The ongoing inter-Korean wrangle over resuming tour programs is the epitome of an irritatingly consumptive and unproductive relationship between Seoul and Pyongyang.
North Korea threatened Thursday to nullify all agreements and contracts with respect to the tour projects should the South ``continue to block" them. Given the usage of language by Pyongyang's propaganda machine, this seems to be closer to a solicitation rather than an ultimatum.
If so, we see few good reasons the North is refusing to accept the South's demand to make a written guarantee of visitors' safety on the governmental level. Yes, North Korean leader Kim Jong-il made a verbal promise to that effect to Hyundai Group chairwoman Hyun Jeong-eun a while ago. Why should it be so difficult to write it down on a working level, then?
The economic situation facing North Korea is too dire to think such a refusal is only to save the Dear Leader's face or its socialist pride.
As far as the tragic incident of 20 months ago is concerned, it is true the South Korean woman, Park Wang-ja, made the mistake of straying into a restricted area. But did the North Korean military have to make it a fatal one through an apparent overreaction? Blame should be on both sides but the price was too dear for the South Korean victim, and most of her southern compatriots still do not know what exactly happened on that day and why.
Equally hard to understand is the North's silence on the four South Koreans it allegedly is detaining. Pyongyang has no obligation by international law to share information on illegal entrants with their home governments. If North Korea's signature emphasis on Korean brethren has a modicum of truth in it, however, it could at least explain the most basic facts, including their safety and whereabouts.
As far as diplomatic rigidity and pettiness are concerned, however, Seoul can hardly be said to be any better than its authoritarian counterpart. At a time when the six-party conference seems likely to be resumed soon and the aides of Kim Jong-il and President Lee Myung-bak are discussing terms of a summit, the delay in the resumption of tours for lack of a written guarantee seems too trivial to matter.
What matters is the confidence between the Koreas, without which volumes of documents can turn into mere scraps of paper, as demonstrated by the two inter-Korean summit agreements, which have been gathering dust since the change of administration.
The Lee Myung-bak administration calls for a ``principle-based" inter-Korean relationship, but had the two previous governments behaved like the incumbent one, inter-Korean tour programs wouldn't have started in the first place
What would Chung Ju-yung, the late founder of the Hyundai Group who broke open the inter-Korean routes a few decades ago, say to see one of his prot?g?s (President Lee) and one of his own sons (Chung Mong-joon, chairman of the governing party) narrowing that road instead of widening it, by setting up ``new principles?"
Unfortunately, the adage, ``History goes two steps forward and one back," seems right.