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2 South Korea's Sunshine policy
strikes back By Sunny Lee
BEIJING - South Korea's Sunshine policy
towards the North has been in a virtual coma for
the two months since the inauguration of
conservative Lee Myung-bak as president of the
South. Lee wants to act tough and teach Pyongyang
a lesson on a Confucian golden rule: reciprocity.
Lee believes Pyongyang failed to learn
from the carrots Seoul patiently dangled during
over the past 10 years. South Korea, in Lee's
mind, held onto a naive belief that such goodwill gestures
would eventually be
reciprocated by Pyongyang. Now, it's time for a
reality check, hardliners are clamoring, and many
are describing the time spent on the Sunshine
policy as the "lost 10 years".
As it
happens, reciprocity is also a golden rule in
business. And it runs deep in former business
tycoon Lee Myung-bak's blood. Naturally, Lee was
quick to point out that the deal Seoul had engaged
in with Pyongyang, offering food and fertilizer
with little concession from the North, had gone
unrewarded. Meanwhile, right-leaning politicians
and the public who support Lee's tough stance on
North Korea, are chanting "No more Sunshine
policy!"
Even under the Kim Dae-jung and
Roh Moo-hyun administrations when Seoul carried
out the Sunshine policy, there had been constant
opposition to it. One of the loudest uproars
against the engagement policy came in 2006 when
North Korea conducted an underground nuclear test.
The test dealt a fatal blow to all the public
relations efforts the Sunshine policy team had put
in. Many people thought: after all these years of
aid to the North, this is what we get. The
Sunshine policy was slammed and Seoul's top
policymaker on North Korea, Lee Jong-seok, stepped
down.
At that time, Yoo Ho-yeol of Korea
University harshly criticized the Roh Moo-hyun
government. According to Yoo, "The Sunshine policy
proved to be helpless in preventing North Korea
from developing nuclear weapons ... Those
supporting the Sunshine policy believed that if we
embraced North Korea warmly first, North Korea
would transform itself through reform and
opening-up, improve its relationship with the
South and that would eventually eliminate the
cloud of war over the Korean Peninsula." He
concluded: "The policy may have started with a
good intention, but the reality now dictates that
we shouldn't anchor to it any more."
Naturally, when Lee took the helm of the
country he ushered in a sea-change and the
Sunshine policy appeared to be destined for the
shredder. After all, Lee won the presidential
election on the platform that he would reverse the
Sunshine policy and be tough on North Korea,
ending the era of unconditional concessions to the
North.
But last week, the Sunshine crusade
struck back with mighty force - both at home and
abroad. "I am confident that Lee Myung-bak will
eventually return to the Sunshine policy," said
Chung Se-hyun, former unification minister under
Kim Dae-jung and also under Roh Moo-hyun until
2004, at a breakfast meeting in Seoul. The
ex-minister also reminded the audience that
halfway across the world, Kim Dae-jung was
delivering a similar message at Harvard about the
same time.
Meanwhile, Cheong Seong-chang,
head of the North Korea department at the Sejong
Institute, a top think-tank that often advises the
government, argued before a strategy forum that
"inter-Korean relations have been rapidly
deteriorating, mainly because the Lee Myung-bak
government persisted on differentiating its North
Korean policies from those of the former Kim
Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun governments, ignoring
the agreements previously made by the North-South
summit and pursued a hardline policy."
In
the same week, a Sunshine team released statistics
that highlight the achievements of the policy. For
example, since the launch of the Sunshine policy,
they say, as many as 1.72 million South Koreans
have visited the scenic Mount Kumgang, or Diamond
Mountain, in North Korea. Currently, there are 69
South Korean companies in the North's Kaesong
Industrial Park, where South Korean companies
employ 30,000 North Koreans.
On any given
day, 300 to 400 South Korean vehicles cross the
Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) to North Korea, with
about 1,000 people crossing the border each day.
Annually, some 100,000 Koreans living across the
DMZ visit each other (the figure doesn't include
those visiting Mount Kumgang). At the end of last
year, total inter-Korean trade reached $1.78
billion, accounting for 40% of North Korea's total
outbound trade.
Citing all these figures
as evidence of North Korea's growing signs of
openness, as well as its deepening ties with the
South, ex-minister Chung said "instead of
criticizing the Sunshine policy as being
non-reciprocal or as being taken advantage of by
North Korea, it's wiser to make the best use of
North Korea's growing reliance on South Korea".
Yet skeptics maintain there has been no
real reduction of military threat under the
Sunshine policy. For example, in 2002, there was a
fatal naval clash between the Koreas in the West
Sea. That bloody confrontation, which the South
said was initiated by the North, resulted in
numerous casualties on both sides, bringing high
military tension to the Korean Peninsula. It also
left a deep emotional chasm in the South between
the pro- and anti-engagement camps. Yet the Seoul
government wanted to continue with its engagement
posture with North Korea. A wife of a fallen South
Korean solider, who was so distraught by "the
country that neglects the heroes who lost their
lives for the country", left the country for the
US, only to return recently after hardline Lee
became the president.
The ex-minister
Chung, however, said such criticism, mainly
assessing the impact of the Sunshine policy in
terms of political and military aspects, is
fundamentally wrong about the sequence of how
things are resolved. Citing the case of Germany,
he said: "The civilian exchange always comes first
and then other changes such as political and
military follow. If you look at it from the angle
of the civilian exchange front, there certainly
has been progress."
Andrei Lankov, a
Russia-born expert on North Korea, nods to the
impact of civilian exchange between the Koreas.
"North Korea is a regime that can be toppled
peacefully on a long-term basis by South Koreans
working together with North Koreans side by side.
Projects like Kaesong are good. We need more. The
more the better," Lankov told Asia Times Online at
his office in Seoul, adding, "If I were the Dear
Leader, I would ... " He didn't finish the
sentence. Instead, he made the gesture of
beheading, trying to make a point of how
"dangerous" such projects are to North Korea.
Lankov is an unusual right-wing scholar in
that he doesn't approve of the North Korean regime
but still sees the usefulness of the Sunshine
policy (up to 80% successful, according to Lankov)
in terms of how it can "destroy" the North Korean
regime from within, by enabling more North Koreans
to be in contact with South Koreans and
foreigners, thereby exposing them to the absurdity
of the regime in which they live.
Supporters of the Sunshine policy also
like to point out the capitalistic influence
permeating North Korea. They maintain that
although North Korea outwardly claims to be a
socialist country, in reality it has already begun
to change into a market economy. Chung cited an
ever-growing wealth gap in North Korea as an
example and argued that "the very fact that the
North Korean government cannot control [the
widening wealth gap] testifies that its socialism
is not working. What is actually working is a
growingly market-based capitalism."
However, not everyone is impressed by such
change in North Korea. The former North Korean
Workers' Party secretary Hwang Jang-yup, the
highest-ranking North Korean official ever to
defect to the South, downplays the significance of
the introduction of a market economy into North
Korea, saying, "Hitler's Germany also
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