Kim Jong Un charts risky course
Closure of joint North and South Korean industrial complex just as worrisome as threats to unleash missiles
For close watchers of the Byzantine world of North Korean politics, the alarming prospect of the last few weeks has not been the possibility of a demonstration of military prowess, but the permanent closure of a weird economic experiment called the Kaesong Industrial Complex.
Kaesong is just inside North Korea and houses 123 South Korean companies on a city sized industrial estate.
The South Koreans have invested close to a billion dollars in the project, which employs 53,000 North Korean workers overseen by several hundred South Koreans who commute over the nearby border.
But at the beginning of April, Pyongyang announced that the North Korean workers were “boycotting” the Kaesong factories and that it was closing the border with the South.
The crossing remains closed and the North Korean workers nowhere to be seen. But, more alarming, about 400 of the South Korean managers are still in the complex, effectively hostages of Kim Jong Un and his Pyongyang regime.
The project was the brainchild of former South Korean president Kim Dae- jung whose Sunshine Policy argued that the way to build confidence between the two Koreas and to pave the way for denuclearization, and eventual reunification, was to separate economics from politics.
To get the project off the ground, the Seoul government had to agree to some demands from Pyongyang which have received much criticism.
The main one was that the companies would not pay the 53,000 workers directly, but pass the $ 90 million a year in wages to Pyongyang. How much of that gets back to the people on the assembly lines is not known, but few people believe it is anything close to what the companies pay.
Even so, Kaesong has many defenders. And, indeed, it has for years stood out as about the only forum where there was some effective confidencebuilding and communication between North and South.
So when Pyongyang shut this door many analysts saw this as a particularly dangerous severing of the last link between the two Koreas.
Mutual confidence and even basic understanding have been in short supply as North Korea’s young and untried leader Kim Jong Un has overseen an intercontinental missile test last December and then an apparently successful A- bomb test in January.
In the last few weeks his regime has chosen to see the annual United States- South Korea military exercises as preparation for war. Kim has threatened to launch nucleararmed missiles at the U. S. and to abrogate the armistice that brought a halt to the Korean civil war in 1953, but which has never been followed up with a peace treaty.
Unsure of where this was all heading, Washington and Seoul have both lessened the strength of their language, cancelled some military exercises and joined neighbours China and Japan in urging North Korea to return to negotiations.
So it was no surprise on Monday that when South Korea’s Foreign Minister Yun Byungse was asked about the prospects of restarting the so- called Six Party Talks he turned to the Kaesong problem.
Yun made it clear he considers the Six Party Talks dead.
The Six Party talks started in 2003 with China, Japan, the U. S. and Russia joining with the two Koreas to try to persuade Pyongyang to give up its nuclear program in return for development aid.
North Korea walked out of the talks in 2009 after it tried, unsuccessfully, to launch an intercontinental missile and received severe criticism from the United Nations Security Council.
Yun told reporters attending a World Journalists Conference in Seoul the Pyongyang regime has all but closed the door on the Six Party process by announcing it is a nuclear power, declaring its nuclear weapons are “national treasures,” and restarting its Youngbyon reactor whose sole purpose is to produce material for nuclear weapons.
“This makes it more difficult for them to abandon these weapons,” Yun said.
And when he was asked about Pyongyang’s brusque rejection over the weekend to the calls by himself and visiting U. S. Secretary of State John Kerry for the North to return to negotiations, Yun raised the Kaesong question.
“Kaesong was intended to separate politics from economics. But now ( Pyongyang) is linking politics and business. It’s unfortunate,” Yun said.
If the Kim regime wants to raise any questions about the complex, the Seoul government will be happy to address them, Yun said.
So the Kaesong forum may be the route by which Kim Jong Un is brought to a table to talk.
But if so, his officials have already stacked the deck by taking the 400 South Korean managers hostage.