October is For Meetings: #Shigak no. 14

By | October 20, 2014 | No Comments

A meeting room at Panmunjom | Image: , Creative Commons 2.0

A meeting room at Panmunjom | Image: Bas Verbeek/Flickr, Creative Commons 2.0

“Shigak” (시각), or “perspective,” is a multilingual data collection effort that uses Twitter to curate sources dealing in key political, social, and economic issues on South Korea. Each bimonthly issue takes only the most important tweets posted by Sino-NK analysts under the hashtag #시각 and augments them with essential annotations and a small dose of concentrated analysis.

Shigak is edited by Steven Denney and Christopher Green. Back issues can be found on the dedicated page.

October is For Meetings: #Shigak no. 14

by Sino-NK

This issue of Shigak recaps a month marked by several different types of meeting. The high profile meeting between between three senior North Korean officials and high-ranking South Korean officials was the most notable. But other important meetings took place, too. To wit, Saenuri Chair Kim Moo-sung met with Xi Jinping and other Communist Party officials to talk shop; military officials from North and South Korea talked it out at Panmunjom; and Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon sat down with reporters from the San Francisco Enquirer to talk about his progressive agenda (namely, his support of the LGBT community). Other notable stories include: debate about defector support payment systems, the future of the ROK Coast Guard, and “American comfort women.”

The following tweets were posted between October 1 and October 15.

A plurality of opinion greeted the departure from Incheon of three senior North Korean officials on October 4. The three, Hwang Pyong-so, Choe Ryong-hae, and Kim Yang-geon, had officially come to South Korea for approximately 12 hours in order to attend the closing ceremony of the 17th Asian Games. The Games were a roaring success for both Koreas: with 234 medals, 79 gold, South Korea came in second on the medal table, while the North, with a much smaller contingent of athletes than the hosts had fielded, came seventh on 36 medals, 11 of them gold.

Saenuri Party lawmaker Han Gi-ho planted the flag of his strident opinion in the SNS-sphere on October 5, concluding brusquely that the goal of the high-level visit had been to provide strategic political support to pro-North Korea factions in the South. A former commander of the ROK Army 2nd Division, Han said that in his personal opinion, the high-level visit was aimed at the following: to stop all talk of a “jackpot unification;” to halt rhetorical besmirchment of North Korea’s “highest dignity;” to end talk of North Korean human rights; to stamp down on balloon flights by defector-led activist groups; and to get tourism to Mt. Geumgang restarted.

Although the prevailing view of the visit in South Korean media was that it was intended to lead to improved inter-Korean relations, a stronger and more logically compelling assessment was also voiced; that the visit, timed to coincide with the 40-day “disappearance” of Kim Jong-un, marked a new phase in North Korea’s strategy of inciting “South-South conflict” [남남갈등] in South Korean society. In general, North Korea promotes this outcome by offering up conciliatory rhetoric and talks to help the left push the engagement line of aid, assistance and dialogue, whilst simultaneously inciting national security conservatives (more or less all conservatives in South Korea) with threats and low-level acts of aggression. That precisely these twin elements have characterized the period since the visit (see here and here; bear in mind that the latter was the outcome of a deliberate incursion into the DMZ by a group of North Korea’s better-trained soldiers stationed not far from Panmunjom) implies that this was indeed one (though potentially not the entirety) of the visit’s strategic goals. That left wing politicians in South Korea have since begun to act in accordance with the strategy ought also to be of interest.

Jeong Gu-hyeon, a South Korean police officer charged with protecting defectors in the north-eastern Nowon district of Seoul, published an op-ed in the Chosun Ilbo on October 10 in which he both problematized the existing system of defector support, and proposed some alterations.

According to Jeong, a significant number of the 27,000 defectors now in South Korea are reliant on government transfer payments for their day-to-day existence. He points to monthly welfare payments of approximately 450,000 won and rising unemployment among defectors (19.9% in 2012), suggesting that the two may be linked, since any defector who takes a job with a firm that falls under the remit of the “4 대 보험,” four obligatory state insurance payments (medical, pension, unemployment, and occupational health and safety), automatically sees his or her transfer payments stopped, and this has the effect of pushing defectors into jobs that do not lead to sacrificing the payments: namely, part-time work on construction sites and in restaurants and gas stations, plus all types of day labor.

The answer to this conundrum, he declares, is to provide the transfer payment to all defectors, without regard for employment status, for five years after they arrive in South Korea. This, he concludes, will act to reward those who work hard while encouraging pursuit of full-time employment for all.

Jeong adds that ways should also be found to get major industrial conglomerates in South Korea [the “chaebol” (재벌)] interested in employing people arriving from North Korea. Specifically, he cites the apparent failure of an MOU signed in 2010 between the South Korean government and POSCO as evidence of the need for improvement in this regard. He proposes placing greater emphasis on technical skills training at Hanawon, the state-run resettlement center all defectors must attend for three months upon arrival, as well as introducing systems to aid in the hiring process, for which he offers nothing in the way of concrete detail.

In a meeting with PRC President Xi Jinping, Saenuri Party Chair Kim Moo-sung asked for China’s cooperation on the denuclearization of North Korea. During the meeting, President Xi said that “the Six-Party Talks are the best framework for realizing denuclearization.” The meeting between President Xi and Kim was part of the Saenuri chair’s four-day trip to China.

Why was Kim in China during another busy season of National Assembly inspections of government agencies? First, Kim’s visit to China came in response to the CCP, which invited him to attend policy talks between the two. Second, Kim not only met with Chinese political leaders but also with South Korean business leaders in China. After meeting President Xi in Beijing, the Korean delegation left for Shanghai, where they met Korean business leaders and Communist Party official Han Zheng. There, they stressed the importance of economic ties between the two countries. Third, Kim appears to be positioning himself for the upcoming presidential race in 2017 by displaying his foreign policy clout. His conservative predecessors, Lee Hoi-chang and Park Geun-hye, both visited China. A recent opinion poll conducted by Real Meter shows that Kim Moo-sung has the highest approval rating of any potential presidential runner, ahead of Park Won-soon and Moon Jae-in, among others.

It was reported that North and South Korean military officials held a secret meeting in Pamunjom on October 15. Deputy Minister for National Defense Policy Ryu Je-seung represented South Korea, and Military Spy-chief Kim Yong-chol represented North Korea. However, the meeting did not succeed in lifting the current tensions in Korea. The South Korean Ministry of Defense cited “differences between the two sides” as the core reason for the failure. North Korea argued that the South repeatedly ignored the North’s request for a meeting to resolve tensions over the NLL and anti-regime leaflets.

The recent talks come after high-ranking North Korean officials paid a surprise visit to the South on October 4. North Korea’s reason for suddenly seeking to reopen dialogue with the South is not clear, but some argue that they are trying to show their resolve to improve inter-Korea relations after years of tension (see Christopher Green’s analysis of an October 5 tweet in this edition of Shigak for an alternative view).

There are indeed differences between the two sides. President Park has said she is open to a dialogue, but is not yet willing to lift the May 24 Measures that were imposed on North Korea after the sinking of the Cheonan naval corvette in 2010. For its part, North Korea does not want South Korean activists to send anti-regime leaflets to the North. Recently, the North Korean military fired shots at balloons containing the leaflets, causing a tense situation. During the North Korean officials’ visit to South Korea earlier this month, both sides agreed to hold high-level talks in late October or early November. The South Korean government asked for the talks to be held on October 30. It remains to be seen whether recent tensions and the failure of the meeting on October 15 will prevent these high-level talks from happening.

The Chosun Ilbo reports on the ongoing parliamentary audit into official activities of the state. The inspection has generated a debate about the future of the South Korean Coast Guard. President Park Geun-hye vowed to disband the Coast Guard following its botched rescue attempt of passengers on board the Sewol ferry, which sunk on April 16 just off the coast of Jindo Island, Seoul Joella province. Lawmakers from both the ruling Saenuri Party and the opposition New Politics Alliance for Democracy (NPAD) want to enhance the functional capacity of the Coast Guard—not disband it. Saenuri wants to grant it prosecutory power (transforming it into some sort of sea police), while NPAD simply wants a new manual drawn up which outlines preparatory measures for dealing with large-scale accidents (such preparatory measures do not exist, apparently).

The Sewol’s sinking provoked the ire of the South Korean population, which is what likely explains President Park’s promise to abolish the Coast Guard. In reality, such a move requires more than an executive promise. While the sinking of the Sewol ferry lead to calls for an increase in safety and security measures, the incident (or incidents) that appear to be influencing the debate surrounding reform of the Coast Guard is Chinese fishermen venturing into South Korea’s territorial waters. On October 10, there was a violent clash between officers of the Coast Guard and fishermen. The clash left one fishing boat captain dead and several others arrested. This is not the first (nor is it likely to be the last) violent confrontation. In 2011, one Coast Guard officer died after being stabbed by a fisherman while attempting to a vessel in South Korean waters.

Kookmin (People’s) TV reproduces a transcript from a radio interview between Son Byong-hui and former investigator for the Presidential Truth and Commission on Suspicious Deaths, Go Sang-man, on prostitution in Korea. The dialogue revolves primarily around the institution of regulated prostitution in Korea from the time of colonial occupation through the postwar period, with a focus on “American comfort women” (미국 위안부) and the regulation of “camptown” (기지촌) prostitution by the South Korean government. Camptown prostitution is an explosive, and politically inconvenient, fact of modern Korean history.

The issue of camptown prostitution is not an unexplored issue. Maria Hohn and Seungsook Moon’s edited volume Over There: Living with the US Military Empire From World War Two to the Present is an informative introduction to the issue of camptown prostitution and the efforts by both the US military and the South Korean government to regulate the sex industry (despite being nominally against it). Most controversially, Moon, in her chapter “Regulating Desire, Managing the Empire” argues that the camptown prostitution was made possible by the institutional foundations laid by the Japanese colonial authorities. Equally as controversial, the foreign currency demand in Korea’s early developmental period strongly influenced government officials to find ways to exploit the camptowns, which were de facto legal enterprises under the Park Chung-hee regime. The issue has recently been given attention in the foreign media, and even provoked the ire of political scientist Katherine Moon (author of Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in US-Korea Relations), who thinks calling postwar sex workers “comfort women” is inaccurate and will only confuse the South Korean public.

New Politics Alliance for Democracy (NPAD) lawmaker and Seoul Mayor, Park Won-soon, has come out in support of the LGBT community. In an interview with the San Francisco Examiner, Park stated, “I personally agree with the rights of homosexuals.” He emphasized that Korean society is “in process now” towards recognizing the rights of homosexuals. He framed the struggle as a tug-of-war between Protestant churches and (progressive) civil society, insisting that only civil society has the power to “expand the universal concept of human rights to include homosexuals.” Park believes that “Once they persuade the people, the politicians will follow.”

Park’s remarks, a promising sign for the future of (actual, rather than disguised nationalist) progressive politics in South Korea, has produced no small backlash from Korean society, especially from Christian churches. While encouraging, one wonders whether the South Korean electorate will be receptive or repulsed. An unhappy electorate could easily persuade any politicians to perform a volte face. While society has “progressed” in many ways, it also shows signs of conservative resiliency.

 

 

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