A History of Korea (110 page)

After the summit, active inter-Korean contacts produced some tangible results, including exchange visits by separated family members and relatives, an end to propaganda broadcasts attacking each other, and plans to construct a massive industrial complex at Kaes
ŏ
ng, where South Korean companies would employ North Korean workers. But this rapid rapprochement in inter-Korean relations failed to realize any substantive results. North Korea still posed a grave threat to South Korea’s survival. Kim’s sunshine policy lacked reciprocity for South Korea’s concessions, and disillusionment and impatience with Kim’s policy once again mounted.

Tensions between North Korea and both South Korea and the United States had already been raised when George W. Bush entered the White House in early
2001. The Bush administration expressed skepticism about the North Korean regime and demanded verification of North Korea’s nuclear and missile development programs as well as reduction of its conventional weapons deployed along the
DMZ
. Bush also voiced doubts about the possibility of any meaningful engagement with North Korea. His hard-line stance heightened tensions in North Korea’s relations with both the United States and South Korea. As a result, North Korea canceled planned talks with South Korea and suspended all cooperative programs. Having expected the summit to improve relations with the United States, North Korea reacted by freezing most North-South contacts in a gesture of protest.

The deadlock in the inter-Korean rapprochement process gave South Korean conservatives a hand in discounting the sunshine policy. Kim Dae-jung suffered a blow in September 2001, when the National Assembly voted to oust his unification minister. Kim’s opponents claimed that the minister was trying to appease North Korea by conceding too much and receiving little in return.

North Korea’s attitudes toward the United States and South Korea further hardened as the United States started a campaign against terrorism following the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington in 2001. U.S.–North Korean tension peaked when President Bush labeled North Korea part of the “axis of evil” in January 2002 and condemned its attempt to develop weapons of mass destruction.

Kim Dae-jung’s sunshine policy, which had already borne heavy criticism, was further attacked when another serious naval crash erupted in the zone south of the Northern Limitation Line in June 2002. On 29 June, one of the two North Korean patrol boats, which had crossed the
NLL
, opened fire at a South Korean patrol boat. Two South Korean naval ships returned fire immediately. The gun battle continued for about 20 minutes, until North Korean ships returned to its waters. One of the South Korean Navy speedboats was directly hit and was sunk. Six South Korean sailors were killed and 19 others wounded. The naval clash came on the eve of the closure of the World Cup soccer finals co-hosted by South Korea and Japan, and also at a time when inter-Korean reconciliation had been stalled. North Korea’s provocation had been intentional, probably to seek revenge for the 1999 skirmish that had ended in its defeat.

Much of the South Korean public was enraged. The issue became even more politically explosive by the South Korean government’s response to the North Korean provocation. News media close to the Kim Dae-jung administration toned down the incident, describing the naval clash as an accident and thus
nullifying Kim Jong-il’s responsibility, further intensifying criticism of the sunshine policy. Ultimately Kim Dae-jung was forced to issue a warning to North Korea, while pledging no retaliatory action and the continuation of its sunshine policy. The crisis was eventually resolved when North Korea officially expressed its regret over its aggression.

Despite the stalemate in North–South Korean relations, Kim Dae-jung stuck by his sunshine policy. He believed that whoever succeeded him should inherit his engagement policy. But his sunshine policy only made many South Koreans more skeptical of the United States, their longtime ally, than they were of heavily armed North Korea.

Newly elected South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun pledged to continue his predecessor’s high-profile efforts to engage North Korea. As a staunch advocate of engagement with the Stalinist regime in the North, Roh was prepared to throw the South Korea–U.S. alliance away and make common cause with North Korea. Because of increasing dissatisfaction with the sunshine policy among the conservative voters, however, he changed its name to the “peace and prosperity policy.” Encouraged by South Korea’s friendly attitudes toward its northern neighbor, North Korea stubbornly urged South Koreans to abandon their alliance with the United States and pursue national cooperation with their communist brethren.

From the start the Roh administration pledged to continue aid, trade, and reconciliation programs with North Korea, despite the latter’s nuclear weapons policies. At the nuclear crisis talks, Roh hoped to soften both North Korea’s position, as well as the U.S. hard line toward the Stalinist state; Roh’s position was that the Korean peninsula had to be free of nuclear weapons and the crisis had to be settled through peaceful means, but he consistently opposed sanctions or other coercive measures against North Korea.

As the North Korean nuclear issue dragged on, public momentum in South Korea built in favor of moving forward with inter-Korean reconciliation. Many South Koreans were weary of the North Korean nuclear problem and recognized that the nuclear issue interfered with inter-Korean reconciliation; in more than a few cases, they downplayed negative stories about North Korea.

As the Roh Moo-hyun administration continued its engagement policy toward North Korea, South Korean society witnessed some unprecedented developments. The United States, which had publicly accused North Korea of being
the world’s most inhumane regime, enacted the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004, which was intended to help North Korean refugees in China and promote human rights in North Korea. It passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in July 2004 and by the Senate in October. In September, before the bill’s passage in the Senate, 27 lawmakers from the ruling Our Open Party delivered a letter to the U.S. Embassy in Seoul asking the Senate to vote down the bill. In July of that year, a South Korean Navy ship fired two warning shots at a North Korean patrol boat crossing into South Korean territorial waters. After North Korea angrily canceled inter-Korean military talks, the South Korean defense minister resigned and apologies were sent to North Korea.

Few South Korean overtures were reciprocated. In 2005 South Korea’s Defense White Paper removed the term “main enemy,” referring North Korea, and several attempts were made to end the National Security Law banning advocacy of North Korea’s communist system. None of these moves was met with a wisp of concession from North Korea.

Meanwhile, however, economic cooperation between the two Koreas managed to progress. Opened in December 2004, the Kaes
ŏ
ng Industrial Complex used South Korean power and telephone service and employed 4,100 North Koreans working for 15 South Korean companies. In the fall of 2005, 25 more South Korean companies built factories in the industrial park and 700 more were on a waiting list in quest of cheap labor. On the east coast, buses took an average of 19,000 South Korean tourists a month across the
DMZ
to the North Korean K
ŭ
mgang-san special tourism zone. In 2005 inter-Korean trade surpassed $1 billion for the first time in the country’s history.

In early May 2006 Roh expressed his eagerness to meet with Kim Jong-il and to propose many concessions, including massive economic aid for North Korea. Acknowledging the difficulty of pursuing its engagement policy toward North Korea while North Korea was confronting the United States over its nuclear weapons program, Roh hoped that a breakthrough could be found when a second inter-Korean summit was held. Clearly his approach contrasted sharply with the U.S. strategy of applying pressure on North Korea, especially as Roh had said that South Korea would place no conditions on its aid to North Korea.

North Korea responded to Roh by canceling scheduled test runs of a cross-border railway. Although the two Koreas agreed to relink a cross-border railway over their heavily fortified border, North Korea abruptly called off the test runs mainly because of resistance from its hard-line military. The rail crossings would have been deeply symbolic of generally warming relations between the
two Koreas. The last train ran across the border in 1951, during the Korean War, carrying wounded soldiers and refugees to South Korea.

North Korea triggered an international furor in early July 2006, when it test-fired seven missiles, including a long-range Taep’odong II that plunged into the East Sea. While the United States and Japan led an effort for the United Nations to impose sanctions, South Korea withheld shipments of aid to North Korea. In the inter-Korean ministerial talks held in Pusan in mid-July 2006, South Korea suspended humanitarian aid, including a North Korean request for 500,000 tons of rice and raw materials for light industries, until Kim Jong-il agreed to return to the six-party talks. This suspension of economic aid to North Korea marked the first punitive action taken by Roh against North Korea following sharp public criticism at home for what many viewed as a weak response to the North Korean missile tests.

Despite South Korea’s participation in international sanctions against North Korea, in early September 2006 Roh downplayed the threat posed by North Korea’s missile tests. He said that the tests were conducted not for any actual military attack but for political purposes and that North Korea was developing nuclear weapons and missiles only as a “deterrent.”

After North Korea announced, in early October 2006, that it had successfully conducted an underground nuclear test, the Roh administration decided to continue its two inter-Korean economic projects even though the
U.N.
Security Council adopted a resolution sanctioning North Korea on its purported nuclear test on 9 October. After reviewing the draft
U.N.
resolution, the South Korean government concluded that it was not necessary to stop the Kaes
ŏ
ng Industrial Complex and package tours to K
ŭ
mgang-san. These two huge inter-Korean projects were a major revenue producer for the Kim Jong-il regime, and it was feared that continuing them would take much of the sting out of any
U.N.
sanctions against the North.

On 13 February 2007, in the six-party talks, North Korea agreed to shut down its main nuclear reactor and eventually disable its nuclear program in exchange for energy assistance and security guarantees. Two days later Roh adopted an optimistic view regarding inter-Korean relations, saying that South Korea’s aid to North Korea could produce beneficial effects similar to those of the Marshall Plan. But the two Koreas differed over how to rebuild relations that were badly frayed by North Korea’s menacing missile tests and its subsequent nuclear test.

In early August 2007 the two Koreas agreed to hold a summit between Roh Moo-hyun and Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang on 28–30 August. But they postponed
the meeting until 2–4 October ostensibly because of the flooding that killed hundreds of people and left more than 300,000 homeless in North Korea. On 2 October Roh walked across the heavily fortified border with North Korea on his way to the summit in Pyongyang, a symbolic gesture intended to demonstrate his enthusiasm for permanent peace on the Korean peninsula. The summit took place amid rare optimism at international talks on the North Korean nuclear programs but was somewhat overshadowed by North Korea’s negotiations with other countries, particularly the United States.

Wrapping up the three-day talks, the two Koreas issued an eight-point joint declaration that mainly focused on economic cooperation projects. According to the declaration, the two Koreas agreed to create a “special peace and cooperation zone” in the disputed Yellow Sea encompassing Haeju, a port city in southwestern North Korea, and its vicinity in a bid to push ahead with the creation of joint fishing, economic, and maritime peace zones, with shared use of Haeju harbor, the passage of civilian vessels via direct routes in Haeju, and joint use of the Han River estuary. They also agreed to open an air route for South Koreans to North Korea’s Paektu-san, and South Korea pledged to accelerate the development of Kaes
ŏ
ng and repair a railway connecting Kaes
ŏ
ng with Sin
ŭ
iju, a North Korean town on China’s border, as well as a highway between Kaes
ŏ
ng and Pyongyang. In addition, South Korea would construct a shipbuilding complex in Namp’o, a port town southwest of Pyongyang. These economic projects were in keeping with South Korea’s long-term goal of reducing the economic gap between the two Koreas, a necessary step toward reunification. Under the joint declaration, the two sides agreed to work toward replacing the Korean War cease-fire with a peace treaty, and pressing for a meeting with the United States and China, the other signatories of the 1953 armistice. This point appeared to be a concession by North Korea, which had long argued that South Korea should not be involved in any peace negotiations, as the signatories of the 1953 armistice were North Korea, China, and the United Nations led by the United States. North Korea also agreed to carry out the nuclear agreement reached on 13 February 2007. The joint declaration sought to allay the North Korean leadership’s anxieties about the side effects of economic liberalization, stating that the two Koreas would regard each other with mutual respect and confidence, despite their differing ideologies and political systems. Although it paved the way for much more economic cooperation between the two Koreas, the declaration did little to concretely address North Korea’s denuclearization pledge. It also omitted sensitive issues such as North Korea’s human-rights
problem and the disposition of abductees and prisoners of war, both of which prompted criticism that the pledge only served to bring the summit meeting to a smooth conclusion.