Category: Inter-Korean Issues

Instead of bribes, this time Seoul is offering the North Korean "Marshall Plan" for a second inter-Korean summit:

Unification Minister Lee Jae-joung in a New Year’s message on Tuesday said South Korea must assume responsibility for solving the poverty of North Korea. In the message e-mailed to all ministry officials, the minister said the South has to assume responsibility “as a country exporting US$300 billion worth of products and services around the world and one of the 10 largest economies and since its people share the same blood as the North Koreans.” Lee said, "Security on the Korean Peninsula will always be in danger, and we cannot guarantee peace on the peninsula unless we can find a fundamental solution to the problem of poverty in the North.”

Here is the South Korean’s government’s answer to solving poverty in South Korea:

The government provides rice and fertilizer to the North on humanitarian grounds. But that is not enough to address the fundamental poverty there, and a different approach is needed. Lee appears to be thinking of comprehensive economic aid so Pyongyang can overcome poverty. Experts speculate that the government is thinking about a large-scale economic package similar to the Marshall Plan that revived Europe after World War II.

(…)

On Tuesday, the unification minister said, "We need to offer aid to North Korea from a more productive and longer perspective beyond what is currently being done. We need to restate our concept of aiding the North so that it can continue under the next administration.” Kim Tae-hyo, a political scientist at Sungkyunkwan University, says it sounds as if the government wants to help North Korea in infrastructure or logistics systems, beyond cooperative projects like package tours to Mt. Kumgang or the Kaesong Industrial Complex. “It seems to have concluded that it must do it in a way so the next government can’t change the policy on aid to the North it has set.”

The fundamental problem with poverty in North Korea is that the South Korean government won’t admit what the cause of the problem is, the regime! You can give them fertilizer and food, you can pave all the roads in North Korea, but poverty will remain because it is in the regime’s interest to keep the people poor and the South Korean government knows it. 

All this aid is just a bribe to get Kim Jong-il to agree to a second inter-Korean summit.  The first inter-Korean summit in 2000, was agreed to after than President Kim Dae-jung paid off Kim Jong-il with $500 million dollars.  President Roh Moo-hyun can’t just bribe Kim Jong-il like Kim Dae-jung did so he has instead disguised the bribes as increased economic assistance to a tune of over one billion dollars in aid to North Korea this year.  President Roh wants, what I call the "World’s Most Expensive Photo Op", which he believes will give him some kind of legacy once his presidency ends this year.  The leftists in South Korea on the other hand believe that a inter-Korean summit will give them momentum going into this year’s presidential elections against the conservative candidates when Kim Jong-il makes vague promises of inter-Korean unity and cooperation he has no intention of keeping. 

It worked in 2000, but hopefully South Korean voters have wised up to being burned one to many times by the Sunshine Policy of unconditional aid to North Korea that has led to only more belligerence from North Korea. 

The Chosun Ilbo has confirmed my earlier suspicions of why the South Korean government is pushing for a second inter-Korean summit:

Ruling Uri Party chairman Kim Geun-tae said late last month that he will ask the president to dispatch a special envoy to North Korea for the purpose of promoting an “unconditional” inter-Korean summit, and the former Uri Party chairman Chung Dong-young said March or April next year would be the right time for the summit, when the presidential election is some six months away.

This government is now obsessed with an inter-Korean summit. Until the middle of its tenure, officials asked what the point would be unless the North Korean nuclear crisis has been resolved. But their rhetoric has recently changed: now the two heads of state must meet unconditionally. President Roh Moo-hyun keeps saying the North’s nuclear weapons are nothing to worry about: he is begging Kim Jong-il for a meeting.

The Kim Dae-jung administration paid Pyongyang US$500 million to make the first inter-Korean summit in 2000 happen. Having extracted that much money as the price for meeting a vigorous South Korean president in the first half of his tenure, North Korea is surely going to demand several times the money for meeting a lame duck. There is a strong smell of hustling for a summit about the government’s refusal to impose any additional sanctions on North Korea over its nuclear test, and in its earmarking of W1 trillion (US$1=W923) for “economic cooperation” with the North next year.

I hadn’t thought of the political angle, but yes an inter-Korean summit would appear on the surface to be something that would boost the Uri Party’s chances in next year’s elections, but I think it would back fire if South Korea gets nothing in return for the summit.  I think a second inter-Korean summit is a distinct possibility because President Roh appears intent on sending as much hard earned South Korean taxpayers money up North as possible to secure such a summit.

If a summit does happen I expect Kim Jong-il to only make vague promises and declarations with no substance.  President Roh understands Kim Jong-il won’t denuclearize or make any major concessions, but that isn’t what a second inter-Korean summit is about.  It is all about the photo-op of him toasting Kim Jong-il.  I think that would be a fitting legacy for President Roh.

Unsurprisingly South Korean Unification Minister Chung Dong-young, one of North Korea’s useful idiots, has sided with North Korea over the current controversy between Hyundai and North Korea’s joint tourism projects:

Unification Minister Chung Dong-young met with Hyundai Group chairwoman Hyun Jeong-eun on Sunday to discuss a spat between the company and North Korea over a tourism project Hyundai Asan operates in the Kumgang Mountains.
A source connected to the matter said Wednesday the two discussed North Korean demands to reinstate Hyundai Asan vice chairman Kim Yoon-kyu, who was ousted over corruption charges, but the differences in opinion were wide. That suggests Chung asked for the disgraced executive to be reinstated.

It was the following day that Hyun posted a statement on the Hyundai Asan homepage saying that Kim had been removed due to corruption and rejected calls to reinstate the man who had for many years coordinated the tourism projects with the North.

I am beginning to like Chairwoman Hyun more and more. It is about time someone stood up to the Norks and blew off Chung.

It appears that the Hyundai tours to different North Korean locations may end:

Hyundai Group chairwoman Hyun Jeong-eun on Monday publicly rejected a North Korean demand to reinstate Kim Yoon-kyu, the disgraced vice chairman of Hyundai Asan who had dealt with the North for many years in arranging their joint tourism projects. “I now seem to stand at a crossroads of whether to continue or quit our North Korea projects,” she said. Since Hyundai’s ouster of Kim, Pyongyang has applied pressure on the group by slashing the quota for the Asan’s Kumgang Mountains tours and blanking requests for negotiations on stalled projects to Kaesong and Mt. Baekdu. When Hyun visited the Kumgang Mountains, she says, authorities forced her to open her handbag, a gesture she interpreted as contempt, and she concluded, I’ll choose honest conscience rather than opportunistic servility.”

It is standard practice in inter-Korean economic cooperation to put up with Pyongyang’s demented behavior. That makes Hyun’s statement all the more significant. Her resolve not to allow North Korean pressure to meddle in her corporation’s managerial rights is the natural choice for a top executive, but in the reality of inter-Korean relations things rarely take their natural course.

I think this is great that someone is finally taking a stand and not kissing the North Koreans butts continuously. The Korean government can learn something from Chairwoman Hyun Jeong-eun. It is going to be interesting to see how this plays out.