PART 10: The changing South Korean position
By Henry C K Liu
(To see the previous installments in this series, please use the links at the bottom of this article.)
South Korean politics has been evolving along two parallel paths since the Cold War was declared ended by US president George H W Bush and Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev at the Malta summit of December 1989 and formally ended in 1991 with the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. One path moves toward increasing resistance to US domination to the point
of rising anti-US sentiments. Another path moves toward closerties with neighboring China, a country of shared cultural affinity, and with the largest population in the world, as it adopts a rapid economic development policy of "peaceful rise".
Both paths lead to moderation of Cold War ideological hostility in South Korea toward its estranged Northern fraternal state across the 38th Parallel.
While superpower detente between the US and the USSR unraveled with the June 1972 Watergate scandal that eventually brought down US president Richard Nixon in August 1974, was left in deep freeze by the anti-Soviet bias of Zbigniew Brzezinksi, president Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, and was finally pronounced dead with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, "nordpolitik" became South Korean policy. It was named in 1983 after West Germany's Ostpolitik by then South Korean foreign minister Lee Bum-suk but was not formally announced until the 1988 Summer Olympic Games in Seoul.
Nordpolitik was a policy of reaching out to the People's Republic of China and the USSR, Cold War allies of North Korea, with the hope that normal relations with these two neighboring major powers would provide new economic opportunities for South Korea, particularly in China, and would also moderate North Korean belligerence. Nordpolitik later became the signature foreign policy of South Korea under Roh Tae-woo, the country's first democratically elected president, albeit in a highly orchestrated electoral process, whose term ran from 1988 to 1993. After the Cold War, nordpolitik became the Sunshine Policy articulated in 1998 by president Kim Dae-jung, who received the Nobel Peace Prize for it.
A new kind of leader emerged in South Korea out of the new domestic politics in the new millennium. Roh Moo-hyun, a liberal democrat, was elected president on December 19, 2002. Born on August 6, 1946, in Gimhae, Gyeongsang-namdo province, of poor farming parents who struggled hard to give their children the benefit of at least some basic education, Roh attended Busan Vocational High School on a scholarship. After graduation, he worked with a fishing-net company for a subsistent wage. Aiming to be a lawyer but unable to afford college, he studied law after work at home and, after what Roh calls the 10 hardest years of his life, the self-taught lawyer passed the bar on his fourth try in 1975.
"Every time I look back on my life, I am suddenly engulfed in a certain feeling. It is a kind of shame," Roh wrote in his autobiography, Common Sense or Hope. "It is exceptional, in a society which puts so much stress on one's educational background, that a man with only a vocational high-school diploma was elected president."
Roh defended one of several student members of a book club named Burim that studied leftist theories who were detained and tortured for almost two months by the government in what came to be known in Korean history as the Burim Incident. The experience affected Roh fundamentally, launching him on the career path of a dedicated human-rights lawyer, defending other student protesters and striking workers. An activist in the pro-democracy movement, he joined the Democratic Citizens Council in 1985. By 1987, he became director of the Busan office of the Citizens' Movement for a Democratic Constitution.
During 1987, Roh participated in the June Struggle demonstrations for direct presidential elections. By September, Roh was arrested during a protest at Daewoo Shipbuilding and spent three weeks in prison for aiding and abetting striking workers, resulting in a suspension of his license to practice law.
Roh then turned to politics, using his high-profile record in the pro-democracy front to win election to the National Assembly in 1988. He held the seat for only one term, losing it after quitting his party in protest of a political merger he opposed. His early efforts in politics were less than successful. From 1988 to 2000, Roh won only two out of six elections. In 1992, Roh ran again for a National Assembly seat as a member of a new party, representing his home base of Busan, and lost. In 1995, he ran for mayor of Busan and lost. In 1998, Roh tried once more for the National Assembly, this time from Seoul, and won a two-year term. In 2000, Roh returned to Busan to run for the National Assembly and lost once again. Despite another election disappointment in 2000, a grassroots groundswell of support kept Roh from quitting his failing political career in despair. Two and a half years later, on December 19, 2002, amid a changing political climate, Roh won the presidency on the Millennium Democratic Party (MDP) ticket by a clear majority.
Roh, the most progressive president to date of South Korea's political leaders, emphasized his independence from US influence by boasting during his election campaign that he had "never set foot on American soil", adding defiantly: "What's wrong with anti-Americanism?" He hinted that should relations with the United States turn confrontational, South Korea might side with China. Reflective of the new politics, a campaign focused on ending labor conflicts, bridging regional rivalries and working with North Korea gave Roh Muh-hyun the presidency of a changing Republic of Korea in January 2003.
As a dark-horse candidate, Roh campaigned on a willingness to negotiate with the North even after Pyongyang announced in October 2002 that it was actively pursuing a nuclear-weapons program. His victory showed that most South Koreans did not regard the North's nuclear-weapon program as a threat to the South but as deterrence against US attack on the North. Despite decades of ideological estrangement, South Koreans do not want to see a US nuclear attack on their Northern brothers and sisters. Such an attack would also have unspeakably adverse effects on the South, as well as a severe anti-US backlash. The historical precedent of the United States dropping two atomic bombs on Japan shows that another US nuclear attack in another Asian adversary is not unthinkable, unless North Korea develops an effective nuclear deterrence.
Many South Koreans feel privately that a unified Korea with nuclear weapons would not be a bad thing, but few will publicly say so. Still, Roh has explained that to avoid confrontation with.....
to be continued.
PART 10: The changing South Korean position
By Henry C K Liu
the US, his desire to keep open lines of communication with Pyongyang does not mean he condones the North's nuclear strategy as it is perceived by the US.
"Regardless of what defensive strategy North Korea embraces, the series of nuclear measures taken by it is not desirable for peace and stability in Northeast Asia, including the Korean Peninsula," Roh said. "It will not promote stability and prosperity for North Korea. North Korea must withdraw its recent nuclear
measures and restore the relevant facilities and equipment to their original state."
Left unspoken publicly is a private call for the US to avoid pushing North Korea down a path of no return.
Despite popular support for his conciliatory North Korea policy, Roh was dealt a sharp political setback last May 31 in local elections on account of domestic and economic issues. In both the mayoral and local-council elections, Roh's Uri Party received only 30% of the votes cast, winning none of the mayoral seats except one in North Jolla province. The ruling Uri Party lost every other race - six parliamentary, seven mayoral and gubernatorial, and 31 local legislative, including in Roh's home town - and failed to regain its majority in the National Assembly. Uri Party chairman Chung Dong-young resigned over the dismal election results, and although he was immediately replaced by Health and Welfare Minister Kim Geun-tae, there was serious danger that the ruling party itself could break up to leave Roh without political support in his final, lame-duck year of office.
Uri Party members were shaken by the sudden resignation of party chairman Chung, a potential presidential candidate. In his resignation speech, Chung said: "[We] must accept the people's punishment of our party in a prudent and humble manner ... we have failed to win public approval of our policies." The party received another shock as former prime minister Goh Geon, a highly popular public figure, announced he was recruiting pragmatic reformers to create a new bipartisan group, intended to be the driving force behind Goh's planned bid for this year's presidential election. Ironically, just before the May 31 elections, Uri Party elders had attempted to bring Goh into the party, but a sizable number of party members rushed to join Goh's new group.
A history of disunity
The Uri Party was largely the creation of a factional row inside the MDP when Roh, after his surprise election victory in 2002 as a liberal, refused to accommodate the conservative wing and resigned from the MDP on September 29, 2003. Roh's supporters in the MDP formed the Uri Party, later officially recognized by the president as the new ruling party. The remnant MDP factions then joined forces with the opposition conservative Grand National Party (GNP) in a controversial move to impeach the liberal president in March 2004 on trumped-up charges of campaign illegality, corruption and incompetence in dealing with economic affairs.
The most serious charge was the alleged violation of the constitutional requirement of "political neutrality" on the part of public servants, including the head of state, committed by Roh when he openly appealed to the nation to support the Uri Party during a televised news conference with reporters on February 24, 2004. The impeachment was passed by the National Assembly on March 12 but overturned by the Constitutional Court on May 14, 2004.
Despite early successes in the polls, the Uri Party in its short history has been plagued by disunity within its own ranks, going through 14 party chairmen in the past three years. The last party chairman to resign was Chung, who was the most charismatic and popular figure in the party and its prime candidate for next December's election. With the Uri Party dissolved and many of its members flocking to Goh's new group, the lame-duck president is left with very little support in the National Assembly.
In South Korean politics, presidents traditionally serve out their final year in office without introducing new policy initiatives. Former presidents Kim Dae-jung and Kim Young-sam both made very few policy changes in their final year. Reformers argue that a lame-duck administration in power for a whole year could negatively impact the economy and national interest in a time of rapid changes in the region and around the world.
Two mainstream faction leaders of the governing Uri Party last December 27 voiced their support for moves to dissolve the party and create a new political group to win back public confidence ahead of the December 2007 presidential election. In a meeting in Seoul, the party's incumbent chairman, Kim Geun-tae, and his predecessor Chung Dong-young agreed to join forces to create a new party that unites all "pro-democracy reformists and future-oriented forces".
The agreement accelerated the breakup of the Uri Party, which saw its approval rating hit a record low of less than 15%, making US President George W Bush's dismal 28% approval rating on January 22 look like a winner. Followers of Roh opposed the move to create a new party. The latest opinion surveys showed Uri presidential hopefuls Kim and Chung lagging far behind probable candidates of the main opposition GNP, former Seoul mayor Lee Myung-bak and former GNP chairwoman Park Geun-hye, by up to 30 percentage points.
Hostility toward the North, artificially inflamed by US Cold War manipulation, is a mismatch with deep-rooted Korean nationalism, as highlighted by the May 2002 visit to North Korea by Park Geun-hye, daughter of the late president Park Chung-hee.
The Park Geun-hye challenge
Less than two years after her dramatic visit to North Korea, Park was on March 23, 2004, elected chairwoman of the GNP, the conservative opposition to the liberal Roh government. Under her leadership, the GNP won local elections against the Uri Party, which had increased spending on social services for low-income Koreans and adopted conciliatory policies toward North Korea while moving away from Cold War military alliances with the US and Japan.
After the controversial GNP bid to impeach Roh, Park led the GNP in the April 15, 2004, legislative elections to win 121 seats in the National Assembly, against the ruling Uri Party, which won 152 seats from a total of 299 to maintain a slim majority. But four months later, on August 19, the Uri Party suffered an embarrassing setback when party chairman Shin Ginam had to resign after revelations by a national investigation that his father had worked for the Japanese military police during the Japanese occupation in the first half of the 20th century. The GNP then....
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PART 10: The changing South Korean position
By Henry C K Liu
swept the nationwide local-level elections. During Park's tenure her party's approval ratings topped 50%, despite backlash from the unpopular impeachment call.
Park resigned her party post last June 16 in preparation for a presidential bid for the upcoming election slated for December. Former foreign ministers Gong Ro-myung and Hong Soon-young, former deputy commander of the Korea-US Combined Forces Command Kim Jae-chang, and former ambassador to Russia Lee
Jae-choon formed a group to advise Park to focus South Korean policy on North Korea on reciprocity rather than indulgence while restoring close relations with Washington and Tokyo.
On December 1, Park criticized Roh for opposing the creation of a new bipartisan political party, saying it was up to the people to decide. In her 2007 New Year message, Park attacked Roh's liberal domestic policies and vowed to end the so-called "Korean disease", a reference to British prime minister Margaret Thatcher's attack on the "British disease" of frequent labor strikes in the 1980s.
During a recent news conference in Qingdao, China, Park proposed linking Korea, China and Japan by means of a train-ferry system, using ships equipped with rails on deck to accommodate train cars, which she said would enable Korea to take part in development projects deeper in China and tap energy resources in Central Asia. She said such a regional project would be possible only with political cooperation among North and South Korea, China and Japan.
On November 2, Park said that regardless of personal political consequences, she would work to resolve the North Korea nuclear issue, hinting at a second visit to the North. Her first visit to Pyongyang was in 2002, when she met with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. She said then that although her mother was assassinated by a North Korean agent, she decided to meet Kim to help bring peace on the Korean Peninsula. It was a symbolic posture of a new South Korean relationship with the North that blood is thicker than ideology.
From the beginning, Park's political path was paved by personal tragedy that gave her an aura of serene dignity. She lost her mother, then South Korea's first lady, to a North Korean assassin in 1974. Five years later, her father, Park Chung-hee, the nation's longtime military ruler, was gunned down by his intelligence chief.
But as her political star begins to rise in South Korea, now an unruly democracy, Park, 55, has transformed herself from an object of national sympathy into a statesperson of great expectation. She took control of the GNP, consolidating the nation's largest conservative opposition force, which had lost public support through corruption scandals and an unpopular attempt to impeach Roh.
As an early contender for December's presidential race that could make her South Korea's first female leader, Park traveled to Washington in mid-March 2005 on her first official visit to the United States as head of the GNP, the opposition to the liberal Roh administration that rubs the US the wrong way. In three days of meetings with Bush, administration officials and congressional leaders, she called for strengthening US-South Korea ties, which have been weakened in recent years as political differences over North Korea divided Bush and Roh.
Bush had sought to isolate North Korea as an evil state, while Roh chose engagement and reconciliation with a fraternal regime. South Korea under Roh would not reverse its policy of active economic engagement with the North Korea despite its declaration that it had nuclear weapons. In response, Park's GNP called for a parliamentary inquiry into Roh's North Korea policy. Yet the difference between Park and Roh is one of tactics rather than strategy.
In an interview designed to solicit US support before her departure for Washington in March 2005, Park said South Korea needed to do more to force the North back to international talks aimed at dismantling its nuclear-weapons program. South Korea and China have advocated a softer line with North Korea, while the United States and Japan have pushed for a tougher stance.
Yet even with US support, Park's hurdles toward the presidency lie in South Korea itself, where her father's legacy is being debated. Park Chung-hee, who came to power in a 1961 coup, is revered by conservatives as the one who set South Korea on the path to prosperity with an industrial policy, but he is despised by liberals as a repressive violator of human rights. His efforts toward unification with the North, vetoed by the US, which cost him his life, were generally admired by South Koreans.
Members of the governing Uri Party, including several of Roh's top aides who were arrested during Park Chung-hee's era, have moved to create a truth commission that is compiling a list of South Koreans who collaborated with the pre-World War II Japanese government during its long occupation of the Korean Peninsula. GNP officials view the commission as an attempt to sully the image of Park Chung-hee, who served as a soldier in the Japanese army during the occupation. A public disgrace of the elder Park could kill the political ambitions of his powerful daughter. Ironically, the investigation led to the embarrassing revelation of the sordid past of the late father of Uri Party chairman Shin Ginam.
Park Geun-hye's political foes are also moving to list those who illegally benefited under her late father's dictatorial reign. She has conceded that "Korean history needs to be re-examined", acknowledging past anti-human-rights excesses. But she insists such a review should be conducted by politically neutral parties and viewed in the context of the Cold War. In addition, she said, there should be an investigation of people who "committed pro-North acts under the guise of the pro-democracy movement" during her late father's rule.
Park may have difficulty connecting with younger South Koreans who, having no direct experience with the Korean War era, tend to be more anti-US and often view her late father and her party as relics of the repressive past encouraged by US authorities. In defense, Park said: "The past is the past. I'm looking toward the future." As in many other parts of the world, pro-US positions are becoming domestic political liabilities in South Korea.
Neither the ruling Uri Party nor the opposition GNP support US policy on North Korea, with the difference that the Uri Party is more antagonistic toward the US. Just as it took a life-long anti-communist, Richard Nixon, to open the US to communist China, a political leader of Park Geun-hye's conservative credentials may be needed to break the artificial but deeply embedded separation .......
to be continued.
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PART 10: The changing South Korean position
By Henry C K Liu
of the two Koreas imposed by the US since the beginning of the Cold War.
Park has the advantage of unmatched name recognition, she is personally untainted by corruption and scandals and, despite her conservatism, she has shown herself to be pragmatic and flexible on policy toward North Korea, favoring reconciliation and economic cooperation with the North, in contrast to others in her party who want a less indulgent approach. Park's solid
conservative credentials may give her credibility to open up cooperation with North Korea. When she met with Kim Jong-il in 2002, by all accounts they got on well. Both are the offspring of charismatic figures who built the two Koreas in their own separate image: one a hard-driving economic powerhouse built by industrial policy and the other an unapologetic socialist state.
Recent conservative successes in local elections will boost Park's chances of winning the hotly contended nomination as presidential candidate for the GNP. After two successive defeats, the party is desperate for victory in the next election in December. But she still faces formidable rivals inside the party. Her ability to effectuate unification of Korea will be a major asset in her campaign.
The five presidential hopefuls for the December election are Park, former Seoul mayor Lee Myung-bak, former prime minister Goh Kun, former GNP chairman Lee Hoi-chang and former Gyeonggi provincial governor Sohn Hak-kyu. With an approval rating above 40%, Lee Myung-bak is currently the front-runner.
Waning days of Roh presidency
By current law, Roh cannot seek re-election. His surprise proposal for a constitutional revision to allow future heads of state to seek a second term in office and reduce the term to four years from its current five is widely seen as a gambit to turn the tide of the presidential race, as early opinion polls suggest candidates from the Uri Party have little chance of winning in the December election. Indeed, the party collapsed when up to 30 lawmakers quit the largest parliamentary bloc.
Roh's proposed constitution change immediately divides South Korean politics along ideological lines, providing the ruling party an issue to rally its support base again. Roh argued that a change in the presidential term would bring stability and consistency in state affairs, saying the current single five-year term makes its leader a lame duck for almost his entire final year, at the expense of the national interest. The proposal, however, is unlikely to pass the 296-member National Assembly, as the main opposition conservative GNP has vowed to kill the measure even before it is formally presented. In South Korea, a bill on a constitutional amendment must be endorsed by at least two-thirds of the members of the parliament and then pass a national referendum. The GNP has a bloc of 127 seats in the single-chamber legislature to the Uri Party's 139 seats.
Still, Roh is expected to host the second inter-Korean summit in the months leading up to the presidential vote. While North Korea has significantly increased tensions in Northeast Asia by conducting seven ballistic-missile tests, including an abortive launch of the long-range Taepodong 2, and a dud nuclear test, the Bush administration described these tests only as provocative but not an immediate threat to US security. With universal non-proliferation increasingly becoming a broken dream, the US has openly relied on a nuclear-missile defense regime as deterrence, coupled with a nuclear fatalism of selective proliferation for trusted allies, such as India, Japan, Taiwan and Israel, pitted against a losing non-proliferation battle against North Korea, Iran and a host of other minor states such as Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Germany.
North Korea, notwithstanding being labeled as evil, has never adopted suicidal policies. Without credible missile defense, for North Korea to attack the US, which possesses tens of thousands of nukes and accurate and reliable delivery systems for counter-strikes, would be suicidal. In other words, North Korea's nuclear force logically is designed as only a defensive deterrence against first attacks from the US. This defensive deterrence nevertheless upsets the US because it enables North Korea to be geopolitically defiant of US hegemony without being blackmailed by the threat of a first strike.
Still, for the US, reliance on deterrence against a North Korean first strike is preferable to embracing reckless preemptive strikes on North Korea, which would unleash uncontrollable geopolitical consequences. Deterrence is also preferable to escalating the nuclear crisis by adopting Japan's suggestion of imposing comprehensive international economic sanctions. Tokyo and Washington seem to have forgotten that a US embargo of oil in 1940 pushed Japan to attack Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941.
The division of the Korean nation into two states of opposing ideology and economic systems was the result of a US attempt to lure the USSR into World War II against Japan. After the war, it became part of the US policy of containment of global communism. More than 15 years after the fall of the USSR in 1991 and the end of Cold War paranoia of communism as a threat to liberal democracy, the antagonism between the two Koreas is a dysfunctional anachronism devoid of an operative cause. Korea has remained an unstable and dangerous flashpoint for no geopolitical purpose. In a similar manner, the gulf between mainland China and a US-protected Taiwan is also an outdated geopolitical anachronism that prevents a normal US-China relationship from developing.
Notwithstanding the current US fixation of promoting democracy around the world, democracy on every continent is producing governments that are critical of if not outright hostile to US policies. Facing an endless quagmire in Iraq, rising Iranian influence and the destabilizing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the US has decided that stability, not democracy, is its priority in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, a shift made clear by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in her January 15 meeting with Egyptian leaders. It is a sobering shift from the delusional missionary policy of "transformation diplomacy" to spread democracy around the world promoted by Rice since the beginning of the Bush administration more than six years ago.
The United States' confrontational posture with North Korea leaves Koreans in the South and many other people in Asia and around the world exasperated. US "transformation" policy in Asia has escalated North Korea's nuclear-weapons program and engendered growing anti-US sentiment in South Korea and other parts of Asia. Even within US political circles, a rising number of analysts are questioning whether Washington's East Asia security strategy serves national interests, with US forces spread thin by the Iraq war and the "war on terrorism" and with the......
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PART 10: The changing South Korean position
By Henry C K Liu
looming prospect of US troops stationed in South Korea becoming nuclear hostages.
South Korean relationships with the US have come under review in Korea as domestic politics evolves with changes in global and regional geopolitical conditions. Controversy surrounds the US handover of wartime military control of South Korea to Seoul. A group of 77 retired South Korean generals urged the Roh administration not to try to retrieve wartime operational control
over its troops from the US during its tenure, which ends next January.
Seo Joo-seok, senior presidential secretary for national security, said the South Korean government has a flexible attitude over when the wartime control should be transferred. The retired generals demanded in a public statement that the next president be allowed to decide the issue. They urged Roh not to discuss the timetable for the transfer during his summit with Bush last September 14 in Washington, a month ahead of the Security Consultative Meeting annual talks between defense ministers of the two countries.
In a letter to South Korean Defense Minister Yoon Kwang-ung, then US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld once again emphasized Washington's wish to transfer operational control over Korean troops to Seoul by 2009, three years earlier than South Korea's initial deadline set for 2012. Rumsfeld, pressed for funds for the disastrous occupation of Iraq, called for South Korea to assume an "equitable amount" of defense costs. Many South Koreans interpreted it as a call for "a 50-50 split", stirring controversy over the increasing financial burden on Korean taxpayers. The looming burden of high defense expenditure provides an urgent incentive for South Korea to reduce tension with the North and to accelerate long-delayed unification.
On August 17, a month before his US visit, Roh told a press conference that he was frustrated over the deadlocked relationship between the US and North Korea. Looking ahead to the upcoming summit, Roh told reporters he felt it almost impossible to persuade Bush to mend fences with Pyongyang.
Li Dunqiu, director of the Korean Peninsula Research Center of the State Council of the People's Republic of China, argues that South Korea would naturally move strategically closer to China because "Korea's future lies with China, not with the US". Many South Korean leaders agree with that argument in principle. They see China and Korea sharing common interests that transcend the current US-South Korea alliance of Cold War origin.
Many political leaders in Asia see the US insistence on perpetuating its post-World War II hegemony in Asia as a destabilizing factor that threatens prosperity and development in the region for the simple reason that the US is a non-Asian power that does not share cultural affinity or economic symbiosis with most of the region's member states. All over Asia, and particularly in Korea and in the Taiwan Strait, the US works to maintain an unnatural status quo of superpower hegemony left by the Cold War in the name of promoting democracy against communism.
Yet democratic processes around the world have repeatedly resulted in increasingly anti-US, left-leaning governments that oppose the neo-liberal policies promoted by Washington. The US is the main obstacle to the reunification of Korea and the main obstacle in China's recovery of Taiwan. China, on the other hand, wants the two Koreas to improve relations toward reunification because it believes a unified Korea would greatly reduce regional tension and strengthen stability to allow further economic development.
To reduce military expenses associated with US hegemony, the US is working to rearm Japan and is strengthening India's nuclear capability in order to launch a nuclear and conventional arms race in Asia. Applying the Cold War strategy it used on the USSR, the US aims to bankrupt Asia, particularly China, with an all-out arms race among major Asian powers to eliminate the rise of rivals without a shooting war.
Despite the North Korea nuclear crisis and internecine ideological conflicts among domestic political parties, the state of the South Korean economy and its long-delayed economic recovery are issues foremost on the minds of the electorate. Despite Roh's repeated promises on restructuring the economy to re-energize growth, he is perceived as having squandered his political capital on peripheral issues, such as relocating the national capital from Seoul to a new $40 billion capital in the sleepy region of Gongju-Yongi, 160 kilometers south of Seoul, by 2020; rescinding the National Security Law; and probing into past dirt that is better left alone.
Economic growth for the first quarter in 2005 fell to 3%, below 2004 growth and far below Roh's promises of 7%, raising public and investor concern. The government front-loaded public sector spending in the beginning of 2005 in an attempt to jump-start the economy. Although the 2005 growth rate reached 5.7%, growth in 2006 slowed to 5%. Analysts expect 2007 to face a growth rate of below 5%.
While it is obvious that economic growth in South Korea is dependent on closer economic relations with China, a recent report revealed that South Korea was forced to ditch a trade deal with China under US pressure. South Korea is currently pursuing a free-trade agreement with the US even though the experience with FTAs between the US and other countries has not lived up to its promise for the weaker economy.
Roh emerged from his 2004 impeachment with a legislative majority, a severely weakened opposition, and a new popular mandate that provided a honeymoon period in which the electorate was generally supportive of his progressive policies. Yet he was unable to press his advantage to push reform legislation through the conservative-dominated National Assembly. Roh's inaction dissipated public support and revived criticism of his policies and leadership. Acrimony within the National Assembly resumed, impairing the legislature's ability to reach consensus on domestic reform bills. The resounding defeat suffered by the ruling Uri Party in the April 2005 by-elections reflected an electorate that remained frustrated over Roh's failure to achieve progress on domestic economic issues. The main opposition GNP was emboldened to step up criticism of the president's liberal domestic policies, his mishandling of relations with the US, and his soft approach to North Korea.
Characterizing the legislative stalemate as an "emergency situation", Roh was forced to accept the need for a coalition government, but elements of both likely coalition partners, the Democratic Labor Party and the Millennium Democratic Party, remained in opposition.
Yet the conservative opposition GNP has been unable to capitalize on Roh's political weakness. Public support for the GNP in the April 2005 by-elections came as a negative reaction to Roh's failures rather than a shift in support for conservative GNP policies. The GNP itself has been beset with bitter infighting between younger, reform-minded members and older, traditional conservatives. GNP chairwoman Park Geun-hye was unable to bridge this generational gap, and the party remains divided, with the moderates gaining support from the "New Right" movement, a collection of conservative-minded Koreans who are critical of the old-style politics of the GNP. Since the elections, support for the GNP has fallen steadily, with persistent rumors of a breakup of the party, following the same fate of the ruling Uri Party. All in all, South Korean domestic politics is experiencing new dynamics driven by evolving global and regional geopolitics.
The collapse of the Uri Party did not translate into support for any of the opposition parties. Current polls show public support to be declining for all political parties and evenly split among the three main parties. Roh's dwindling political influence and lame-duck status will impede further implementation of necessary political and fiscal reforms, undermine confidence in South Korea's economic future, and hinder progress on resolving the North Korea crisis. The deputy premier for finance and economy recently warned that the South Korean economy "may fall into a long-term recession like that of Japan". Full participation in and integration with the vast, rapidly growing economy of China is an opportunity that South Korea cannot afford to miss.
Public discontent with the effect of globalization on South Korea's protracted economic stagnation gave Roh a popular mandate to pursue increasingly nationalist and China-leaning policies. Anti-US sentiments were augmented by anti-Japan protests that echo Chinese complaints.
Relations with Japan
Strong public support was given to Roh's vocal rhetoric against Japan in response to the dispute over Dokdo, two tiny islets surrounded by 33 smaller rocks 215km off the eastern border of Korea and 90km east of South Korea's Ullung Island. South Korea designated Dokdo "Natural Monument No 336" in 1982, a territory that was first incorporated into the Korean Silla Dynasty in AD 512. Japan asserts that it incorporated Dokdo, as a terra nullius (no man's land), into the Japanese Empire on February 22, 1905, when the governor of Shimane prefecture proclaimed the islets to be under the jurisdiction of the Oki Islands branch office of the prefectural government under the name Takeshima, cited in Shimane prefecture Proclamation No 40 of that year.
The Dkodo/Takeshima dispute has its parallel in the Sino-Japanese territorial dispute over the Diaoyutai/Senkaku Islands. That group - Diaoyutai in Chinese and Senkaku in Japanese - is composed of eight small, uninhabited islands, sitting roughly 160km northeast of Taiwan and 400km west of Okinawa. The jurisdiction over uninhabited islets can mean the expansion of a nation's exclusive economic zone (EEZ), and can bring extra resources, marine, mineral or petroleum, to enrich a nation's assets. In the case of the Diaoyutai/Senkaku Islands, about 40,000 square kilometers of oil-and-gas-rich EEZ is at stake.
The Japanese textbook issue concerning a revision of Japan's role and atrocities in World War II is greeted with strong public protests and diplomatic complaints in South Korea, as it is in China. Sharing a common feeling with the Chinese, Koreans are incensed by such revisions regarding Japan's militaristic and atrocious history in the last century.
The annual visits by Japanese leaders to Yasukuni Shrine, dedicated to the spirit of those who died fighting on behalf of Japanese imperialism, have caused tension in Japan's relations with its Asian neighbors nearly every year since 1975, when prime minister Miki Takeo first visited the shrine as a private individual on August 15, the 30th anniversary of the day that Japan considers the end of World War II. The following year, his successor Fukufa Takeo visited as a private individual yet signed the visitors' book as prime minister.
Several other Japanese prime ministers have visited the shrine since 1979: Massayoshi Ohira in 1979; Zenko Suzuki in 1980, 1981 and 1982; Yasuhiro Nakasone in 1983 and 1985; Kiichi Miyazawa in 1992; and Ryutaro Hashimoto in 1996. Junichiro Koizumi, Japan's 89th prime minister, visited annually six times from 2001 to 2006. These visits have solicited official condemnation from neighboring Asian countries since 1985 as an attempt to legitimize and revitalize Japanese militarism. China identified Koizumi by name as the obstacle to improving Sino-Japanese relations while he was in power (he was succeeded as prime minister by Shinzo Abe last year).
On October 17, 1978, 14 convicted Class A war criminals were quietly enshrined as "Martyrs of Showa" as well as about 1,000 others convicted for war crimes during World War II. Koizumi last visited the shrine on August 15, 2006, which is also the day Korea commemorates its liberation from Japanese imperialist occupation. Japanese annexation of Korea and war crimes during that period are the heat source behind persistent anti-Japan sentiments in Korea. Abe has made some effort to mend fences with both Seoul and Beijing since assuming the premiership.
One step forward, one step back
Pyongyang's behavior, which is dictated by North Korean domestic politics, will affect South Korean public perceptions of Roh's engagement policy. North Korea's agreement to a Joint Statement of principles last September 19 offered a respite to Roh's declining popularity. In the statement, North Korea "committed to abandoning all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs and returning at an early date to the treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons (NPT) and to IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) safeguards".
In the same Joint Statement, the US affirmed that "it has no nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula and has no intention to attack or invade the DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] with nuclear or conventional weapons". South Korea reaffirmed its "commitment not to receive or deploy nuclear weapons in accordance with the 1992 Joint Declaration of the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, while affirming that there exist no nuclear weapons within its territory". All sides agreed that "the 1992 Joint Declaration of the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula should be observed and implemented".
It seemed that the nuclear crisis was resolved by the September 19 Joint Statement. But in response to the US provocation of freezing North Korean bank assets over alleged counterfeiting of dollars, an issue unrelated to nuclear proliferation, Pyongyang followed up with a provocative statement of its own within 24 hours. There seemed to be a conflict between the US Treasury and State Department on the nation's approach to North Korea. Although the North Korean statements reflected Pyongyang's efforts to define further the terms of the vaguely worded Joint Statement rather than a categorical repudiation of negotiations, they dampened initial euphoria in South Korea and underscored that the thorny issues cannot be resolved with US intransigence.
South Korea's legislature and the general public also began to have second thoughts about the rising cost of Seoul's engagement policy. South Korea's proposal to provide 2 million kilowatts of electricity to the North would cost $11 billion through 2018 and was predicated on being in lieu of Seoul's obligation to 70% of the cost of the $4.5 billion light-water-reactor project. Despite $3.5 billion in South Korean aid during the past decade, Seoul has achieved little improvement in North Korean behavior because of US intransigence, resulting in rising anti-US sentiments in South Korea.
Roh has little remaining time to accomplish his policy objectives as his influence decreases exponentially toward the end of his term. It is increasingly apparent that as a lame-duck leader, Roh is unable to provide effective leadership for the nation at a time of critical domestic and international challenges.
A joint statement by the leaders of China, Japan and South Korea released on January 14 at Cebu, Philippines, expressed concern about North Korea's missile launches and nuclear test and reaffirmed the need for full implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1695 and 1718 by all UN member states, as well as their commitment to the peaceful resolution of the nuclear issue on the Korea Peninsula through dialogue and negotiation, the full implementation of the September 19 joint statement, the denuclearization of the peninsula, and satisfaction of humanitarian concerns. Yet the revival of Japanese militarism adds legitimacy to North Korea's push for nuclear weapons on top of continuing US hostility.
Beside security concerns, there is powerful rationale pushing for closer economic integration among the three neighboring nations via progressive government regulations. The leaders also called for cooperation in information technology in the region. China, Japan and South Korea have started active exchange and cooperation in the areas of Linux, IPV6 technology and its standardization, and 4G (fourth generation) mobile communications that do not include US markets, which are increasingly saddled with characteristics of underdevelopment through that country's fixation on market fundamentalism.
(See Part 1: The lame duck and the greenhorn
Part 2: The challenge of unilateralism
Part 3: Dynamics of the Korea crisis
Part 4: Proliferation, imperialism - and the 'China threat'
Part 5: Kim Il-sung and China
Part 6: Korea under Park Chung-hee
Part 7: Clinton's belated path to peace
Part 8: Bush's bellicose policy on N Korea
Part 9: The North Korean perspective)
Next: Japanese strategy for a "beautiful nation"
Just a pile of news, good news at that! For now that is, until the Khazars "strike back"....
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Russia flexes Mideast muscles with Putin visit
Web posted at: 2/9/2007 1:42:50
Source ::: Agencies
http://www.thepeninsulaqatar.com
MOSCOW • Backed by growing economic power, Moscow is restoring old Soviet-era links with Middle Eastern countries and will flex its diplomatic muscles next week when President Vladimir Putin visits Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Jordan.
The Kremlin will also be looking for business opportunities: it wants to win a place for its arms makers in the lucrative Saudi market and explore energy tie-ups, although Russia denies having any plans to join a “gas Opec”.
Moscow wants to play a bigger diplomatic role in the Middle East’s troublespots of Iran, Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Putin will make his first visit to Saudi Arabia days after the kingdom hosted crisis talks between rival Palestinian factions designed to end fighting that has stalled peace talks with Israel.
Russia is part of the Quartet of Israeli-Palestinian mediators that also includes the European Union, the United Nations and the United States. It is keen though to carve out its own approaches to the Middle East’s problems.
“The visit takes place at a very complicated moment for the region, marked with a sharp deterioration of the situation in and around Iraq and ... Palestine,” said Alexander Ignatenko, head of the Institute of Religion and Politics, a think tank.
Russia already has close ties with Tehran and the visit to Saudi Arabia — Iran’s big rival — should give it a broader foothold in the region, Ignatenko said.
On the business front, Russian companies are keen to sell to Saudi Arabia which, as the world’s largest oil exporter, ran a record budget surplus of $71bn in 2006.
“A big interest for a lot of countries is that with high oil revenues there is a big market in Saudi Arabia and throughout the Gulf,” a Western diplomat in Riyadh said.
Mikhail Margelov, head of the international relations committee in Russia’s upper house of parliament, said arms sales were likely to feature during Putin’s February 11-13 trip to the region.
“Saudi Arabia has said it wants to renew its tanks,” Margelov told a news conference. “Russia has plenty to offer on the world arms market.” Gas is likely to be a key topic during Putin’s visit to Qatar, which has gas reserves of 11.2 trillion cubic metres, the world’s third largest after Russia and Iran.
Speculation that Russia may be seeking to establish an Opec-style cartel with other big gas producers has alarmed Europe, whose gas imports come mainly from Russia.
Russian parliamentarian Mikhail Margelov, head of the Federation Council’s committee on international affairs, dismissed the notion that Russia and the US were vying for dominance in the Middle East.
“The idea that Washington and Moscow are competitors in the Middle East is a cliche inherited from the Cold War,” Margelov said this week.
“We can certainly get involved in fierce competition in the economic sphere. On Wall Street they say, ‘In cash we trust,’ and we do too. But in geopolitics, we have the same interests.”
Still, Shumilin said that Moscow has benefited from a cooling of US-Saudi ties in recent years.