North Korea takes hardline stance on unification proposal

South Korea’s President Park Geun-hyeunveiled a visionary and generous program for increased economic cooperation with North Korea, looking toward the eventual goal of reunification. Her vision is being met with hostility from North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

Park’s program announced March 28 is the most detailed and practical ever presented by a South Korean leader. But it appears to have frightened and enraged Kim, who is set on a course of further nuclear development, threats and confrontation.

The initiative received an immediate but extremely negative indirect response from Kim as North Korea launched a series of almost hysterical personal attacks on her. It also threatened to carry out a new nuclear test.

North Korea also carried out the heaviest artillery bombardment at its boundary with South Korea offshore in three years, firing 500 shells, 100 of which fell within South Korean territorial waters just two days after Park’s speech.

An underwater explosion two days later deep in the sea off the North Korean coast measured 5.1 on the Richter scale. The blast was identical in magnitude to North Korea’s most recent underground nuclear test in 2013.

Park’s proposal draws little media attention

President Park’s program for bringing the North and South together received remarkably little media coverage outside South Korea, especially in the English-speaking world even as she took care to unveil it during her four-state visit to Germany.

The South Korean leader known as Asia’s Iron Lady unveiled a three-point program to overcome suspicion and fear between the Koreas after receiving an honorary degree from Dresden University of Technology on March 28. She proposed using the financial and material resources of South Korea, Asia’s third largest and most prosperous industrial economy after China and Japan.

For her first point, Park announced “the urgency of allowing thousands of Koreans on both sides of the border [to] see the family members they’ve been separated from for more than six decades,” South Korea’s Arirang News reported.

In her second point, Park said the Korean states should join forces to raise North Korea’s miserable agricultural production and create a vastly expanded transportation and communication infrastructure for it.

The South Korean leader made clear she is committed to bringing the Koreas together.

“Reunification was a keyword for President Park Geun-hye during [her] state visit to Germany this week,” the Chosun Ilbo newspaper in Seoul reported on March 27.

Park points to German reunification

Park sought German support for her “trust-building process” with Pyongyang. She “discussed how Berlin can share its own unification experiences with Seoul” and “visited the Brandenburg Gate, a landmark in Berlin, symbolic of German reunification,” Arirang News said.

Park’s “hopes to learn from the German experience and seek ways to better prepare for the aftermath” also dominated her meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the newspaper said.

“Speaking to German broadcaster ARD, Park said she is open for constructive talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un,” it said.

“For the two Koreas to communicate well and truly integrate, we would need to narrow differences in our values and ways of thinking,” she said.

She stressed that North Korea must give up its nuclear arms and start looking after its own people.

“She ought to have been more careful about using the reunification of Germany, where East was absorbed into West, as an analogy to South and North Korea,” Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies told The Hankyoreh. “It could send a negative message to North Korea.”

Park said she hoped North Korea would rejoin the six-party international negotiationson its nuclear program, but she laid out no concrete proposals for South Korea to take in persuading the North to rejoin that process.

Nor did she include any concrete proposals for military joint confidence-building measures or increased transparency on security issues to reduce tensions on both sides, South Korean commentators pointed out.

“President Park recognizes the urgent need to engage North Korea But she also understands that you have to strike ab balance and get the right balance to win [North Korean leaders’] trust and cooperation,” Ralph Winnie, vice president of the Eurasian Business Coalition in Washington, D.C., told Asia Pacific Defense Forum [APDF] in an interview.

Winnie pointed out that Park unveiled her program at a time when Kim clearly had other priorities.

“Kim Jong-un is trying to consolidate his own power right now. That is his absolute priority and he will not allow himself to be distracted from it,” he said.