South Korea highlights rays of 'sunshine'
James Brooke, New York Times
September 12, 2004

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA #-- Kim Duk-hong had just received his second death threat in two months: a plastic bag containing two vials of poison, an 8-inch knife and a letter accusing him of forming "a tricky anti-North Korea association." It warned, "Now, the time is coming to pay for your sins."

Professing fears for his safety, South Korean security officials declined last month, once again, to issue a passport to Kim, one of the highest-ranking North Korean defectors. Officials said it would be too dangerous to allow Kim to travel to Washington to testify before a U.S. Senate committee.

"We need to consider his personal safety, and unless the U.S. pledges to be responsible for his safety, it is rather dangerous," said a South Korean security agency spokesman, who asked not to be identified. Referring to the 14-month stall of what is normally a one-week process, the official said, "Concern for his safety is the only reason his passport issuance is being delayed."

But the real danger could be that Kim might irritate North Korea.

"They know I will be frank and genuine in speaking clearly about the nature of the North Korea regime," Kim, a 65-year-old former senior member of North Korea's governing Workers Party, said in an interview as plainclothes police guards stood outside an office here.

Referring to South Korea's policy of easing tensions with North Korea, he said, "The government knows I am dissatisfied with the sunshine policy." Being able to promote an image of peace and harmony on the peninsula helps South Korea keep its bond ratings low and offers a justification for reduced military spending. So South Korea goes to great lengths to avoid offending North Korea.

Crosses uplugged

When North Korea's military grumbled this summer that when its soldiers looked across the demilitarized zone at night they saw neon-illuminated crosses atop churches, South Korea unplugged the crosses.

When North Korea called South Korean officials "wicked terrorists" for airlifting 468 North Korean defectors from Vietnam to Seoul, South Korea promised not to do it again. Although South Korea has admitted only 5,000 North Koreans over the last half-century, Chung Dong-young, South Korea's unification minister, asked the private groups that were helping the North Koreans to stop.

Although the United States, Canada, Brazil and Australia have admitted well over a million South Korean immigrants in recent decades, Ban Ki-moon, South Korea's foreign minister, said Seoul "shouldn't have to take unlimited responsibility for wandering North Korean defectors."

Recently, 27 lawmakers from the governing Uri Party delivered to the U.S. Embassy a letter asking the Senate to vote down the North Korean Human Rights Act this fall. The bill, intended to help North Korean refugees in China and to promote human rights in North Korea, was passed by the House in July, enraging North Korea.

In July, a South Korean Navy boat fired two warning shots at a North Korean patrol boat that crossed into South Korean waters. After North Korea angrily canceled inter-Korean military talks, South Korea's defense minister resigned and apologies were sent to North Korea.

Few South Korean overtures are reciprocated. For example, under bills now in the National Assembly, South Koreans would be allowed to freely access North Korean Web sites and to travel to North Korea. South Korea's official defense papers would no longer describe North Korea as "the main enemy." Other bills would end national security laws banning advocacy of North Korea's Communist system.

None of these moves has been met with a wisp of a concession from North Korea. Instead, North Korea recently restricted cell-phone use and travel to China.

"What is needed is a phased development program that draws the North Koreans out and opens them up," said C. Kenneth Quinones, an American aid worker who recently spent several days in Pyongyang, North Korea's capital. "But South Korea is doing a hodgepodge that is not going anywhere. The North Koreans are getting everything they need, without giving anything back."

Travel and trade

South Korea's Unification Ministry likes to publicize the growth in inter-Korean travel and trade. But almost all the travel is from South Korea to North Korea. Much of the trade consists of South Korean gifts of rice to the North.

During the first six months of this year, 9,866 Koreans crossed the border for visits, a 74 percent increase over the same period last year. But 9,545, or 97 percent, were South Koreans traveling to North Korea, compared with 321 North Koreans traveling to South Korea.

These numbers do not count the 1,000 South Korean tourists a week who cross the demilitarized zone in buses to visit Mount Kumgang, a tourism enclave in North Korea. With minimal cost to North Korea, the resort was built with hundreds of millions of dollars invested by a South Korean company, Hyundai Asan. Even though North Korea levies a tourist tax estimated at $100 a head, South Korea's government promised in August to spend $2.6 million to build and pave roads in the area.

Mount Kumgang "is just a cash cow; it has no impact on the rest of North Korea," said Quinones, a former U.S. diplomat who lived in Pyongyang in the mid-1990s.

Similarly, inter-Korean trade increased to $325 million in the first six months of this year, a 21 percent increase over the same period last year. But most of this was the result of a rise in South Korean donations, to $152 million.

Over the past two years, South Korea has spent about $1 billion to subsidize the sale of rice at 12 cents a pound, an 85 percent discount from the normal wholesale price. Although the shipments are to be repaid in 30 years, that is largely seen as a face-saving convention to mask the fact that they are donations.

In what South Korean officials described as a major concession, North Korea started to allow their gifts to arrive from South Korea overland by truck, instead of by the far more expensive shipping route. Also, North Korean officials no longer require truckers to tape over their South Korean license plates.

Similarly, South Korean officials often trumpet the fact that South Korean television shows are making their way into North Korea. But so far the shows have included broadcasts of the Athens Olympics and a serial drama about a 19th-century Korean empress, programs that would not highlight the economic abyss that separates the Koreas.

Kim, the defector, knows both sides of this abyss. But when he seeks to speak out, his police protection starts to look like a form of house arrest. On Aug. 4, he had to cancel a news conference at the Seoul Foreign Correspondents' Club.

"I wanted to go to the venue of the conference, but the police told me that they cannot guarantee my safety if I go outside," he wrote to the foreign reporters that day, using an instant messaging system.