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  Kim Jong Il Basks in the Sunshine: North Korea Comes in from the Cold

Kim Jong Il Basks in the Sunshine North Korea Comes in from the Cold

By Wieland Wagner

Part 2: Worlds Apart

North Korea is in fact constantly on the verge of complete breakdown. When the country was hit with catastrophic flooding, Kim postponed a meeting with Roh in Pyongyang that had been scheduled for this week to early October.

For the 48 million South Koreans, the horrendous living conditions of their 22 million poverty-stricken brothers and sisters in the North are difficult to imagine. They benefit from the fast-paced development of the world's 12th-largest industrialized nation, where everyone owns mobile phones years ahead of those sold in Europe. In contrast, the dingy state to the north is generations behind -- and its god-like leader prohibits his subjects from even owning mobile phones.

The extent to which the South has surged ahead of the North, both socially and economically, is abundantly clear in the capital Seoul. South Korea's military dictatorship, which lasted until 1987, had turned the city into a cement-grey Cold War fortress. Dim underground pedestrian tunnels underneath downtown Seoul were meant to double as shelters for the city's population in the event of an attack from the North.

Since then, city planners have rediscovered Seoul's inhabitants, even installing new crosswalks so that they can cross the streets above ground. A river in the downtown area, once cemented over, has been restored and couples now stroll along its landscaped banks.

The South Koreans are unwilling to give up their growing affluence or their democracy, which they obtained two decades ago in a bitter struggle against the military.

For these reasons, few are anxious for reunification with the North any time soon. Many South Koreans refer to their country as a shrimp which they fear would then be crushed between two rival whales -- China, to which Korea was once forced to pay tribute, and Japan, a more recent, and still-hated, colonial master.

The South has no choice but to keep the Kim regime alive through economic cooperation. A symbol of this cooperation is the industrial zone in Kaesong, a North Korean border city, where Kim's subjects have been producing cheap goods for companies from the South for some time.

The capitalist class enemies who have invested in the communist Kaesong include Good People, a South Korean undergarment manufacturer. Strategy director Jung Kil Kyun, 45, travels across the border to visit the company's factory twice a month. The drive from Seoul takes him an hour and a half.

Under the supervision of eight managers from the South, 430 North Koreans, mainly women, sew and fold slips and undershirts in Kaesong for export. Two of the company's English-language brand names are "James Dean" and "Bodyguard." Good People pays its North Korean workers $52.50 a month. "Our labor costs are only 10 percent of those in the South," says Jung.

This is only the beginning. Good People is already planning to build another factory next to its current plant, where it will employ an additional 600 North Korean workers. The manufacturer expects to produce half of its goods in Kaesong by 2010.

President Roh also supports doing business with the Kim regime. He even hopes to win the North's support for his idea of an "inter-Korean economic community." Roh is extremely unpopular in his own country, and his single term expires in six months. But even if the conservative opposition wins the election in December, the next president is likely to continue the policy of economic cooperation.

He may even push it even further. Even the opposition notes, with growing concern, how Korea's powerful neighbor China has wrested control over some of North Korea's most lucrative mines from the Kim regime and is practically economically annexing the northern half of the Korean peninsula as an autonomous border province.

In doing so, China is disrupting the balance of power in East Asia, especially now that South Korea feels increasingly threatened by its dependency on China, which has long surpassed the United States as the South's biggest trading partner. To make matters worse, the Asian giant is becoming one of Seoul's global export rivals with its cheap cars and ships.

To offset this threat, the South recently signed a free trade agreement with the United States, and Seoul plans to make North Korea's Kaesong industrial zone part of the agreement. This would also benefit the "Dear Leader," a survivor who, more than 15 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, can rest easy that no one will attack his realm because none of his neighbors have any geo-strategic interest in North Korea.

However, for Chong Myong Sun, 53, North Korea is not a political phenomenon but a human tragedy. She sits with her 89-year-old mother-in-law on the floor of her fisherman's hut in Jumunjin, south of Sokcho. She holds up two wedding photos of her and her husband, Lim Chang Ung, who she last saw 32 years ago.

They had been married for a short time and their daughter had just been born. When Lim went out to sea in a fishing boat one day, the North Korean navy intercepted the boat and abducted the crew. It was only this spring, after two of the abducted crew members managed to escape from North Korea, that Chung discovered that he is still alive -- and has remarried.

The North has abducted a total of 3,790 South Koreans, many of them fishermen. The South Korean intelligence agency long suspected abductees' relatives of being spies. The abductees and their families are waiting in vain for the Roh administration to take decisive action to secure their release.

The tens of thousands of families that were torn apart in the Korean War are somewhat more optimistic. A few of them have been able to see each other again, but in some cases only by videoconference. For the families who are allowed to see each other, they are only granted one, heartbreaking face-to-face reunion -- as an act of mercy by the "Dear Leader."

Chong wants to bring her husband home while his mother is still alive. But all she can do is hope.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan