At the
beginning of this year, President Park Geun Hye spoke of how unification would
be like “winning the jackpot.” This was reaffirmed on March 28th when she
visited Dresden in Germany, and called for: first, resolving the humanitarian problems
of the peoples of North and South Korea; second, constructing infrastructure to
support the livelihoods of the North Korean people and generate mutual
prosperity; and third, working toward the restoration of the homogeneity of the
Korean people.
However,
North Korea promptly conflated her Dresden Declaration with the desire for a “2015 War of
Unification,” and fell back on its isolationism. The slander they directed at President Park was excessive. On April 27th the weekly German publication Spiegel recalled how KCNA, the North Korean state
news agency, called President Obama a “pimp (Zuhaelter)” and President Park
a “prostitute (Hure)”.
North Korea’s leaders reacted so aggressively to Park’s speech because they knew precisely what “the jackpot” really means: if the future unified Korea were to abandon liberal democracy
and market economics, such a “jackpot” would be impossible. As such, no matter how much the
South may aid the North or how much public infrastructure the South may
construct, the North is never going to be able to embrace Park’s notion of unification.
Importantly, the idea that unification would be the jackpot also contradicts President
Park’s proposal for a “peace park” in and around the DMZ. This is because, strictly speaking, the
former is a policy for unification while the latter is just a North
Korea policy. One places the emphasis on the betterment and economic advancement of a
unified Korea, while the other focuses only on the peaceful management of a
divided one. Simultaneous implementation of the two policies would be
contradictory, then, and the current government should not make the error of trying to doing so. Kim
Jong Eun can be a “partner” in terms of a North Korea policy, but he needs to be avoided if we are to pursue unification.
Trade with
the North, separated families, defectors and human rights cases are
all related to maintaining peace in a state of division, and if we do not engage with the Kim regime then we cannot make any progress. But were we to choose Kim as a partner, a unified Korea could be ruined by hostility, distrust, terror, and civil
war.
By way of reference, the speech that West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl gave in Dresden on December 18th, 1989 emphasized just three things: peace,
freedom and self-determination. I wish to point out that even though he did not
mention unification even once, this speech is regarded as a pillar of the German unification process.
