo issued a statement condemning it, pointing out that it was impossible to dialogue with representatives of the intelligence department like Li Houluo, and the North-South talks were immediately suspended. Since then, Park Chung-hee has replaced Lee Hau-rok, and the North-South Coordination Committee has resumed some low-level contacts, but has not been able to reach further reconciliation. In July 1975, Kim Young-joo again issued a statement stating that talks could only continue in South Korea, where truly patriotic democrats were in power. The following year, direct north-south telephone lines were discontinued.
Kim Young-joo and the North Korean accusations did not wrongfully accuse Lee Hou-ro. Ten years later, Mr. Lee, who had been squeezed out of the center of power, admitted in an interview with the media that he had led the kidnapping of Mr. Kim and that the goal was indeed to target North Korea. During a visit to Pyongyang on May 24, 1972, he recalled that Kim Il-sung mentioned to him that "many democrats in the South" had a more positive attitude toward reunification. Because of "fear that Kim Dae-jung would run to North Korea," the South Korean government finally made this decision.
Some analysts also believe that even without this special event, the South Korean side at that time lacked the atmosphere to continue the high-level dialogue between the North and the South. Park Tae-kyun pointed out that the DPRK side believes that the abolition of the anti-communist law by the Park Chung-hee government is a prerequisite for the Inter-Korean dialogue, but after the signing of the "July Fourth Joint Statement," the ROK government not only did not cancel the anti-communist legislation, but instead arrested some opposition leaders who supported the Inter-Korean dialogue in this name.
However, when the door to north-south dialogue is opened, it will not be closed again. Courtesy contacts between lower-ranking officials on both sides were preserved. In 1985, meetings on separated families resumed, and the two sides finally reached a consensus to support the reunification of separated families. The positive attitude of the NORTH Korean government toward Kim Dae-jung has also laid the foundation for the first meeting between the leaders of the DPRK and the ROK after Kim Dae-jung came to power.
It is precisely for this reason that the "July Fourth Joint Declaration" enjoys an extremely important position in the process of reconciliation on the peninsula. One detail is that, given the protracted state of war between the two sides, Kim Young-joo and Lee Hau-rok each signed the declaration with their own names, neither explicitly signing it on behalf of the top leaders of the two koreas. But since the beginning of this century, when expounding the basic principles of North-South relations, the DPRK's state media have always mentioned the July Fourth Joint Declaration and the June 15 Joint Declaration and the Fourteenth Declaration signed between the leaders of the DPRK and the ROK. The DPRK and the ROK have also held many simultaneous commemoration activities to commemorate the "July Fourth Joint Statement."
In 2013, when the Park Geun-hye government declared that inter-Korean relations should "abide by international law," Rodong Sinmun published an opinion piece pointing out that if the Park geun-hye government is willing to improve inter-Korean relations, it should abide by the "three principles of reunification" in the July Fourth Joint Statement, namely autonomy, peace, and democratic unity. At the low point in inter-Korean relations, the North Korean side also proposed a cease-and-play on July 4.
It is worth mentioning that the DPRK and the ROK have a tradition of "condolence dialogue". When former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung and Jeong Joo-yong, former chairman of Hyundai Asan Group, who made significant contributions to breaking the ice between the north and the south, and others died, the two sides sent delegations to pay tribute, thus achieving contact, often laying the foundation for subsequent formal dialogues at a higher level.
After Kim Dae-jung's death in 2009, North Korea sent a high-level delegation led by Kim Ki-nam, secretary of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea, to visit South Korea to offer condolences, which was also the highest level and largest visit to South Korea before the 2018 "nominal head" Kim Yong-nam attended the Pyeongchang Olympics. South Korea is responsible for receiving and accompanying the condolences to Park Ji-won, the current president of the Moon Jae-in government. Xu Xun, director of the Blue House National Security Office, who has been surfing the peninsula since 2018, and Meng Kyung-il, vice chairman of the North Korean Asia-Pacific Peace Commission, have also participated in this special contact on many occasions.
2022 marks the 50th anniversary of the signing of the July Fourth Joint Statement and the 50th anniversary of the launching of the High-level Dialogue between the TWO Koreas after the armistice. According to South Korean President Moon Jae-in, the four sides of China, the United States, the DPRK and the ROK have reached a preliminary consensus on the signing of the "Declaration on the End of War." If the DPRK and the ROK can make high-level contacts by paying tribute to Kim Young-joo, it will not only help to restart the peace process on the peninsula, but also best commemorate this "first generation of peace messengers.".
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