Unification less of a priority as Korean leaders prepare to talk

Seoul, April 25 

Is unification of North and South Korea the solution or the problem? The recent detente between North and South Korea has given new life to talk of unification for the two countries divided since the 1950s. It’s a term that conjours up visions of the Berlin Wall falling, families reunited and armies disbanded.

Both Koreas have repeatedly called for peaceful unification and marched together under a unity flag at the recent Winter Olympics. And when a group of K-pop stars visited the North recently, they held hands with Northerners and sang: “Our wish is unification.”

But on a peninsula locked in conflict for 70 years, unification is a concept that has become increasingly convoluted and viewed as unrealistic, at least in the South, amid an ever-widening gulf between the two nations, analysts and officials say.

The South has become a major economic power with a hyper-wired society and vibrant democracy; the North is an impoverished, isolated country locked under the Kim family dynasty with few personal freedoms.

Unlike East and West Germany, which were reunited in 1990, the Korean division is based on a fratricidal civil war that remains unresolved. The two Koreas never signed a peace deal to end conflict and have yet to officially recognise each other.

Those unresolved divisions are why seeking peace and nuclear disarmament are President Moon Jae-in’s top priorities in Friday’s summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, said Moon Chung-in, special national security adviser to the president.

Unification — a key topic at the two previous summits, in 2000 and 2007 — isn’t expected to be discussed at any great length, he said. “If there is no peace, there is no unification,” Moon Chung-in told Reuters.

In the past, some South Korean leaders have predicated their reunification plans on the assumption the North’s authoritarian regime would collapse and be absorbed by the South.

But under the liberal President Moon, the government has softened its approach, emphasising reconciliation and peaceful coexistence that might lead to eventual unity, current and former officials say. — Reuters

Public support on the wane in South 

• Public support for reunification has declined in the South, where 58% see it as necessary, down from nearly 70% in 2014, according to a survey by the Korea Institute for National Unification. A government poll in 1969 showed support for unification at 90%
• The economic toll would be too great on South Korea, says Park Jung-ho, a 35-year-old office worker in Seoul. “I am strongly against unification and don’t think we should unify just for the reason we come from the same homogenous group,” he said
• Estimates of the cost of reunification have ranged widely, running as high as $5 trillion -- a cost that would fall almost entirely on South Korea. Both Koreas have enshrined reunification in their constitutions, with North Korea describing it as “the nation’s supreme task”

Pyongyang slams US censure on human rights

• North Korea condemned US criticism of its human rights record as “ridiculous” as a diplomatic whirlwind accelerated ahead of leader Kim Jong Un’s summits with the South and with the US President 
• The isolated North has been accused of a litany of state-sanctioned rights abuses including extrajudicial killing, torture, brutal crackdowns on dissent and even kidnapping foreign citizens
• The US State Department’s rights report on the North described “egregious human rights violations” in the authoritarian state from public executions to widespread surveillance of citizens.
• North slammed the report for “viciously slandering” the nation, accusing the US of being a “hotbed” of rights abuses itself, beset by “cancer-like” gun violence and “all sorts of injustice, deprivation of rights”

Moon’s three ‘Noes’ 

South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s, in a speech in Berlin last July, outlined what he called the “Korean Peninsula peace initiative” with three Noes: No desire for the North’s collapse, no pursuit of unification by absorption, and no pursuit of unification through artificial means.