Good News, Bad News

By Tong Kim

Bad news first: The tragic accident in which a female South Korean tourist was shot dead by a North Korean solider at the Mt. Geumgang resort last Friday may dampen rising hopes for inter-Korean dialogue following President Lee Myung-bak's shift in North Korean policy. That is unless the North Korean authorities fully cooperate with the South in an investigation into the incident.

Unfortunately this incident occurred during the absence of official dialogue between the North and the South. The North Koreans told Hyundai Asan ― which has been running tourist programs since 1998 ― that ``the victim entered an off-limits area, and when she was told to stop she refused and started running before she was shot at 5 a.m.''

The Ministry of Unification immediately suspended the Mt. Geumgang tourist program until an investigation of the incident is concluded, while allowing continued operation of a similar program for Gaeseong. An investigation of this nature cannot be conducted without North Korea's cooperation, especially because there were no witnesses on the scene from the South. There have been other incidents that have caused the suspension of tourism operations, but this is the first time that a tourist has been killed by a North Korean guard.

The South Korean company was notified of the incident more than four hours after it took place. Probably the North Korean military unit involved needed that much time to get instructions from its headquarters in Pyongyang before it provided its account to Hyundai Asan. From the beginning, the North agreed to the tourist programs because of economic benefits. The longer the suspension of tourism lasts, the more economic damage the cash-strapped North Korean regime will suffer.

President Lee was informed of the incident before his address to the convening session of the National Assembly, in which he proposed resumption of ``full dialogue" with North Korea and expressed a willingness ``to engage in serious consultations with North Korea on how to implement the inter-Korean agreements," including the summit agreements of June 15, 2000 and October 4, 2007.

The fact that President Lee went ahead to pronounce his policy shift even after he heard the bad news of the tourist incident was good news: it was a proactive step toward repairing the strained inter-Korean relations. North Korea has been demanding that the Lee government inherit and respect the summit agreements signed by its leader Kim Jong-il.

Nevertheless, the president reconfirmed that his ``highest priority" is denuclearization, without mentioning his campaign platform of ``Denuclearization and Opening 3000 Vision" ― which promised that the South would help increase North Korea's per capita income to $3000, once the isolated communist regime completes denuclearization and opens up, a proposition that the North resentfully rejected.

Instead, Lee Myung-bak redesigned his approach more realistically ― to move from ``an age of declaration" to an ``age of implementation," and to seek ``a new thinking and a new direction," transcending changes of administration. Perhaps more importantly, he seemed to modify his earlier ``vision 3000" with a pragmatic suggestion: ``As the denuclearization process progresses, substantial cooperation between the two Koreas will be revitalized." Now is the time for the North to make a constructive move in return.

This moderate but positive turnaround of Lee's North Korean policy comes at a time when the latest round of six-party talks are making headway toward more progress. From Beijing the good news is that the North Koreans have agreed to work on a monitoring system and a verification regime of its declaration ― which was filed 6 months late and was incomplete in scope and details from the perspective of the United States and some other parties in the talks.

Yet it is a critical step in completing the second phase of the February 2007 agreement before the talks enter negotiations for the third and final phase, to dismantle and remove North Korea's nuclear weapons and programs for good. Although many experts and this writer think complete denuclearization is unlikely to be realized this year, the process is heading in the right direction. The Korean president's goal of complete denuclearization is shared by all parties.

By pursuing the multilateral process in parallel with restoring inter-Korean cooperation, South Korea will have a better chance to increase its influence over the process and to frustrate any North Korean attempt to cut out the South in nuclear negotiations with the United States. In any case it is hard to imagine the North can isolate the South in view of a strong ROK-U.S. alliance and the ROK's role as the chair state for the working group on Economy and Energy Cooperation in the six-party talks.

President Lee's new North Korean policy may encounter some criticism and resistance from conservatives, who don't want to have anything to do anything with the North, from bad experiences in the past and their dislike of the North Korean regime. But we are not living in a perfect world, and we have to make the best of it. Here again presidential leadership is in demand in order to persuade the people to understand what is best for the future of the nation.

Finally, the domestic scene seems to be returning to normal, with the belated opening of parliament following the elections of the leaderships of the two major parties ― the Grand National Party (GNP) and the newly renamed Democratic Party. The political ordeal from beef imports crippling governance for two months has ended, although the controversy still goes on. Fortunately the venue of political debate and discourse has left the streets and returned to the National Assembly.

One uneasy observation of Korean politics last week relates to the certainty that the governing party will have 189 to 192 seats in the national legislature, two-thirds of the total seats, enough to pass constitutional amendment. This is happening as a result of the GNP's decision to accept pro-Park Geun-hye members who had left the party after failing to get party nominations but who were still elected as non-GNP pro-Park candidates.

The GNP's new leadership, headed by Park Hee-tae was instrumental in the readmission of pro-Park members. Although this would not have been possible without the president's concurrence, the public is yet to see Lee Myung-bak's genuine reconciliation with Park Geun-hye, without which the president might be seen as still lacking political leadership.

As for the opposition Democratic Party ― with only 81 seats ― its major challenge will be to come up with policy alternatives for check and balance to prevent or change the one sided policy direction of the administration supported by a super-sized governing party. The history of the legislative body has shown frequent occurrences of disruptive melees in the chamber, whenever an overwhelming majority party was going to pass a controversial bill without sufficiently consulting the opposition.

In short, sheer numbers do not work in the Korean representative system, a thought inconsistent with the democratic precept that legislative issues are decided by votes. Inasmuch as a numerical vote should not change the truth, a majority vote should not pass the wrong bill to hurt the country, according to inscrutable traditional Korean thought. When the opposition party believes this is the case, it revolts. In this sense, the new National Assembly is also a formidable challenge to the super-sized GNP. What's your take?

Tong Kim is a research professor with Ilmin Institute of International Relations at Korea University and an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University SAIS. He can be reached at tong.kim8@yahoo.com.