Page 2 of 3 Working through Korean
unification blues By Andrei Lankov
North, undermining inter-Korean
detente. The Korean nationalist left, now (barely)
in power, still believes that the Chinese solution
is possible and "progressive", and also perceives
any talks about regime collapse in the North as a
reminder of the official anti-communism of the
past. The right is slightly more realistic, but it
seems that its supporters are not too eager to
discuss the difficulties such a turn of events
could bring about.
It will be a
simplification to think that South Koreans
are
completely unprepared for
such an eventuality. Seoul government agencies do
not like to talk about it, but it is clear that
somewhere in government there are secret files
with short-term contingency plans, to be put in
motion in case of a power collapse in the North.
However, these plans deal with immediate
consequences of the crisis, especially with
handling of refugees, and not with the long-term
strategy of reconstruction, and this strategy is
actually the hardest part of the task.
The
major task is to smooth the transition, to make
the shock of unification less painful and more
manageable. It seems that one of the possible
solutions is a confederation. The idea of
confederation has been suggested many times
before, but in most cases it was assumed that the
two existing Korean regimes would somehow agree to
join a confederative state. Needless to say, one
has to be very naive to believe that the North
Korean rulers could somehow co-exist with South
Korea, which even in its worst times was a
relatively mild dictatorship committed to a market
economy (and become a liberal democracy two
decades ago).
Such confederation is
plainly impossible. However, in this case we mean
a different type of state union, a provisional
confederation, whose sole and clearly stated task
would be to lay the foundations for a truly
unified state and to cushion the more disastrous
effects of North Korea's transformation.
Such a confederation will become possible
only when and if the North Korean regime changes
dramatically, and a new leadership in Pyongyang
will have no reasons to fear the influence of the
democratic and capitalist South. In other words,
only a post-Kim government can be realistically
expected to agree to such a provisional
confederation. It does not really matter how this
government will come to power, whether through a
popular revolution, a coup or something else. As
long as this government (most unlikely, bowing to
pressure from below) would be genuinely willing to
unite with the South, it might become a partner at
these negotiations and a participant of the
confederation regime.
The confederation
regime should make North Korea a democracy, one
that introduces political freedoms and basic
political rights. There should be an explicit
statement about the length of the provisional
confederation regime, and 10 to 15 years seems to
be ideal. A longer period might alienate common
North Koreans who will probably see it as an
attempt to keep them from fully enjoying the South
Korean lifestyle while using them as "cheap
labor". On the other hand, a shorter period might
not be sufficient for any serious transformations.
One of the tasks of such a provisional
system will be to control cross-border movement.
South Koreans are now haunted by nightmarish
pictures of millions of North Koreans flooding
Seoul and other major cities, where they will push
the South Korean poor from unskilled jobs or
resort to robbery and theft. Such threats are
real, and the confederation will make it
relatively easy to maintain a visa system of some
kind, with a clearly stated (and reasonable)
schedule of gradual relaxation. For example, it
might be stated that for the first five years all
trips between the two parts of the new Korea will
require a visa, and North Koreans will not be
allowed to take jobs or long-time residency in the
South. In the following five years these
restrictions could be relaxed and then finally
lifted.
South Korean fears of a North
Korean crime wave might be well-founded -
notoriously tough North Korean commandos indeed
make ideal mafia enforcers. However, the North
Koreans also should be protected from the less
scrupulous of their new-found brethren - for
example, from South Korean real estate
speculators. In the case of uncontrolled
unification, South Korean dealers will rush to buy
valuable property in the North, a task which will
not be too difficult in a country where $10 a
month is seen as a good income.
South
Korean dealers vividly remember what happened in
Kangnam, former paddy fields which were turned
into a posh neighborhood in southern Seoul. In
some parts of Kangnam land prices increased more
than a thousandsfold within a decade or so, making
a lucky investor super-rich, and there are good
reasons to believe that the price of land in
Pyongyang or Kaesong could sky-rocket as well.
However, it is easy to predict the
resentment of those North Koreans who will lose
their dwellings for what would initially appear to
be a fortune, but soon will come to be seen as
small change. If real estate speculations are left
uncontrolled, in a few years entire North Korean
cities could become the property of South Korean
dealers - with predictable consequences for
relations between northerners and southerners.
Hence, the provisional confederation regime, while
encouraging other kinds of investment, should
strictly control or even ban the purchase of
arable land and housing in the North by South
Koreans.
Another painful issue is that of
land reform, distributing the land of state-run
agricultural cooperatives among individual
farmers. One of the major challenges would be
claims of land owners who lost their property
during the North Korean radical land reform of
1946. A majority of the dispossessed landlords
fled to the South in 1945-1953 when some 1.5
million inhabitants of the North crossed the
border between the two Koreas. Their descendants
now live in the South and, as both anecdotal
evidence and some research testify, carefully kept
the old land titles. It is just a minor
exaggeration to say that an arable plot in the
North usually has an aspiring landlord residing in
Seoul. These claims remain technically valid since
the Republic of Korea has never recognized the
North Korean land reform of 1946.
For
generations, the North Koreans have been told by
their government that the collapse of the
communist regime will bring back the nasty
landowners who have been laying in wait in the
South. If in this particular case the propaganda
statements are correct, this would produce a very
serious negative impression on
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