[Column] The eclipse of Sunshine

Posted on : 2016-03-06 17:29 KST Modified on : 2016-03-06 17:29 KST
John Feffer
John Feffer

The Kaesong Industrial Complex was the last ray of light from the “sunshine policy” of South Korean president, Kim Dae Jung. All the other parts of the policy of engaging North Korea had already ended, from the Kumgang Mountain tourism project to the effort to present a united front at the Olympics. But the Kaesong zone, established in 2004 to bring together South Korean businesses and North Korean labor in a complex just north of the Demilitarized Zone, managed to survive more than a decade of ups and downs in North-South relations.

Then, last month, 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 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 is 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 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 the shift in politics in South Korea to the right. It symbolized the triumph of pragmatism over propaganda.

Park Geun-Hye has abandoned all her earlier talk of her “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. Those sound a lot like fighting words.

Up until recently, it looked as though the Kaesong Industrial Complex, which employed over 50,000 North Korean workers and over 800 South Korean managers at 124 firms, was on an upward trajectory. Last year, after all, was very good 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, much of which is sold in South Korea.

North Korean workers, mostly women, earned $150-160 a month. The North Korean government took approximately 70-80 percent of that total, which led many outsiders to conclude that the labor was exploited, that the place was a “sweatshop,” even a place of “slave labor.”

But $30-48 a month, given North Korea’s depressed economy, is a lot of money for a North Korean – not to mention the other benefits such as the lunches and snacks that came with the job. The average worker at a state enterprise only makes about $1 a month. The working conditions at Kaesong, meanwhile, were a lot better than anything you’d find in other North Korean factories. Although North and South Korean workers ate separately and kept their interactions to a minimum, the complex nevertheless provided an unprecedented opportunity for each side to humanize the other.

As North Korean defector Je Son Lee recently wrote, “When I was still living in North Korea, people used to say, ‘If you have one person in the family who works for Kaesong Industrial Complex, it can feed the mouths of everyone in their family.’”

Unfortunately the international community largely treated Kaesong as the bastard child of inter-Korean relations. It failed to attract significant foreign investment beyond the South Koreans.

Yet, ironically, here was something that U.S. and South Korean conservatives should have been rushing to support. It was a clear capitalist encroachment into what many consider one of the last bastions of communism in the world (though I prefer to think of North Korea as an example of corporatist nationalism). It was a non-union zone, and conservatives love to talk about how much they hate unions (except, of course, in countries where they want workers to organize and effect regime change).

And the zone was right in the middle of one of North Korea’s invasion routes into the south. The North Korean military has taken control of the area. In what possible way could the closure of Kaesong represent a win for Seoul and Washington?

I’m not happy that North Korea has a nuclear weapons program. And believe me, China is not happy either. But registering our opposition to the program will not magically eliminate the North’s nukes. Nor will additional sanctions convince the leadership in Pyongyang to change their minds, any more than the economic embargo against Cuba transformed the system there. North Korea is convinced that the outside world wants to destroy it – which is not mere paranoia – and a nuclear weapon is its only security blanket.

The cynical will say that the international community has tried both isolation and engagement, and neither has worked. But that’s not really true. The international community has put its body and soul behind isolation and has been, at best, half-hearted about engagement. If only to make the obligatory nod toward non-proliferation, politicians condemned North Korea for its nuclear tests and missile launches. But at some point, again in the interests of non-proliferation, the key players have to get back to the table with North Korea and negotiate a freeze of its nuclear capabilities at their current rudimentary level. By all means, as North Korea has requested, the negotiations should also address a peace treaty to end, finally, the Korean War. In the meantime, we should be multiplying the points of engagement, not shutting them down.

The North Korean regime is noxious in many ways. But one thing is for sure. Even though it is outgunned, it will not readily stand down. The sunshine policy is dead and gone. Unless we start using our words, East Asia will be plunged into a darkness far more profound than the one that so famously exists north of the DMZ at night.

By John Feffer, director of Foreign Policy In Focus

The views presented in this column are the writer’s own, and do not necessarily reflect those of The Hankyoreh.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]

button that move to original korean article (클릭시 원문으로 이동하는 버튼)