hankyoreh

the head of the group Fighters for a Free North Korea

Nine months after the launch of the Lee Myung-bak administration, the North-South cooperation and trust, cultivated with difficulty since the first inter-Korean summit in June 2000, are crashing down. In response, President Lee and his core advisers are writing this off as an “inevitable period of adjustment in the process of normalizing the misguided inter-Korean relations of South Korea being dragged around by North Korea for the 10 years of the Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun administrations.” A representative example is Lee’s “policy” that “waiting is also sometimes a strategy.” But many experts are commenting that the fundamental cause of the vicious cycle of distrust and conflict between North and South Korea is the fact that the current administration has lapsed into dogma and ignored its promises with its counterpart, existing principles and changes in the political situation.

Ignoring Agreements: The starting point and core cause of the deterioration in North-South relations has been the Lee administration’s ignorance of the June 15 Joint Statement and October 4 Summit Declaration. In a Unification Ministry operations report on March 26, President Lee emphasized, “The most important agreement between South and North Korea is the Basic Agreement signed in 1991,” making no mention at all of the other two declarations. At the Singapore ASEAN Regional Forum in July, the government took the risky measure of removing a passage about the October 4 Declaration from the chair’s statement. In a statement issued October 10, North Korean leader Kim Jong-il said, “The position and attitude toward the June 15 and October 4 declarations are the touchstone separating North and South Korean reconciliation and confrontation, unification and division.”

Ignoring the Other Party: This year, prior to the hard-line measures toward Seoul taken by Pyongyang, there was, without exception, “provocative ignorance” from the South, which could only provoke the North. When Kim Tae-young, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made his March 26 statement about a preemptive strike against North Korea, Pyongyang responded with the withdrawal of Office for Economic Cooperation and Consultations authorities (March 27) and the “total barring of passage through the Military Demarcation Line by Southern authorities” (March 29). Recently, after a succession of events in which South Korean authorities referred to an “emergency situation” in relation to speculation on the ill health of Kim Jong-il, private groups distributed leaflets to the North, President Lee spoke about “unification under a liberal democratic system” and South Korea participated as a co-sponsor of a human rights resolution on North Korea at the United Nations, Pyongyang responded with its “November 24 measures,” which included the cessation of Gaeseong (Kaesong) tourism.

Ignoring Implementation: President Lee and his group have repeatedly emphasized “authenticity,” but there have been no actions going beyond words. Humanitarian aid to the North, including 50,000 tons of corn, has not been put into practice for many months, though they have said, “We will give it to them if they ask.” President Lee promised that he would actively pursue economic cooperation if there were progress in the North Korean nuclear issue, and while such progress as the submission of a nuclear report by North Korea (June 26), the destruction of the Yongbyon cooling tower (June 27) and the removal of North Korea’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism by the United States (October 11) has been realized, Lee’s words have not led to action.

Ignoring Principles: Many experts have noted that while the Lee Myung-bak administration emphasizes a “principled policy toward the North,” the reality is a “lack of principles.” Since the Roh Tae-woo administration, all South Korean administrations but Kim Young-sam’s have consistently emphasized a principle of “separating politics and the economy.” But the Lee administration’s “Vision 3000: Denuclearization and Openness” is a policy that breaks away from the existing principle of separating politics and the economy, linking the two and staking economic cooperation on the nuclear issue.

Ignoring the Political Situation: Major changes are coming for the situation of the Korean Peninsula, with U.S. President-elect Barack Obama announcing an active policy toward North Korea that includes direct dialogue, but President Lee and his core advisers have persisted in claiming that “There are no problems in South Korea-U.S. cooperation” and “We don’t understand what North Korea is telling us to change.” Also, there are growing voices of concern that the position of South Korea, a nation directly involved in the Korean Peninsula issue, might weaken.

Besides these, negative factors are being turned into crises by the government’s “political course” of staying conscious of South Korean conservative forces when an unforeseen situation arises, such as the shooting death of a South Korean tourist at Mount Geumgang (Kumgang) (July 11) or speculation about the illness of Kim Jong-il. The government provoked North Korea to a degree beyond what is necessary by answering with a policy of immediately ceasing tourism projects and sending a government research team to Mount Geumgang and by making semi-public statements about the emergency in the North Korean situation.

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