Asia Times: PYONGYANG WATCH: 'Absorption, maybe assassination, but not appeasement!'



	October 09, 1999	atimes.com

The Koreas

PYONGYANG WATCH
'Absorption, maybe assassination, but not appeasement!'
By Bradley Martin

To put it mildly, not everyone in South Korea agrees with President Kim Dae-jung's Sunshine Policy of sweetness and light toward North Korea or with the related US-led moves to drop economic sanctions and cozy up to Pyongyang in hopes of making the old foe less hostile and thus less dangerous. There remain plenty of Southern hardliners who - far from favoring guarantees of the continued existence of the Pyongyang regime, the basis of current policy - condemn that regime as evil incarnate and argue that it must be removed.

An impassioned summary of arguments against appeasing Pyongyang - and in favor of applying pressure that could help force the collapse of the North Korean regime and lead to South Korean absorption of the North - came in the September issue of Wolgan Chosun, whose editor is a noted North Korea specialist.

As many as 3 million Koreans in the North have died of starvation because their leader, Kim Jong-il, is more concerned with his own survival and comfort than with the lives of his subjects, says the monthly, which is a sister publication of South Korea's largest and oldest daily, Chosun Ilbo. ''History will record the massacre of a minimum six million people (three million dead in the Korean War and another three million dead during the great famine) committed by father and son Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il as a devilish act in the same chapter with the holocaust of Jews by Hitler, the mass purge of Russians by Stalin and the killing fields of Pol Pot.''

The magazine finds fault with much of the rest of the South Korean press for playing down the real cause of the deaths of so many northern compatriots. It alleges that the deaths have been given less prominent play in the South Korean media than the Kosovo crisis or the Rwanda massacre. ''In most cases the media failed to address the culpability of Kim Jong-il and painted the mass starvation in North Korea as inevitable deaths caused by a natural disaster, as they ran stories that went like this: 'North Koreans have been dying from a great famine ever since the great floods of 1995.'''

Not only journalists but politicians are to blame, the article argues. Politicians obsessed with a lobbying scandal ''are paying less attention to the deaths of many North Koreans than they would to some stomach ailment of their pet at home''. The politicians ''cannot either see or feel the decisive moment that would determine the destiny of our nation passing before their eyes, and therefore they are missing the decisive opportunity of reunification to save the North Korean people''.

Wolgan Chosun points a finger at ''self-styled progressives and democrats'', recalling: ''Before the collapse of the socialist East European bloc, many of these individuals called for unconditional reunification.'' They changed their minds after seeing the great costs and difficulties of German reunification and realizing that with North Korea's worsened circumstances the cost for South Korea would be much higher. They took to opposing reunifications through absorption. And, the magazine complains, they kept quiet about North Korea's human rights violations and ''the crimes of Kim Jong-il''.

The magazine observes that some South Koreans believe the deaths in the North will continue unless Kim Jong-il is removed - that ''one man has to be taken out to prevent millions [more] from dying, and keeping that single individual alive would mean an end to millions of lives''. Assassinating Kim would be as justified as the Nato campaign to curb ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, they argue. Of course, ''the problem is that such physical punishment could trigger a war with many people to be killed''.

Urging that South Koreans examine the assassination option on moral grounds before assessing its practicality, the magazine does not itself get around to addressing such obvious practical questions as how assassins could get close enough to the secretive, reclusive and well-guarded Kim to kill him. Rather, the article goes on to discuss other options.

''We must develop methods and channels to allow South Koreans to directly help their northern neighbors,'' Wolgan Chosun says - arguing that ''some relief movements are, in effect, turning into campaigns to help out North Korea's communist party by feeding and fattening the North Korean officials handling relief supplies at the expense of others''. Religious organizations in the South tend to ''keep silent about Kim Jong-il's criminality and simply 'roll up their sleeves for help''', the magazine complains.

On the other hand, stinginess and hard-heartedness are not the answers, either. Some anti-communist conservatives take a wrongheaded attitude, asking: ''Why do we have to take responsibility for what Kim Jong-il did wrong? If we have money to help North Koreans with, we had better first spend it on our children going hungry.''

What's needed, the magazine argues, is a new, balanced and ''righteous'' perspective on North Korea that ''combines the hatred toward the Kim Jong-il regime and the sympathy for the starving North Koreans''. One such approach would be condemning Kim Jong-il for his crimes before an international war crimes tribunal while at the same time getting individual South Koreans involved in sending anti-Kim Jong-il propaganda to the North by means of millions of balloons.

''A plethora of arguments invented to avoid the responsibility of unifying the country is making the people small and mean,'' the article says in conclusion. ''Would we become the kind of people who wish there is no reunification within our generation because we do not want to foot the huge bill for reunification . . . or because we do not want to see many North Korean refugees at our doorsteps? Or would we take the path of great justice by trying to save North Koreans, [knowing that] if we miss this opportunity our generation will be recorded in national history as cowards? The former is a road to a third-rate country and the latter is a choice to become a first-rate country and a first-rate people.''

(Special to Asia Times Online)

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