Open Sources, February 12, 2014
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HERE COMES THE PARK DOCTRINE:
The government plans to announce a set of guidelines on the Park Geun-hye administration’s national security policies next month to better publicize her handling of national security issues, an official said Tuesday. [….]
He said the guidelines may also delve into Park’s global push for the unification of South and North Koreas and lay out in details each policy step of Park’s so-called Korea Peninsula Trust Process, aimed at denuclearizing North Korea.
On the military defense front, the planned guidelines will go over South Korea’s defense systems against North Korea, most notably the so-called Kill Chain preemptive missile attack system and the local missile defense system, called KAMD. [Yonhap]
Well, good. I was hoping for some clarity about exactly what all of this reunification talk means. I’d like to think it means something plausible and coherent, rather than just a shallow, feel-good, weasely pre-election triangulation toward post-Sunshine pan-Korean nationalism. Reports from Park’s administration, however, continue to focus on achieving reunification, as if she has decided to make that a (the?) principal objective of her presidency:
“If last year was a period to expand our society’s understanding of the trust-building process in the Korean Peninsula within the larger picture,” said Park, “then this year’s policy deals more with setting the groundwork framework for internal stability and setting straight various abnormal practices in the North-South relationship.” [Joongang Ilbo]
Does that mean detente, preparing for regime collapse, or a little of both? Whatever Park’s plans are, the ROK government’s influence machine here operates with monomaniac focus on whatever goal it picks. Under Roh Moo Hyun, it was Sunshine. Under Lee Myung Bak, it was the Free Trade Agreement and later, the U.S.-ROK nuclear agreement. If it’s going to be reunification next, people are going to want to know a lot more about how she intends to achieve it, what reunification looks like under Park’s vision, and what America will be expected to do to achieve it.
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SOUTH KOREA’S DEFENSE MINISTER says North Korea is ready to pop a nuke whenever, and the Prime Minister says that there are no immediate signs of regime collapse, “[al]though there exist factors to be worried about in political, economic and social terms.” Whether those are really things to worry about probably depends on your perspective. It’s fair to say that there would be a strong up-side and a strong down-side to either occurrence, and that each comes with plenty of advantages to be exploited.
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SO MUCH FOR CHEAP LABOR: North Korea is demanding another $30-a-month raise in the “wages” ostensibly paid to the workers at Kaesong, where Lavrenti Beria meets P.T. Barnum. (Although the workers themselves likely see little, if any, of the money). That’s roughly 45% of the current “wage.” Just as Kaesong is trying to rebuild investor confidence from the fiasco of last year’s 4-month shutdown, North Korea is doing its best to obliterate Kaesong’s only real attraction to investors.
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INNS ARE THE LATEST TARGET of the regime’s crackdown. If I understand the concept, these are something like the cheap hotels South Koreans call yeo-in-suk.
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NORTH KOREA SHIPPING TRACKER: The folks at NK News have really done us a tremendous service with this one. I knew that there were pay services like this available, but I’d always thought they were prohibitively expensive. I’ve already noticed that North Korean ships were reported in both Australia and Panama, both places where North Korean ships have been caught smuggling. I wonder why those governments still permit North Korean ships to enter their waters.
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MORE KKOTJAEBI (homeless orphans) are visible on the streets of North Korean cities and towns since Kim Jong Un’s coronation, according to Rimjingang’s latest report.
Economic stagnation is steadily eroding the nation. In the past two years, disparity between the rich and poor has increased. As a result, vulnerable citizens neglected by the government, including many children, have lost their homes and become known as kotchebi.
Until very recently, the consensus held that things were improving for residents of Pyongyang, but I’ve read nothing credible that things were getting better elsewhere in North Korea (quite the opposite). Rimjingang’s report also carries images and stories of some of the kids, and as you can imagine, they’re heartbreaking.
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I UNDERSTAND WHY KOREANS ARE EMOTIONAL about comfort women, and I’m relieved to see that not all Japanese are in complete denial about their responsibility for what the old imperial government did all those years ago. What I don’t understand is how South Koreans can be so apathetic about similar abuses of North Korean women by Chinese pimps and brokers right now — abuses that South Koreans still have some power to remedy, given that they’re happening in the present tense. No, I don’t suppose the conduct is exactly the same in all ways, although if you’re a North Korean woman forced to work in a Chinese brothel, I’m sure the subtlety of the distinctions may be lost on you.
I wonder if Koreans were equally apathetic about the comfort women Japan was abusing when it was happening. At least they had the excuse that resistance would have been mostly futile. Today’s South Koreans can’t say that, which is why their silence won’t be so easily forgiven by their North Korean compatriots.