hankyoreh

By Kim Yeon-chul, Inje University professor

Seeing the breakdown of inter-Korean working-level talks on the Kaesong Industrial Complex, I find myself thinking of sixty years ago, and the armistice talks that were held then. Around March 1951, the front lines had bogged down around the 38th Parallel. The talks began that July. So why did they take another two years? Why, as a character asks in the film “The Front Line,” did we get so deep in the war for so long that we forgot what we were fighting for? The agreement was signed at ten in the morning on July 27, 1953 - so why did the gunfire continue until ten that night? For what possible reason could the war have continued on until the signed agreement took effect twelve hours later? The armistice talks weren’t talks - they were a war of their own.

Since the war, there have been two perspectives in this country on inter-Korean relations: the war perspective, and the negotiation perspective. Negotiations are different from war. In negotiation, you acknowledge the other side. You give what there is to be given, and you take what there is to take. It’s about giving things up to win other things. In war, though, you don’t recognize the other side as anything but something to exterminate - as we see with the calls to hasten Pyongyang’s collapse. It’s not the product of any kind of analysis, just the wishful thinking of people advocating the path of war. To those people, negotiating is gift giving. They don’t appreciate the concept of give-and-take.

Judging from the way the Kaesong talks went, it doesn’t appear that the South Korean government saw them as a negotiation process. They suddenly replaced their representative, and after the third round they stopped offering any revisions to the drafts. North Korea kept revising its plan, but the leaders in Seoul refused to make any concessions. In their willingness to scuttle the whole thing over whether the delegation leaders were equivalent in rank, in their decision to release sealed 2007 inter-Korean summit transcripts because they were suspicious of the politics, they appear to have viewed any concessions as a sign of weakness. And still they insist on adhering to “principle.” The message seems to be that they want to teach Pyongyang a thing or two about “manners.”

What, as the “Front Line” character asked, is the reason for the fighting? Why didn’t the government show any consideration for the businessmen at the Kaesong tenant companies? Did they hear none of the agonized cries, that the factories could not be idled any longer, that it would be impossible to start up again if any more time passed? Who were the talks for anyway? What is the purpose of the “principle” that the government puts so much stock in? One wishes they would remove the ideological lenses and face reality.

What is left for us if the complex closes? Just what awaits us once the dialogue, the interchange, the cooperation has come to a complete standstill? Not co-existence, not negotiations - the logic of war is all that will remain. Must we seek out the same solution as sixty years ago, a temporary halt to the fighting but a relationship that is like a war? If so, then we have no future. Anachronism carries with it no small opportunity cost.

Last week, I had the chance to visit Myanmar (also known as Burma). The government there is currently involved in multi-level ceasefire talks with around twenty armed minority rebel groups, including the Kachin Independence Army. Government officials I met there said that democracy was meaningless without peace. The government in Yangon chose the path of negotiation rather than war. I asked one of the officials, the equivalent of a minister in the Office of the President, what the rebels’ biggest demand was. “Equality,” was the reply. They wanted to be treated as negotiating partners, and the government agreed. Trust was a certainty once that kind of willingness was demonstrated. Now, we are told that real, substantive negotiations can take place without any mediation by the UN or other organizations.

The official had a message for us, too, as people from a divided country: if you want reconciliation with the enemy, meet with them. It’s the only way for trust to grow. Then we’d be able to solve the problem. It’s the path of reconciliation, a path we all recognize. And it’s what history demanded from them - and what it demands from us.

The views presented in this column are the writer’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Hankyoreh.　

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