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TOWARD ONE KOREA
Part I: Seoul goes from ally to
arbiter
By David Scofield
SEOUL - When US Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld arrives here on Sunday, he will find a South
Korea that has drifted far from its former status as a
staunch ally of the United States and into an
increasingly cozy relationship with the "axis of evil"
member north of the Demilitarized Zone.
A year
ago South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun promised the
nation that he would spare no effort to "engage" North
Korean leader Kim Jong-il; he pledged to "equalize" the
US-Korea relationship, largely defined by the presence
of 37,000 soldiers in South Korea and viewed by many as
symbolic of national weakness; and further vowed to
"mediate" future disputes between the US and North
Korea, playing arbiter rather than ally.
Roh has
kept his word, and strong coercive steps, the sort that
can curb a dictator's dangerous behavior and enforce
some modicum of respect for human life, will not, it
seems, come from the South.
Unlike the united
front Washington and Seoul presented to Pyongyang in
1994, the South Korean administration has made it very
clear that no amount of Northern belligerence and
bellicosity will sway it from its objective of a
placated, "peaceful" North Korea. This should serve as a
wake-up call for all those within the US administration
who pin their hopes for peace on a negotiated settlement
with the present leadership in North Korea.
The
tense negotiations that led to the now-defunct Geneva
Agreed Framework in 1994 were predicated on a simple
assumption: enticements and rewards would eventually
bind the Northern leadership to a framework that, while
initially elevating, would ultimately undermine the
brutal system that maintained it. Enticements and
incentives ranging from fuel, food and fertilizer to the
construction of two light-water reactors valued at
almost US$4 billion and myriad diplomatic proposals were
designed to be irresistible. All this, architects of the
1994 arrangement theorized, would eventually embed North
Korea in a greater system of exchange, in the hope of
ushering in a change in the regime.
Unfortunately, Pyongyang has a different agenda.
After initially accepting agreements, North Korea often
reneges, feigning misunderstanding and/or bad faith on
the part of its opponent, while vehemently demanding
renegotiation of crucial terms. This allows it to secure
both immediate and middle-term incentives in the
interim, as well as maintaining full control of the pace
and timing of the engagement. For North Korea, constant,
self-controlled, low-level crisis - the status quo - is
a win. Implementing agreed principles, the terms
necessarily designed to divest situational control from
the North Korean leader and invest power in the
institution of the agreement, equals a loss.
This fact, a fundamental concern, was partially
mitigated by the presence of a credible, bi-national
deterrent.
Since former South Korean president
Kim Dae-jung's now-controversial June 2000 Pyongyang
summit with Kim Jong-il, however, the politically
pendulous South has taken an about-face in its approach
to the North. The crucial notion of reciprocity in
dealings with Pyongyang has become a farce as the North
continues to receive largesse from the South - at least
$500 million and up to $1 billion for the 2000 summit
alone - while offering little discernable in return.
In fact, the North has grown increasingly
cantankerous in its dealings with the South, demanding
compensation for even the slightest overture. After the
Peace Festival on Cheju Island last month, the North
Korean delegates refused to leave until they were paid
an additional $1.2 million by the South, on top of the
"gifts" and monies that had already been loaded on to
their plane. In August, during the "celebration of
peace" that was to have been the Asian Games, North
Korean reporters physically assaulted a group of human
rights activists, eliciting silence from the South
Korean government and apathy from most citizens. The
North Koreans were neither detained nor charged for the
violent assault, in sharp contrast to the "anti-North"
protesters who were detained for publicly burning North
Korean flags.
The new North-friendly philosophy
is evident throughout South Korea, including its
classrooms. Today's school texts reflect the present
policy, neutralizing some rather nasty bits of recent
history involving North Korea, including attacks on
South Korea and North Korea's widely condemned gross
human-rights abuses.
But while depictions of
North Korea have been officially softened, the
portrayals of the US have become markedly less
enthusiastic, prompting the US embassy in Seoul to
initiate a review of how the US is being officially
depicted in school curriculum and government sanctioned
textbooks. And it's not only what's being said that's
concerning, but what's being omitted as well.
On
August 15, a national holiday in South Korea celebrating
the nation's liberation from Japan, the role of the US
in ending the colonial period was conspicuously absent
throughout government speeches. And its not just the
role the US played in developing the South that is
largely ignored within South Korean officialdom, but
North Korean attempts to destroy the nation as well.
October 9 marked the 20th anniversary of the
Rangoon (Yangon)bombings, an attempt by North Korean
agents to kill then-South Korean president Chun Doo-wan.
The agents missed Chun but managed to kill 21 other
people, including Seoul's foreign minister and deputy
prime minister. November 29 will mark the 16th
anniversary of North Korea's bombing of a Korean
Airlines jet over, again, Myanmar, killing 115 people.
It is unlikely that either of these events will receive
any formal recognition by the Southern government, with
most South Koreans unaware of the terror North Korea
initiated on these dates.
Soon after his
inauguration last spring, Roh declared "war" on the
nation's independent media, declaring that he would
vigorously pursue those who "distort and misrepresent"
his administration and its policies. Indeed, some of
Roh's more irrational supporters have taken it on
themselves to attack physically and intimidate newspaper
publishers who they maintain harbor "anti-Roh,
anti-progressive" bias. A media watchdog, the
International Press Institute, has included South Korea,
along with Russia, Venezuela and Zimbabwe, on its Media
Watch list since 2001. The Vienna-based organization
cites government activities designed to "curb and
coerce" the media among other government intrusions
designed to reduce the freedom of the press in South
Korea as reason for inclusion on the list.
There
is little dissent within the nation's public
broadcaster, however, as KBS, managed by a former editor
of the Seoul-based, North-sympathetic Hankyoreh
newspaper, has been so glowing in its portrayal of the
Northern leadership that fleeing North Korean refugees
huddled in China's Jilin province prefer not to listen.
Refugees complain that they only hear positive
portrayals of the North and its leadership on KBS, a
fact that disgusts those who have witnessed the depraved
regime first hand. Indeed, discussion of North Korea's
human rights atrocities is largely absent in South
Korean media, and in most circles of society here.
Perhaps South Korean Unification Minister Jeong Se-hyun
summed up the country's position well when he was quoted
by Wall Street Journal associate editor Melanie
Kirkpatrick as saying, "Political freedom is a luxury,
like pearls for a pig. The improvement of economic
conditions for the North Korean people is the most
important issue right now."
South Korea's desire
to play intermediary between North Korea and the US has
manifest into that of an advocate, rather than arbiter.
When the North announced in October last year that it
had secretly, and in direct contravention of its 1994
agreements, developed a highly enriched uranium program
and was planning to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation
Treaty (it was the initial threat of the same by
Pyongyang in 1992 that led to the Geneva agreement),
South Korea quickly declared that the US must have
misunderstood. When North Korea announced in September
that it had finished reprocessing plutonium for the
manufacture of additional nuclear weapons, it was South
Korea that declared that this was false. Contrary to
North Korean declarations that it has working nuclear
devices and is busily making more, the South proclaimed
again, not true.
The South Korean administration
maintains the principle of a non-nuclear peninsula, but
polls continue to show that few fear the Northern
nuclear threat, with many taking quiet pride that the
North is a nuclear power. The South, after much
persuasion by the US, abandoned its nuclear weapons
program in the mid-1970s. An oft-heard phrase in South
Korea these days is Korean pride: loosely translated as
an embrace of Korean nationalism and independence. A
"Korean bomb" would be a boon to many in the South who
believe the peninsula has been under the yoke of foreign
powers for far too long.
There is nothing to
suggest that more agreements, regardless scope or scale,
will be more successful than those past. Indeed, given
the very obvious shift that has taken place within the
South Korean government and society concerning North
Korea, coupled with a strong nationalist embrace of "one
Korea", it is fantasy to assume that the terms of any
new agreement can or will be adequately enforced by the
South, making any attempt at a negotiated peace with the
North far less likely than 10 years ago.
Next: A new strategy
David Scofield
is a lecturer at the Graduate Institute of Peace
Studies, Kyung Hee University, Seoul.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd.
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