South Koreans are on the horns of a dilemma about North Korea policy ahead of the presidential election.
South Korea is a deeply divided country. It is divided by socioeconomic inequality. It is divided by its past, its present, and its future. But most importantly, it is divided by North Korea and the US.
Within South Korea, North Korea has been a permanent point of friction between Liberals and Conservatives. These two major parties, which represent the centre-left and the centre-right in South Korea’s parliament, get into fights that reduce the North Korean issue to a number of hackneyed slogans before every election.
The upcoming election, which will take place on May 9, is no different.
The previous administration ended in the ignominy of now former President Park Geun-hye being arrested for her alleged involvement in an extortion ring, where she leveraged her position as president, with a close friend named Choi Soon-sil.
And Park’s decisions on her country’s North Korea policy, as expected, also played a central role in this scandal.
It has been alleged that Park’s friend Choi was directly involved in a decision to close an industrial complex that was viewed as the main symbol of inter-Korean cooperation in early 2016.
Park’s liberal predecessors established the Kaesong Industrial Complex (KIC) in 2004 inside North Korea to help the country to reform its economy and ease tensions between the two Koreas. In the KIC, South Korean companies were allowed to manufacture their products using North Korean labour.
Choi’s involvement in the decision to close down the KIC may be a conspiracy theory, or it may even be true, but the controversy and speculation surrounding this closure demonstrate that policy on North Korea is a highly divisive subject among South Korea’s political elite.
The frontrunner in the race, Moon Jae-in, the candidate for the liberal left who lost the presidency in the last election, wants to reopen the KIC. Moon also wants to re-open Mount Kumgang, a tourist resort in North Korea that welcomed tourists from the south between 1998 and 2008.
Moon Jae-in and Donald Trump may have to choose between the safety of Seoul and San Francisco.
It may look like a fair deal to a South Korean liberal, but in a way it misses the point: North Korea did not develop nuclear weapons to force the South Korean government to invest in their development or to send tourists to their beach resorts. Moon’s condition to reopen both these establishments is simple: a freeze on North Korea’s nuclear programme, and an agreement to start negotiations aimed at ultimately ending it.
Indeed, the North Korean government quite happily developed nuclear weapons and missiles while accepting South Korean investment and aid in the 2000s, and it is unlikely that a future President Moon could stop them continuing to do so.
