Daily NK (DNK): The Kaesong Industrial Complex is to reopen. Do you welcome the news?

Professor Lankov (L): Yes, it’s a very good thing. Frankly, I did not expect it to happen. When asked about probability I used to say, “60 to 70% it is not going to restart.” Some people whom I take very seriously even said 95%. So it’s a good thing: slightly unexpected, but very good.

DNK: Why are you so pleased about it?

L: Two reasons, maybe even three.

First, it is a sign that relations between North and South Korea will warm. Of course, the North Koreans only want better relations with the South because they’ve got South Korean money; it’s very simple. Nevertheless, as our experience of the Sunshine Policy shows, when North and South Korea interact economically there are far fewer military clashes and serious confrontations. I’m not saying that clashes do not happen; we saw some clashes under the Sunshine Policy after all. Rather, the possibility of a clash is much lower, and the possibility of any clash escalating is quite close to zero.

Second, North Korea has to be changed, and as the Cold War in Eastern Europe illustrates, the best way, maybe the only way, the outside world can promote change is by infusing information inside North Korea.

To this end, information that goes through official channels is usually seen as trustworthier than that which does not. In Kaesong there are 55,000 North Koreans who are exposed to the sight of South Koreans every single day. They are tall: and their skin! It clearly shows that they are not sent to do labor, that the American imperialist dogs don’t send them to work for free in the fields as a part of agricultural labor mobilization programs. When we take into account family members we are probably talking about a quarter of a million people getting this type of exposure. It’s a significant part of the North Korean population, located in a strategically very important area.

Number three; sooner or later North Korea will start changing anyway. I don’t know whether it will come about as a result of popular revolution, regime collapse or as a result of some gradual transformation, but it will come, and when the country starts changing, one of their major obstacles will be a dramatic shortage of information about modern technology and the modern world. In Kaesong, North Koreans see how modern factories should operate, and they learn the basics, very primitive basics no doubt, but still the basics, of modern technology. It should be welcomed. Kaesong is a good start, and I just hope that late president Ro Moo Hyun’s 2007 idea of a second industrial complex will happen, too.

DNK: Do you mean the planned complex at Haeju?

L: Probably in Haeju, but as far as I understand it the final decision about location has never been made. Is it going to be implemented? Yes, eventually, and the sooner the better.

DNK: Do you really think it will happen?

L: I’m not sure. I hope so.

DNK: That’s just a hope, though.

L: Just a hope. There is a high probability that the Mt. Geumgang and Kaesong tours will be restarted within the next year or two. This is good for the above-mentioned reasons, especially the Kaesong tours. Geumgang is more or less a ghetto, but Kaesong tours give a great deal of exposure. This is what I think is going to happen. There’s a fairly good probability that we’ll go back to the last year of the Roh Moo Hyun administration. Of course, had the nationalist left in South Korea, with whom I patiently disagree on many issues, remained in power in 2008 we would have been there years ago.

DNK: There’s a wealth of good reasons why the left was voted out of power.

L: There are many reasons, it’s true, and we can say a whole world of nasty things about them. But when it comes to their North Korea policy I would say they were generally right. Right for the wrong reasons, yes, but right nonetheless.

DNK: A North Korean soldier shot and killed a South Korean tourist at Mt. Geumgang in 2008. It’s a serious problem.

L: Yes, it’s a problem. But if you have tourists present in a high-security area, such things are going to happen occasionally. Let me tell you something awful: when you are sending tourists by bus, sooner or later there will be a traffic accident. And somebody is going to be killed by a bus. And planes you know, sometimes, fall from the sky.

DNK: You’re absolutely confident that it was accidental?

L: No, I’m not absolutely confident. I’m inclined to believe it was accidental, but I’m not sure. It’s because in North Korea there are people who want tensions, including maybe the leader himself sometimes.

I am under no illusions about the North Korean leadership, and that is my major difference with the left: they believe that through this policy they can change the North Korean leaders and start some gradual evolution of the government. I don’t think it’s going to happen.

DNK: That being the case, what do you believe? Why do you want all these things to happen?

L: Such exchanges can speed up changes in North Korean society.

DNK: Leading to what?

L: I’m not talking about the North Korean leadership “seeing the light” and becoming mild, non-authoritarian democracy lovers. If that were to happen they would be killed. Their major reward would be a firing squad. Such exchanges make common people, especially the lower reaches of the elite, demand change, demand transformation, demand reform.

DNK: Fine, but even if we agree that restarting Mt. Geumgang and Kaesong tours is a good idea, public opinion is not with us. To me it was abundantly clear that Moon Jae In was going to lose last year’s presidential election, and so he did. Park Geun Hye got a million more votes than Moon.

L: Yes, but I do not remember then-candidate Park Geun Hye saying anything especially negative about North Korea, and she didn’t say anything especially positive about then-President Lee Myung Bak’s hardline policy, either. In any case, the North Korea issue does not decide South Korean elections, and it would be a big mistake to think that the one million voters who backed Park were hard-liners. The average South Korean’s attitude to North Korea is that they don’t give a damn. They just want North Korea to be quiet, and they are quite ready to make political and financial concessions to achieve it. As long as the concessions are relatively moderate, they will pay North Korea to remain quiet.

DNK: Let’s play devil’s advocate here. So the North Korean side “got Kaesong back,” but on less favorable terms than before. They also recognized that they’re beholden to the law of diminishing returns on their belligerence and threats. They know that nobody believes their threats anymore. Further down this track there are two paths: one of them is kinetic responses and starting battles, which they’re not going to do, and the other one is starting to behave better.

L: No. Starting to behave better is not in their interest. If I were in their shoes, what would I do next? I would do another Cheonan; some manipulation that comes with plausible deniability, or at least where responsibility cannot be proved immediately.

I am under the impression that, judging from the behavior of the South Korean government starting in early April, after the sinking of the Cheonan on March 26th, that they knew full well it was done by the North Koreans. But they did not want to admit it, because public opinion was very agitated, and any admission would mean having to do something. They didn’t want to do anything because they understood that a kinetic response would be bad news.

The main condition of any future strike is no civilian casualties. No collateral damage. They want to drive a wedge between the South Korean government and the public, so killing civilians is a very bad idea. Even during the (November 23rd, 2010) Yeonpyeong Island shelling, the civilians who were killed were not supposed to be there. It was risky and some of the shells landed near a local school, but clearly they wanted to minimize collateral damage.

DNK: You say that if Kaesong is operational then such things probably won’t happen. But of course we both know that in 2002 there was a naval battle, and that was in the Sunshine Policy era.

L: I’m not sure it was a deliberate provocation. You have disputed territory, and people crossed into the territory and, well, there were too many people with too many guns. Nobody thinks the 1996 submarine incident near Gangreung was a provocation, and I am not sure 2002 was, either.

DNK: Let’s leave that one up there in the air, then. Your phrase, “Sunshine Policy Lite.” Do you want to define it?

L: I believe the Sunshine Policy was basically quite successful. It kept tensions low and it helped many common North Koreans and also the North Korean government. Admittedly many North Korean officials could afford a new Mercedes Benz as a result, but it’s also true that many common North Koreans could afford a bowl of freshly boiled corn and maybe a few slices of kimchi because of it. The policy had some serious shortcomings: the gifts were excessively generous, uncontrolled and unconditional. It was not really popular here, either: increasingly unpopular, in fact. South Korean voters are driven by two incompatible desires: they want North Korea to be friendly, and they don’t want to pay for it. The problem is that North Korea is not going to be friendly for free. You have to pay them, and the payments are likely to be large.

DNK: You are describing appeasement, aren’t you?

L: What do you mean by appeasement? “Appeasement” is a meaningless word. It’s just a word of abuse that can be applied to any policy of concessions that the speaker happens not to like. A bit like “fascism.” Everything that is not democracy and smells like authoritarian rule gets described as “fascism.” I’m also guilty of this sin. What’s wrong with appeasement?

DNK: They just keep coming back. It’s like “paying the Danegeld.”

L: A hardline policy is not going to change anything. It will push North Korea closer to China, it will help the hardliners in North Korea who don’t want to change things, and it will make North Koreans not only more destitute but also more ignorant about the outside world.

DNK: You are talking about engagement the way Winston Churchill talked about democracy: the best of a bad set of options.

L: Yes! This policy will always be criticized, because we only have one history and cannot run an experiment. There will always be people who say that it was a bad policy. However, all policies have serious flaws. There is no perfect policy when dealing with North Korea.

DNK: Very well. Moving on, earlier today Lee Jung Hee (the head of the Unified Progressive Party) tweeted that South Korea should seize the opportunity presented by the reopening of Kaesong to reduce the scale of the upcoming joint U.S.-South Korean “Ulchi Freedom Guardian” military exercises as a sign of goodwill.

L: That kind of agitating is her job. She is wrong, though. It would look excessively weak to do what she is suggesting. South Korea should be neither excessively aggressive nor excessively tough.

DNK: Do you think South Korean policy has been strategically good under President Park?

L: In dealing with North Korea, South Korea is doing remarkably well. We have seen a realistic approach incorporating a desire to continue cooperation. Actually, not cooperation: more like unilateral aid with conditions. It’s not cooperation because there’s no reciprocity. In any case, South Korea should hang tough when negotiating, since this method is well understood by the North Koreans.

DNK: Give as good as you get?

L: Yes, don’t bow to the pressure.

DNK: As you know, Daily NK is currently running a campaign to both improve its website and help forge a more coherent worldwide community of people with an interest in North Korea. Therefore, the final question is: Why should readers support it?

L: Daily NK pioneered a model of reporting from inside North Korea. There have been a few media outlets that have tried to imitate Daily NK, with varying levels of success, but Daily NK remains the most widely read and basically the best example of the model. The 2009 currency reform was a triumph. It’s not widely understood worldwide, but pretty much everything that was written about the currency reform for the first two weeks came via Daily NK. Then big newspapers in Korea reported it, and then it went to the global media, but the initial source was one or two or three people with mobile phones talking to Daily NK. We will know the names of these people in due time, but not today or tomorrow.

It’s a good thing. What I would like to see Daily NK do from here is less news about South Korea and South Korean politics, and more and more inside information about North Korea.

DNK: The rejoinder to that is that if you don’t understand the South Korean domestic situation, then you can’t understand North Korea, and vice versa.

L: It’s partially true, but if people want to understand South Korean politics there are plenty of places they can go. I think Daily NK pays excessive attention to this issue, and to fringe groups like the Unified Progressive Party, which are not very relevant.

Daily NK should focus on its core competence, which is inside reporting. On this, it is unbeatable.