There’s a push for North and South Korea to unify, but the question is who would benefit, writes Kevin Ritchie.
The soldiers glare into the middle distance. You can’t see their eyes, because of the dark glasses. In the middle distance stands a forlorn soldier on the steps of an apparently derelict building.
This is the demilitarised zone (DMZ) separating North from South Korea. In the middle are the blue buildings where the two sides confer. But here, it’s the South Koreans, with their UN badges, who look far more threatening.
The DMZ is reportedly the most dangerous place on Earth, the last vestige of the Cold War; 250km long and 4km wide, sown with landmines, cutting an entire country in two. But the tour buses and jabbering tourists clicking away with cameras and tablets lend a surreal air to a real threat.
It’s just one of the apparent contradictions in one of the most intractable civil wars remaining in the world. 50km to the south, well within artillery range, lies another one, Seoul – the capital of South Korea; a 50-year-old ultra-modern metropolis for a three-millennia-old culture – and the talk is of reunification.
The South Korean government is determined to prepare its people for the eventual unification of the peninsula – something that last existed, very briefly, after the end of World War II.
To this end it has a unification ministry, with a budget of $200 million, a staff of 600 and a special fund of up to $1 billion for humanitarian aid to the famished north, evangelising the benefits of one country; a new growth engine after democratisation and industrialisation, blending the technological prowess of the South with the North’s natural resources and cheap labour. It has to keep beating the drum – far too many South Koreans want nothing to do with it.
Divided for almost seven decades, the new generation has got used to the status quo. The desire for unification tapers off the younger the respondents are.
Lee Dong-eng, a 26-year veteran in the unification ministry, believes that 80 percent of South Koreans over the age of 40 are keen to see the two countries unify. This figure drops to 60 percent among the 20- to 30-year-old group who have to study, marry and start a home. For young Koreans interviewed at random the response is unequivocal: no unification, because it is their generation who will have to pay for it.
There are 75 million people living in the Korean peninsula, but only a third live in North Korea. The official government position is that if reunification takes place in 2020, after 30 years the benefits will be twice the actual cost. A fortnight ago, though, the South Korean Financial Services Commission announced that it would cost $500 billion to develop North Korea and assimilate it with the South. According to the Korean Joongang Daily, the FSC had been studying the North Korean economy in preparation for “a possible sudden collapse of its government or another kind of rapid and unexpected reunification”.
According to the paper, South Korea’s GDP is 43 times larger than the North.
Professor Lee Mi-kyung is adamant that the new focus has not been sparked by the instability in the North, including health fears over Kim Jong-un, but rather over the need to be competitive in a world of shifting super powers and complex geo-political realities.
“The world order is being reshaped. It’s a world of unlimited, political potential. We need to unify to prosper and survive.”
She concedes though that there is little incentive for people in the South, most of whom see it as a national project with little inherent benefit to individuals.
Lee Duk-heng admits that unification would be hard, especially if the North collapsed. The reason is the growing chasm between the two countries, from ideology to language, exacerbated by the lack of contact. Every time there is an uptick in hostilities, what little contact there is, is promptly frozen. Since 2006, North Korea has staged three nuclear tests, been involved in three fire fights at sea, and shelling an island, killing four. A fortnight ago as the UN called for the prosecution, without naming him, of Kim Jung-un at the International Criminal Court for human rights abuses, an envoy from Pyongyang threatened more nuclear tests.
For Lee Duk-heng, the process of unification cannot be derailed by North Korean aggression, but nor must South Korea turn the other cheek.
North Korea, he says, is the most isolated country in the world; it’s also unsustainable without foreign aid.
He believes its nuclear policy, among others, is a way to blackmail other countries into feeding its people. It’s that very inability that has sparked the greatest upheaval and concomitant repression in the north, centring around the DPRK’s own euphemism, the arduous march from 1994 to 1998 – a famine that claimed 2 million lives according to Lee Yong-ken, the team manager at the ROK’s North Korea human rights team, although western estimates of the death toll vary between 800 000 and 1.5 million.
Blamed on massive mismanagement, exacerbated by the death of North Korean founder Kim Il-sung in 1994, the country has not been able to feed its people since.
Unicef has issued two separate reports on the scale of the malnutrition. Other findings are more drastic: North Korean men are 10cm shorter than their South Korean counterparts, with the difference in height being 7cm for women. The starvation led to a massive exodus of up to 3 000 refugees a year, termed defectors by the South, from the dawn of the millennium onwards. Today there are 27 000 “defectors” living in South Korea, but the annual migration has been throttled back to half that number under Kim Jong-un.
“There are three classes of people in North Korea: 30 percent are the important people, 45 percent are the middle class and 25 percent are the people who have been stigmatised for being politically dangerous or working against the state,” explains Lee Duk-heng.
“There is free medical care, free education in North Korea, but only the 30 percent at the top can benefit. The rest don’t benefit at all. The biggest concern of the western world is the concentration camp and the gulag. Some of the primary examples… in Russia and Auschwitz in Poland have disappeared, but in North Korea, they exist,” says Lee.
“The North Koreans emphasise that they don’t run political prison camps and to avoid the UN resolution to be passed, they’ll invite the UN’s special rapporteur to their country, but according to the COI (UN Committee for Inquiry) reports there are four camps with 80 000 to 100 000 inmates in total.”
Many of the South Korean officials have never been to North Korea despite spending their professional lives studying K1, K2 and K3, the in-house shorthand for Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un.
Instead they get their information from the refugees who successfully defect and the network of embassy contacts from diplomats whose countries retain missions in Pyongyang. South Africa has diplomatic ties with both, serving Pyongyang through its embassy in Beijing, with Ambassador Hilton Dennis in Seoul.
“Unity is a question of when, not if,” he says. “The ideal situation for the world, for us as South Africans, is that people of the peninsula must have a dialogue and decide their own future. Our situation in a sense was worse than theirs but we have shown that differences can be overcome and people can be reconciled.”
The omens aren’t good though. As Kwon Yong-woo, the director general of the Korean Peace Regime responsible for inter-Korean relations, explains, North Korea under Kim Jong-un has oscillated wildly between hardline and softline, a low point of which has been his ordering the execution of his own uncle. The South Korean government has no doubt that Kim Jong-un remains in control, but worries about fissures in the elite.
“I cannot be optimistic about the long-term stability of the regime”, says Kwon. “North Korea needs to escape its international isolation.”
In the meantime, the luxury tour buses park in neat ranks outside the Dora Observatory just west of Panmunjom on the DMZ. The tourists disgorge in their hundreds flocking to the observation deck to peer at the North through telescopes.
Every now and again a ROKA soldier in full combat gear and face daubed in camouflage paint emerges – for the tourists to take selfies.
The real business happens in the DMZ though, away from the cameras, seen from the bus on the way back to Seoul; infantrymen conducting manoeuvres in the marshland next to the river delta and a squadron of tanks on transporters moving further down the line. It was Publius Flavius who coined the phrase, back in the fourth century, Si vis pacem, para bellum (if you want peace, prepare for war). It looks like South Korea has taken this to heart.
* Kevin Ritchie is editor of The Star.
The Star