End of kabuki theater on North Korea
By Kurt Achin
I gratefully accepted the Korea Times' invitation to participate in a roundtable on North Korea the other day. In doing so, I reminded the group that I was speaking purely in a personal capacity, and not on behalf of any organization whatsoever.
Our discussion revolved mainly around the suspension/closing of the Gaeesong Industrial Complex, which has been both celebrated and lamented as the death of the Sunshine policy of “engaging” North Korea.
The zone perhaps best exemplifies what I perceive to be the central flaw of the “sunshine policy” of inter-Korean reconciliation: it was a mechanism for purchasing fairly shallow optics of reconciliation at exorbitant prices, while doing little or nothing to change North Korea fundamentally.
Unification Minister Hong Yong-pyo essentially admitted on the record recently what all but the most doe-eyed Pyongyang supporters long accepted as fact: the North Korean government has been skimming off the lion's portion of hard currency “wages” allotted to Kaesong workers.
His Tennessee two-step on whether the money was diverted specifically to nuclear weapons programs may as well remain an afterthought: hard currency, a noted scholar has pointed out, is fungible.
Thus, even if not specifically earmarked for nukes, the money relieved fiscal pressures on other regime line items, thereby freeing up funds for weapons. (The same dynamic comes into play when visitors purchase inflated tour packages to bow to statues.)
Showcase projects and the pay-to-play inter-Korean summits that was its genesis may have made a degree of sense in an era when levers to move North Korea seemed truly nonexistent.
Today, however, we have much better insights into the seismic forces that are transforming North Korea border-to-border, and not just for those connected to a relatively tiny capitalist theme park of hand-picked employees.
Devote a tiny fraction of the annual Kaesong wages to loading up USB drives with Korean dramas and documentaries and make them available to Chinese traders, and watch what happens. Enhancing broadcast availability across all platforms will inform more North Koreans than the Kaesong zone ever could.
The government should also take a very light touch in enforcing bans on money transfers to the North, allowing defectors to send funds to family members via emerging networks will put far more hard currency directly in the pockets of ordinary North Koreans than the sham wages in Gaeseong.
Those funds are quite likely to be invested in grass roots trading activities, fueling the North's bottom-up marketization. Enough with the kabuki theater of paying North Korea's regime for feel-good optics ― the era has come to opt for real change, by engaging North Korea's people.
Kurt Achin, a former journalist, now works as TBS radio show host.