Long road to reunification

After the fanfare of the meeting between chairman Kim Jong-Il and president Kim Dae-Jung in Pyongyang in mid-year, moves toward a closer relationship have been slow. North Korea’s Tokyo-based unofficial spokesman, Kim Myong-Chol, has predicted peaceful reunification of Korea within five years. It might happen. But the road to unity will be longer and harder than was the path to German unification, finds Kevin Rafferty

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Kim Jong-Il and President Kim Dae-Jung: same language, same smile, but same country?

The atmosphere at Panmunjom, the village that has achieved lasting fame because the border between the two Koreas runs through it, reveals one kind of reality. You can almost feel the sullen distrust between the two Koreas. Visitors are told to control every movement, for fear that a stray gesture, even a hand shading an eye, might be misinterpreted and cause an incident that could hit the peace tripwire and cause an explosion. Perversely, only the wildlife in the four-kilometre-wide demilitarized zone can truly enjoy the truce: as the area is sown with minefields, tank traps and the most sophisticated kinds of modern military ordinance, there is no modern economic development to disturb the chilly peace. Technically, North Korea and South Korea are still at war because only a truce, not a peace treaty, was signed when the guns fell silent in 1953.
Even after the summit of the Kims, Panmunjom is tense. South Korean soldiers manning a permanent border guard never expose more than half of their bodies to the opposing North Koreans a few yards away. There is something symbolic in the fact that the border between the two sides is traced even by the microphone wire along the green-baize- topped table where the two sides get together to discuss problems. The microphones are never switched off.
Life in the streets of the two countries also tells its own story of the enormous differences and the distance the two Koreas will have to travel on the road to fraternity.

The gap in income and living standards is much wider than between the Germanies. Today South Koreans enjoy annual income of about $1,400 a head while the Figure in North Korea languishes below $600. South Korean exports this year probably will reach more than $150 billion while North Korea will raise less than $1 billion - and several hundred million dollars of that will come from sales of military equipment to rogue states such as Libya. The southern economy is motoring along at double-digit growth again; the north is still recovering from famine, power breakdowns and supply shortages.
Though there was a physical wall between East Berlin and West Berlin, citizens of the two sides in Germany shared much more experience of each other's life - through easily accessible television and radio programmes and limited cross-border visits, for example. But the late North Korean chairman Kim Il-Sung, father of the present chairman, sealed the border with the south so hermetically that it offered a reminder that 19th century (united) Korea was known as "the Hermit Kingdom".
The immediate controversy after the summit was to decide which of those families that had been separated for more than 50 years should have the privilege of meeting each other again - and on what terms. So far all the encounters between north and south have been tense and limited.
In the past, a few individuals from the south have visited the north. One was Bishop John Chang Yik, who taught the Pope the rudiments of the Korean language (the Pope visited South Korea in 1989) and whose father was once prime minister of South Korea. The bishop had to use a Holy See passport to get in to the North Korean capital Pyongyang via Rome and Beijing.
He was followed everywhere he went in the north. Other visitors have been business leaders who originated in the north, most prominently Hyundai group founder Chung Ju-Yung, who has set up a tourist resort in the north at Mount Kumgang park, site of the 100-metre Nine Dragons waterfall.
Arrested for talking
The problems over the resort are instructive as to some of the difficulties of doing business in North Korea. Hyundai promised to pay $950 million between 1998 and 2002 in exchange for a 30-year monopoly on tours to Mount Kumgang and in addition agreed to invest $1 billion for an airport, shopping malls, restaurants, a golf course, ski facilities and an amusement park. Prospects of a profit were remote. In June last year, North Korea halted the tours for several weeks because a holidaying housewife from the South dared to try to discuss a forbidden topic with one of the park officials - comparing life in the north and the south. She was arrested, detained and questioned for several days as a spy. Tourists to the resort have to travel on Hyundai buses along a private road ringed by barbed-wire fences to keep them well away from the everyday life of North Koreans. The resort's North Korean workers are specially cleared and Hyundai staff and their tourists are told that only safe subjects such as the weather should be discussed.







Hyundai's founder Chung Ju-Yung: one of few to visit the north

Even though Kim Dae-Jung attracted a cheering crowd of several hundred thousand northern well-wishers to greet him at the airport and on his route, they were very much a captive audience. Journalists who went with him found deserted streets: the local populace is kept well away from nosy outsiders.
In Seoul and other southern cities, the only problem likely to be encountered while attempting to talk to people on the street is that they may not be able to spare the time from their busy shopping. And southern businessmen say they want only to do business and make money, not become involved in political discussions nor try to change society.
On superficial grounds, North Korea is an attractive place, especially to business leaders from the south, where wages of $1,500 a month and aggressive trades unions have consigned cheap production-line goods to the past. The 22 million population of the north enjoys a 99% literacy rate and good basic education. Wages are between $100 and $400 a month.
South Korean economists claim that North Korea has begun to pick itself off the Floor. The southern Bank of Korea estimates that northern economic growth was 6.2% last year. Grain production rose to 4.22 million tonnes, though this is barely above famine level. Northern factories also resumed production last year from depressed levels earlier in the 1990s when power shortages meant that only a third of them were working.
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Long road to reunification

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