09:03
Tieng Anh Vui
WHEN an April tantrum led North Korea to withdraw its 53,000 workers from the Kaesong industrial complex and expel the managers of the 100-odd South Korean firms, it was curtains for the only surviving product of years of attempts by South Korea to work with the North. The regime in Pyongyang claimed its move was out of pique at military exercises—“attack rehearsals”, it called them—that South Korea was conducting with America. In fact, it was all of a piece with North Korean provocations that had run for months and included a nuclear test in February.
Since then, it has looked as if Kaesong would never reopen—and good riddance, many in South Korea clearly thought. First opened in 2004, the enclave of capitalist enterprise houses mainly small-sized textile and electronics factories. The South kept Kaesong on life support, supplying electricity and water and two meals a day to workers. Firms paid around $140 per worker each month, but they paid it to the state, which pocketed a big chunk. Despite the cheap labour, few owners made money there.
Yet on August 14th, after seven rounds of talks, both sides agreed to reopen the complex. Four days later came another breakthrough: after three years of suspension, North Korea also agreed to restart temporary reunions for families separated for decades by the Koreas’ division and the tragedy of the Korean war. On August 20th the South said it would also talk about the possibility of once more allowing South Korean visits to the North Korean resort of Mount Kumgang (out of bounds to North Koreans). Visits were ended in 2008 when a North Korean soldier shot dead a tourist strolling on the beach.
Eternal optimists see these moves as a precursor to reviving the “six-party” talks meant to get North Korea to dismantle its nuclear-weapons programme. Kaesong, says Yoo Ho-yeol, a professor in North Korean studies at Korea University in Seoul, is the one remaining “window for talk”. Hwang Seung-hee of the unification ministry says that, once both sides finalise the Kaesong deal, setting up family reunions will be “quick and easy”.
The North Koreans’ about-turn probably reflects a realisation of how badly it needs the hard cash. But Peter Beck of the Asia Foundation also senses North Korea’s desire to loosen its economic dependence on China.
Why the conservative government of South Korea’s new president, Park Geun-hye, should be so keen on Kaesong is more puzzling. True, the agreement supposedly ensures that North Korea no longer uses Kaesong as a political bargaining chip—though whether such a guarantee is worth the paper it is written on is another matter. Meanwhile, Bruce Klingner, a former CIA analyst, thinks the joint undertaking never to shut the zone in future risks hobbling the government in Seoul.
For now, Mr Yoo argues, it is all an endorsement of Ms Park’s “trustpolitik”, a fuzzy notion for building confidence across the border. Part of it involves breaking the North’s “bad old habits” of negotiation: “confrontation, conversation, compensation”. Fine, but what if North Korea pockets the compensation and then starts the confrontation all over again?
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