by JOHN FEFFER
Barack Obama and South Korean President Park Geun-Hye PHOTO/White House
With governments on both sides of the DMZ extinguishing what little remained of the “sunshine era” of engagement, the peninsula is lurching toward a new period of darkness.
As the world focuses on the war in Syria, the refugee crisis in Europe, and the primary slugfest in the United States, the two Koreas are heading toward a catastrophe in the Far East.
Although relations on the Korean peninsula have been deteriorating for the better part of eight years, the last six months have been particularly tense. North Korea recently conducted its fourth nuclear test and followed up with a satellite launch using a long-range rocket. The international community reacted in its customary fashion, with condemnations and the imposition of more sanctions. South Korea joined in the chorus of disapproval.
But this time, South Korea went a step further. It severed its last important economic link with the North.
The Kaesong Industrial Complex was the only legacy remaining of the “sunshine policy,” the Nobel-Prize winning project of former South Korean president Kim Dae Jung. Established in 2004, the economic zone brought together South Korean businesses and North Korean labor in a business park located just north of the Demilitarized Zone in the ancient Korean capital of Kaesong.
Last week, South Korean President Park Geun-Hye pulled the plug on Kaesong. North Korea expelled the South Korean employees and froze the assets. The North also cut the communications hotlines that had connected the two countries. In this way, the two sides cooperated one last time to extinguish the final fading rays of sunshine.
The South Korean Ministry of Unification initially claimed that the proceeds from Kaesong helped the North fund its nuclear and missile programs. The minister subsequently walked back that claim, admitting that the government had no such evidence. That didn’t prevent President Park from repeating the same claim the next day.
The nosedive in relations on the Korean peninsula is already having a regional impact. North Korea has announced, in response to a new round of sanctions from Tokyo, that it’s suspending its investigations into the people it abducted from Japan in the 1970s and 1980s. Both China and Russia are concerned that South Korea will adopt a new missile defense system in the wake of North Korea’s actions. And the United States has sent four F-22 stealth fighters to fly over South Korea in addition to an aircraft carrier already on its way for upcoming exercises.
But it’s the suspension of Kaesong that remains most troubling. The project represented the only real example of Korean reunification avant la lettre: a model for how the two very different countries could gradually work together toward common goals. Kaesong had survived for more than a decade despite North Korea’s nuclear tests and South Korea’s shift to the right. It symbolized the triumph of pragmatism over propaganda.
Park Geun-Hye has abandoned all her earlier talk of a “trustpolitik” policy of engaging the North. “We now need to find a fundamental solution to effectively change North Korea, and it is our time to be brave,” she said this week. Those sound a lot like fighting words.
Optimists always say that it’s darkest before the dawn. But we’re well past dawn on the Korean peninsula. We’re heading toward a showdown at high noon. And yet the sky seems to be getting darker and darker. Can all the parties concerned somehow avert a total eclipse of the sun?
The Importance of Kaesong
At its height last year, the Kaesong Industrial Complex employed over 50,000 North Korean workers and over 800 South Korean managers at 124 firms. As a result, 2015 was a very good year for the economic zone. For the first time since it started over a decade ago, the complex generated more than $500 million in economic output. That’s a lot of shoes, overcoats, and electrical products, many of which are sold in South Korea.
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