Kaesong Managers Become Hostages, OFK Blogger Fails to Suppress Schadenfreude

[Update: North Korea lets them out. It’s not clear whether the border is fully reopened, but either way, no sane foreign business would invest in Kaesong now. And just in case all of this wasn’t strange enough, South Korean “academics” see North Korea cutting off one of its own main sources of hard cash and conclude that it’s South Korea that’s in a bind. Hey! I had just been thinking that what an economically strapped economy really needs most is a black hole for dumping the taxpayers’ money. The principle holds up just as well if you plug in General Motors or AIG in lieu of Kim Jong Il.]

Call it culpable stupidity. Really, you could call it the inverse of some other South Koreans’ ill-considered evangelizing “mission” to the heart of Talibanistan, one that ended with murder and a large ransom payment to terrorists, advancing the interests of the very evil they promised to moderate. The managers of the Kaesong Industrial Complex may have more secular motives, but their evangelical faith in the power of unrestrained greed and exploitation is no less impervious to reality, and in both cases, idealism fared poorly on contact with determined evil:

Some 762 South Koreans have been stranded in North Korea for three days over the weekend after North Korea closed the border again. The Unification Ministry on Sunday said, “North Korea has not sent consent on South Koreans entering and leaving the Kaesong Industrial Complex since last Friday. Since then, the inter-Korean border has been closed.”

A senior government official said that day North Korea “must understand that it will also suffer losses if the operation of the industrial park is suspended. We’re considering reducing the amount of money we pay North Korea or suspending payment of monthly wages to North Korean staff for the time being by applying the ‘no-work, no-pay’ principle in proportion to the reduced working hours.” [Chosun Ilbo]

And as was the case with the Afghan hostage situation, adults in free societies make their own choices in life, and when adults in free societies knowingly put themselves at the mercy of terrorists — unlike the Taliban, North Korea has held thousands of South Koreans hostage for decades — their government is not obligated to reward terror and ransom them out. North Korea’s belligerence has been expensive, and it wouldn’t be out of that regime’s character to use its new hostages to recoup some of those losses.

(Contrast the deliberate vulnerability of the South Koreans involved in the Afghan and Kaesong situations to South Korea’s deployment to Iraq, where 3,000 South Koreans made zero military contribution to stabilizing Iraq while they hid behind concrete barriers under the protection of Kurdish militiamen.)

A step further: it would be just and fitting if these exploiters shared a small measure of the captivity of their slave laborers for a few weeks. It might even help South Korea acquire a little moral perspective. Yes, I said it.

Related: Yes, this is a tragic situation, but really — who goes to Yemen … as a tourist … these days? I’ll be interested in watching the circumstances here unfold.