Farewell sunshine

Kim Dae-jung

Farewell sunshine

Aug 18th 2009 | SEOUL
From Economist.com

South Korea's former president, who promoted engagement with the North Korea, has died

Reuters

 

 

NO onE would have been more pleased than Kim Dae-jung with North Korea’s announcement on Monday August 17th. The hermit state said that it would allow separated families to hold a reunion and let South Korean tourists back into the country. South Korea’s former president, who died the next day at the age of 85, was the foremost proponent of engagement with North Korea as a means to bring peace to the Korean peninsula.

 

Mr Kim was widely praised for his bold decision to meet North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong Il, in June 2000. But the achievement was later sullied after payments were found to have been made by South Korea to the North in exchange for attending the historic summit. The company at the centre of those payments, South Korea’s Hyundai Group, is once again at the forefront of initiating contact with North Korea. Hyundai’s chairman, Hyun Jeong-eun, recently had a four-hour lunch with North Korea’s leader.

 

Kim Jong Il was in good form, according to Ms Hyun. “He accepted all our requests,” she said. “He told us to tell him everything we wanted so we did.” Apart from pledging to allow family reunions and tours of his country (managed by Hyundai), the North Korean leader promised to “energise” the joint inter-Korean industrial park in Kaesong. He also pledged to allow commercial traffic across the heavily fortified border to resume at the levels reached before the latest bout in acrimony between the two Koreas.

 

Ms Hyun’s private visit to North Korea has lent credence to those in Seoul who have been urging renewed diplomatic efforts towards thawing relations. Distrust between the two Koreas had reached a new level after North Korean missile and nuclear tests in April and May. South Korea’s president, Lee Myung-bak, has all but stopped political, cultural and family exchanges because of North Korea’s nuclear weapons. Mr Lee’s government has voted in favour of a UN resolution condemning North Korea’s human-rights record and lent strong support to international efforts to impose comprehensive economic sanctions against the regime in Pyongyang.

 

North Korea has been frosty too. In May it rejected requests by the American special representative for North Korea, Stephen Bosworth, to visit and said it would not return to multilateral negotiations that sought to end its nuclear weapons programme. Kurt Campbell, America’s assistant secretary of state for the region, said his country would not be an “ardent suitor” of North Korea. Tensions on the Korean peninsula rose with the sultry summer heat.

 

Then came the unexpected trip by Bill Clinton, America’s former president and husband of the current secretary of state, to Pyongyang at the beginning of August to meet Kim Jong Il. The visit was ostensibly a private one aimed at securing the release of two American journalists held for four months by North Korea since their apprehension on the border between North Korea and China. Mr Clinton had expressed regret that he did not try to normalise relations with North Korea during his last days in office. But Mr Clinton’s status as a former American president and his wife’s role raised speculation that a diplomatic channel had been opened.

 

All this would have pleased South Korea's former leader no end. He won the 2000 Nobel Peace Prize for promoting inter-Korean reconciliation, human rights and democracy. Yet his “sunshine policy” toward North Korea is out of favour with the current South Korean government. At his last public engagement in June, Mr Kim defiantly defended his legacy. “There should be continued negotiations and patience” with North Korea, he said from a wheelchair. “Aid and compensation is needed for North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons.”

 

Some in South Korea view the “sunshine policy” as naive at best and at worst aiding and abetting the North’s nuclear programme. Still, at the time of his death, many South Koreans were echoing those sentiments for renewed dialogue with North Korea, worried that Mr Lee’s approach is inflexible and unimaginative. Although Mr Kim has died, his influence on relations between North and South Korea will persist.