By Michael Breen
When a group of Korean men last week gathered outside the Japanese embassy and laid nine pheasants, a symbol of Japan, on Japanese flags, and smashed their heads in with hammers, they were trying to send the message that the disputed Dok Islets are Korean.
Instead, the message they succeeded in conveying was, ``We are disgusting.''
To their credit, local media and members of the public criticized this ghastly demonstration, even though it was made in the name of Dok, a location over which Korean nationalistic passions normally surge in a seamless, unexamined, anti-Japanese direction.
The government, in contrast, took no action to either arrest the protestors on charges of public disgust or apologize to the embassy.
This customary foppish posture may appear to fit the tendency to want to get on the right side of, rather than lead, public emotion. But it also makes unfortunate sense because public misbehavior may be Korea's most viable strategy for addressing the Dok issue.
That is the inevitable conclusion if you consider a wee truth that tends to lie buried in the mountains of words that newspapers churn out about the subject: That, as far as international law is concerned, while Korea and Japan may claim Dok as a rock, they have no exclusive claim on the seas around it or the sea beneath.
There is an assumption that Korea does not want to take the dispute to international resolution because that would elevate Japan's claim to equal status and, worse, because there's a good chance that Japan could win on a technicality. (Tokyo's claim is based on the fact that Dokdo was not included in the list of territories it formally renounced after World War Two).
But it is more likely that both would fail to get the resolution they really want.
That is because, by the definition of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which South Korea and Japan have ratified, Dok is not a ``do" (island). It's rocks. To qualify as an island a rock must be able to ``sustain human habitation," the law says.
In other words, an inhabitant has to be able to collect water and grow or catch his own food. He can't rely on the weekly ferry from Ulleungdo for his choco pies. Having a maritime police unit and a civilian couple living there does not make the Dok Rocks an island. Nor does having a postal code and SKT connection. Nor, apparently, does the setting up of a desalination plant. Fresh water has to be naturally occurring.
You can claim rocks in international waters, but that's all. You can't claim as yours what's around or beneath them. To quote the preamble to the convention, ``Rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own shall have no exclusive economic zone or continental shelf."
The squid, oil and other good things are Korean and Japanese.
Of course, Korea doesn't need to accept this because it has de facto control, but that control will not allow it to extend its exclusive zone, at least not in a way that would be blessed by international law.
Given this, our best objective is to use this disputed area as a way to create peace and harmony with Japan, jointly exploiting the resources for the mutual benefit of our two peace-loving peoples.
Just kidding, nation-lovers.
No, we have to gather pheasants and hammer away until Japan surrenders her claim.
Arguably, we could achieve this by ignoring it. In other words, when Tokyo decides to include her claim to the Dok Rocks in school textbooks, the issue that has caused the current protests, the Korean government could simply act as if nothing has happened.
Another option is to negotiate. That means having something ready that could be swapped in exchange for Japan's claim.
But these options are non-starters because of the Korean public's mistrust of its government. If there were negotiations, the public would focus on what was given, not on what was gained. If the strategy were to not react, the public would accuse the government of being pro-Japanese.
This lack of trust prevents the government's negotiators from really exercising their great skills in the national interest. As brilliant as they may be ― insiders say the foreign ministry outsmarted their counterparts in the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement talks ― they have to take a thumb-sucking posture of we-stamped-our-feet-but-the-foreign-bully-forced-his-will-on-us.
In the case of Dok, merely agreeing to talk would cause an outcry of the pheasant-splattering variety.
By far the best strategy is to blow the trumpet, float some good ones (the proposal to make it inhabitable is an effort to put the ``do" back in Dok, but it won't work), and let people go nuts.
Michael Breen is chairman of Insight Communications Consultants in Seoul. He can be reached at mike.breen@insightcomms.com.