Park Geun-Hye still pushing for reunification
President Park Geun-hye on Tuesday made another pitch for her signature reunification vision, emphasizing that it’s time to end the pain of a divided Korean Peninsula.
“I think the time has come to fundamentally resolve the pain of a division on the peninsula, as next year marks the 70th anniversary of that,” she said in a video message for the inaugural World Conference on North Korean Studies.
The two-day forum opened at Seoul’s Yonsei University, drawing more than 150 South Korean and foreign scholars. [….]
“The government is continuing support to substantively help North Koreans, endeavoring to expand cooperation and exchange, with the door for dialogue open, while dealing resolutely with North Korea’s provocations,” she said. [Yonhap]
It’s a sad statement that the President of South Korea has to market something that ought to be the fondest wish of the people of any divided nation state, particularly one where each is in such desperate need of the other’s resources. If only Park could articulate a credible path for bringing that about. What she’s saying, unfortunately, sounds like a slightly less permissive version of the same thing that’s been failing for two decades.
I had hoped that this interview with Professor Shinn Chang-Min would help me understand the ideas that Park Geun-Hye herself has articulated so poorly. The interview is interesting, readable, and filled with novel and unconventional ideas, and Shinn is realistic enough about the nature of the regime. At the end, however, it was a bit like listening to the Underpants Gnomes present their business plan—I still didn’t understand Phase 2, how Shinn expects to reunify Korea without removing the principal obstacle to that outcome.
Let’s hope that the so-called DPRK ceases to exist when reunification occurs.
How can reunification happen without, to use a semi-polite phrase, regime change? Given that, how can a South Korean politician articulate any kind of specific plan in public?
Very good point, Sean.
It’s too bad I’ve already used the “elephant in the room” cliche this week.
Park Yeon-mi expects the DPRK to end in ten years, but she doesn’t say anything about the Glans Plan! View her on Youtube.
For what it’s worth, Paul, a South Korean living in Yanji, China agrees with Park. A Christian missionary, Paul is quoted in David Eimer’s new book “The Emperor Far Away,” – “I think there’ll be huge changes in the next five to ten years…Years ago, North Koreans thought their leader was a god. Now they don’t. They know it’s wrong they have no food. Only a few people are against the system now, but their numbers will increase.” We shall see!
Here are two more quotes from the same book. A couple of pages earlier, the same Paul admitted, “(North Koreans have) been brainwashed and think their leader is a god, and breaking down those barriers takes a long time.” Eimer also spoke with a woman from Pyongyang who travels back and forth to China. According to her “(China) is too free and the people are too free. It’s because there are so many countries with such free ways that we are poor.” – Wow.
Reunification without regime change in the North is unthinkable and impossible.