hankyoreh

By Lee Jong-seok, guest columnist and former Unification Minister

North Korean authorities have announced that they will be launching a “satellite” sometime between Apr. 12 and 16. Even though they claim the launch has peaceful intentions, it is nevertheless a provocation that threatens peace. The technology used for the satellite is identical to that used for missile development and there are questions surrounding North Korea’s true motivations. It also appears likely that the launch will have an impact, large or small, on April’s general election in South Korea.

Whose side is Pyongyang on in carrying out this provocation on the eve of an election? Does it favor the opposition, as is being claimed by reactionaries who have trotted out their timeworn redbaiting tactics? I don’t think so. In my eyes, it favors the ruling New Frontier Party party. History bears this out.

On Nov. 29, 1987, about ten days before the 13th presidential election in South Korea, a bomb went off on a Korean Airlines jet flying over Myanmar after being placed there by a North Korean operative. The incident ended up provoking security concerns and alarm about North Korea among the South Korean public, contributing decisively to the eventual victory of Democratic Liberal Party candidate Roh Tae-woo, a veritable grandfather to today’s NFP.

In April 1996, around twenty days before a general election, North Korea declared that it was abandoning its maintenance duties for the Demilitarized Zone and sent armed forces into Panmunjeom. This quickly spawned concerns about a possible war in South Korea, and the end result was salvation for the New Korea Party, the forerunner of the NFP, which was facing the threat of an election rout due to a case of bribery by a Blue House figure. For the opposition, it meant defeat.

During the 15th presidential election in December 1997, former religious Cheondogyo leader Oh Ik-je, who had was exiled to the North, wrote a letter to opposition candidate Kim Dae-jung telling him that reunification would happen within the century if he was elected president. Six days before voting, Oh appeared on North Korean television and said Kim’s reunification plan was similar to North Korea’s Koryo democratic confederation system. This resulted in a North Korea crisis theme for the election that painted Kim as supporting the North Korean communists.

What these episodes show is that Pyongyang has traditionally been an ally to reactionary forces in South Korean elections. Even today, North Korea’s propaganda organs continue to disparage the ruling party and encourage support for the opposition in South Korean elections. Some people see this and come away with the impression that Pyongyang wants the opposition to win. Lending credence to this belief is the fact that the opposition is pushing an engagement policy of dialogue and cooperation with North Korea. But is this really the case?

Given the strong anti-North sentiment in South Korea, open support for a particular political group from North Korea during election campaigning actually works against that group, which ends up painted as being “pro-North” or “working for Pyongyang.” North Korean sources who are familiar with what goes on in South Korea are aware of this. Requesting support for the opposition is as good as asking voters to reject that candidate. I believe that the reason the Pyongyang regime acts in a way that hurts the opposition candidates is because it thinks that it helps its own stability to have an administration in Seoul with an authoritarian character like its own, rather than a democratic administration that sets up a stark contrast with its own dictatorial leanings, and that it goes some way in mitigating its “South Korea complex” in terms of resolving issues in inter-Korean relations.

It does not seem North Korea’s satellite launch plan was announced as a way of directly affecting the South Korean election. It seems to have been motivated by Pyongyang’s own political timetable for April, a month that will see the centenary of Kim Il-sung’s birth, the likely consolidation of the Kim Jong-un regime, and the pledged building of a “strong and prosperous country.”

Irrespective of Pyongyang‘s intentions, the launch will still affect the South Korean election. Most of all, we can expect the reactionaries, with their history of turning the North Korea variable into an election issue, to use serious national security issues as an opportunity to red bait opposition candidates.

But the South Korean public is now different than it was in the past. In the June 2 local elections after the Cheonanham sinking in March 2010, we saw voters begin questioning the way North Korea was used as an election issue. With the Cheonanham incident and the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island, they got the sense that the Grand National Party administration was the least competent in handling national security since the days of Rhee Syngman, South Korea’s first president. And as if this were not enough, it also exploited national security as an election issue. The people realized that what we need instead is a government to steer inter-Korean relations in such a way that Pyongyang would not interfere with South Korean elections by engaging in provocations, and that also had a strong national security posture.

At this point, the opposition needs to stop simply responding defensively to the ruling party‘s North Korea scare tactics. They must start working proactively to offer the public a vision for replacing the incompetents in control of national security. And it needs to ask the people of South Korea just which side really stands for “security.”

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]