hankyoreh

President Park Geun-hye came out with a hard-line stance on North Korea in her United Nations General Assembly keynote speech on Sept. 24. That body looks to be just the latest battlefield in inter-Korean antagonisms that have been ongoing since the start of the year. It now appears it will be that much tougher to address problems for inter-Korean relations and the peninsula as a whole.

Park’s references to North Korea during the speech focused on three main arguments: the need for denuclearization before anything else can happen, calls to turn up the pressure on Pyongyang, and the belief in reunification as a panacea. At one point, she said South Korea and the rest of the international community would actively support the North‘s economic development if it decided to give up its nuclear program and introduce greater openness and reforms. In its substance, this is the same policy that her predecessor Lee Myung-bak served up with his “Vision 3000” - which only led to North Korea beefing up its nuclear capabilities. If anything, Park’s version is a step backward, since it doesn’t actually offer anything in terms of conditions or a process for denuclearization. At least Lee gave some kind of vision for a “grand bargain” with Pyongyang in his UN General Assembly address in 2009, the year after he took office.

Park asked for the international community to take “necessary actions” on human rights in North Korea. This could have just been a generality, but at a time when Pyongyang’s relations with Seoul and Washington are so poor, it’s inevitably going to sound like a call to raise pressure on the North. The North Korean Foreign Minister asked to attend a senior-level meeting on his country’s human rights situation that was organized by the US on Sept. 23, but both the US and Seoul said no. For the South to then turn around and invite the North for a bilateral “dialogue” on human rights sends a very inconsistent message.

As for Park‘s talk about how a “reunified Korean Peninsula would be the starting point for a world without nuclear weapons and a basic solution to the human rights issue,” that’s just an inverted version of the “unification as panacea” vision. The underlying assumption is that unification cannot realistically happen until the nuclear issue is solved, and the human rights issue cannot be addressed unless the North Korean regime is changed under the South’s leadership. Park also said nothing about the methods that would bring this reunification about.

At this point, efforts to address the North Korean nuclear and missile programs are at a standstill. Washington is ignoring the deepening issue because it’s more focused on going after the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria, and Seoul doesn’t seem much interested in doing anything about it either. Meanwhile, a number of new problems have recently surfaced in inter-Korean relations: disputes over the launching of balloons containing leaflets, heated exchanges over human rights, and conflicts over the North Korean cheering squad at the Incheon Asian Games, to name a few.

If things keep going this way, it’s only going to become more difficult to figure out a solution to these issues affecting the peninsula. Many people had talked about how the UN General Assembly should be an opportunity to turn things around; instead, it’s been the opposite. Seoul needs to find a way to truly improve inter-Korean relations and resolve the nuclear issue.

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