Setting Conditions for the Second Inter-Korean Summit

Instead of bribes, this time Seoul is offering the North Korean "Marshall Plan" for a second inter-Korean summit:

Unification Minister Lee Jae-joung in a New Year’s message on Tuesday said South Korea must assume responsibility for solving the poverty of North Korea. In the message e-mailed to all ministry officials, the minister said the South has to assume responsibility “as a country exporting US$300 billion worth of products and services around the world and one of the 10 largest economies and since its people share the same blood as the North Koreans.” Lee said, "Security on the Korean Peninsula will always be in danger, and we cannot guarantee peace on the peninsula unless we can find a fundamental solution to the problem of poverty in the North.”

Here is the South Korean’s government’s answer to solving poverty in South Korea:

The government provides rice and fertilizer to the North on humanitarian grounds. But that is not enough to address the fundamental poverty there, and a different approach is needed. Lee appears to be thinking of comprehensive economic aid so Pyongyang can overcome poverty. Experts speculate that the government is thinking about a large-scale economic package similar to the Marshall Plan that revived Europe after World War II.

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On Tuesday, the unification minister said, "We need to offer aid to North Korea from a more productive and longer perspective beyond what is currently being done. We need to restate our concept of aiding the North so that it can continue under the next administration.” Kim Tae-hyo, a political scientist at Sungkyunkwan University, says it sounds as if the government wants to help North Korea in infrastructure or logistics systems, beyond cooperative projects like package tours to Mt. Kumgang or the Kaesong Industrial Complex. “It seems to have concluded that it must do it in a way so the next government can’t change the policy on aid to the North it has set.”

The fundamental problem with poverty in North Korea is that the South Korean government won’t admit what the cause of the problem is, the regime! You can give them fertilizer and food, you can pave all the roads in North Korea, but poverty will remain because it is in the regime’s interest to keep the people poor and the South Korean government knows it. 

All this aid is just a bribe to get Kim Jong-il to agree to a second inter-Korean summit.  The first inter-Korean summit in 2000, was agreed to after than President Kim Dae-jung paid off Kim Jong-il with $500 million dollars.  President Roh Moo-hyun can’t just bribe Kim Jong-il like Kim Dae-jung did so he has instead disguised the bribes as increased economic assistance to a tune of over one billion dollars in aid to North Korea this year.  President Roh wants, what I call the "World’s Most Expensive Photo Op", which he believes will give him some kind of legacy once his presidency ends this year.  The leftists in South Korea on the other hand believe that a inter-Korean summit will give them momentum going into this year’s presidential elections against the conservative candidates when Kim Jong-il makes vague promises of inter-Korean unity and cooperation he has no intention of keeping. 

It worked in 2000, but hopefully South Korean voters have wised up to being burned one to many times by the Sunshine Policy of unconditional aid to North Korea that has led to only more belligerence from North Korea.