Gloomy anniversary
Koreas must return to spirits of summit declaration
``Ten years of time can change even rivers and mountains," an old Korean saying goes. The native land of the Korean Peninsula seems to have changed little over the past decade; what's has been turned upside down is the inter-Korean relationship ― from cooperation to confrontation.
On June 15, 2000, top leaders of the two Koreas shook hands warmly and embraced each other, and the United Nations unanimously welcomed the start of peace regime on the Korean Peninsula. Exactly a decade later, words of war are flying across the border, and the U.N. has to call for both Koreas to exercise self-restraint not to raise tension any further.
As a candidate two and a half years ago, President Lee Myung-bak vowed to seek a win-win, co-prospering relationship with North Korea and respect the agreements from the two summits. Upon taking office, however, Lee stuck to his precondition ― the North's abandonment of nuclear programs ― as if he had forgotten to do so while campaigning. He then made it clear that a reunified Korea should be a free, democratic state, during a summit with U.S. President Barack Obama.
These were sound, justifiable demands ― in theory ― but were extremely unfeasible in reality, forcing most experts to wonder whether the Lee administration has any genuine intention ― or even a solid sense of reality ― to move inter-Korean relations forward.
To paraphrase Lee's calls from the standpoint of North Korea, it was like demanding the North give up its biggest ― or only ― military and diplomatic leverage and be absorbed by the South. The rest is already history with the estranged Koreas falling into escalating hostility and a game of chicken.
No one can defend North Korea's nuclear ambition or its suicidal threat to ``turn Seoul into sea of fire." Nor has Pyongyang abandoned its goal to communize the South by force ― albeit as a political propaganda.
Assuming there are many ways of interpreting the Kim Jong-il regime, however, one of them is to regard it as a thug who holds its people ― and even the safety of South Koreans ― as hostage. The biggest victims of inter-Korean confrontation is not the leadership in Pyongyang but North Korean residents, as Seoul has severed even humanitarian aid.
If another calamitous famine hits the reclusive country, the Lee administration will hardly be able to avoid at least moral responsibility, as the former Kim Young-sam government looked away while millions of North Korean starved to death in the mid-1990s.
Also, conservatives may be free to think the inter-Korean reconciliation in the first eight years of the 2000s as just Pyongyang's extortion of cash from Seoul to make atomic bombs targeted at its benefactors. But the longer the Lee administration delays the resumption of the six-party talks pending the solution of the Cheonan incident, the more nuclear bombs will be made in the North ― without South Korean money.
The June 15, 2000 joint declaration came neither from a na?ve, nationalist fantasy nor from some politicians' personal ambitions; its biggest significance was for Koreans to begin to throw off the historical yoke put on them by world powers.
Ten years later, we Koreans are standing at square one.