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I never thought I'd live in a country that's foreign policy is so friendly towards it neighbors and gnerally peaceable that I want to rant about it. But here goes.
The whole mess started out as a sleazy political gimmic on the part of South Korea's ex-President Kim Dae Jung(also known for his idiotic economic policy of doing everything he could to encourage people to run up huge credit card debts) in which with the help of the Chaebols (the conglomerates that dominate the country to a disgusting extent) a few hundred million dollars was secretly sent north to Kim Jung Il in order to bribe him to take part in a summit and engage in a lot of talk about how much everyone wants reunification and Kim Dae Jung's plan for a new happy, peaceful, friendly foreign policy vis a vi the North.
Pretty impressive piece of political threatre that was good enough to fool the Nobel Prize people and just about everyone else until the story about the bribery came out (just recently a whole bunch of pardons have been handed out to pretty much everyone involved since they were doing their illegal acts for the "good of the nation"). Built on this foundation of lying, sleaze and corruption the whole thing just keeps on getting worse and worse.
You get little minor concessions from the North such as allowing families to be reunited. Which makes what the North has to give up the priviledge of feeding, providing medical care for and pointing a gun at some old guy so he doesn't run off. Wow, what a concession it is to no longer force a member of your population who is too longer providing Kim Jung Il with more caviar to not be able to see his family. Of course it is nice to have families reunited and have some people be able to get out of the hellhole of North Korea but its all political theatre, the South Korean government is really dropping the ball on doing anything to really help North Koreans (more on this later).
In exchange for photo-ops and the like that Southern politicians get they then shell out lots and lots of aid to the North. The transparency of how much of this aid is benefiting only the elite is sickening at times. A while back there was a big train wreck in the North, (after which Northern media announced that several children died trying to save pictures of the Dear Leader from the wreckage, I'm not sure if it would be more disgusting if this was the truth or a lie) and the South got ready to send medical supplies north. The North then said that medical supplies for the people weren't what was needed, so they asked nicely for the money to be spent on TVs and other expensive consumer electronics instead.
So we get a lot of nice photo ops of one Northern and one Southern kid hugging in the middle of the DMZ with a big banner about unification while everyone predends that the immense concentration camps in the North don't exist. But there's not much that the Southern government can do about that, but when there is a chance to actually help people who've suffered from Northern tyranny the South does ****-all.
The best example of this are the people (who as of 7/24/2003 are believed to number over 100,000 http://www.refugeesinternational.org...letin?bc=00617 and are certainly more by now as this is a record year for defections from the north) have escaped from Northern tyranny into the dubious promised land of the People's Republic of China (much easier to escape to China then go through the DMZ of course). If the Chinese police come across them these illigal immigrants are deported to Korea, the North of course. There have been cases of Chinese police grabbing North Koreans right outside of embassies that the North Koreans were trying to enter in order to get out of China.
Because of this, generally the only easy way for refugees from the North to get to the South is be high profile enough for the Chinese, in order to avoid bad press, to quietly send them to south via a third country. For regular people what generally happens is they hide out in China working illegally with the threat of deportation to the North constantly over their heads or try to sneak into another country (generally SE Asian ones I believe and from there get to South Korea) where in a number of cases they've been hauled from China's southern border all the way back to North Korea.
What does the South do about Korean people getting hauled back to the North? As far as I can tell, nothing. I've been reading Korean newspapers for about a year now and I've never heard of any real complaint from Korean politicians about Chinese sending fellow-Koreans back to what must certainly be pretty nasty punishments for defectors. If the government had any balls at all it would put the entire resources of the KCIA behind smuggling North Korean refugees out of China (taking a page out of the Mossad's efforts to get Jews out of Middle-eastern Countries after 1948) and let China and the North ***** all they want.
And then, as part and parcel of all of this is the white washing of the image of the North in public discourse in the South. There's less coverage of the North in South Korean than in American newspapers, strangely enough, and very little of it is negative.
The most sickening example of this is the case of a small group of people who've escaped from the North and have pooled enough money to start an internet radio station to talk about their experiences. Since the radio station has started getting publicity there's been constant demonstrations in front of their offices denouncing them for trying to damage the South's relations with the North (which is laughable considing how few people in the North have internet).
You get the same sort of thing all the time. A while back the North's navy shot some South Koreans (although the North has recently promised to stop shooting South Koreans at sea, unless it really wants to) and some American soldiers ran over two school girls by accident. The North Koreans shooting people get buried while the "murder" of the girls becomes a national outrage and stays on the front pages for weeks and weeks and from what I've heard things got hysterical enough for a while that lots of "No Americans Served" signs went up on businesses. Of course a while after things died down (i.e. after the last Presidential election, when the need for political theatre had abated for a bit) a Korean employed by the US military goes and runs over some people and it gets one mention deep in the english language paper I read and then is promptly ignored.
Then you get the personal things. I had one adult student who was planning to go to America for the summer to enroll her 4 year old kid in intensive English classes (and who wanted to go to America to have her kid so he would've been born a US citizen but didn't have enough money to do so at the time). I was doing some role playing with her about what questions people in America would ask about Korea. I think about the 10th was "what do you think about North Korea" and her answer was (to paraphrase) "Its a good place because it stands up America." Good to keep your priorities straight, ya know...
I've also been told a number of times how nice it is that the North is preserving Korean culture and language instead of being all infested with English. While the amount of Konglish in the South has gotten really ridiculous the North isn't any better. Not only do they not call ice cream i-su-ka-rim (nothing wrong with that) but they've started taking Korean words of Chinese origin out and replacing them with Newspeak neologisms. Chinese cultural influence has been HUGE in Korea since waaaay back before Korea's unification. This means that the North Koreans are scrapping words for really basic things like "teach" and replacing them with neologisms like "learning giving" it also probably means scrapping most Korean personal names since they're all based on Chinese characters. Hell everything from numbers, to the cardinal directions is based on Chinese so that the North is working on is as ridiculous as radomly scrapping English words that was coined after 1066 and making up neologisms to fill in the spaces and then fall this preserving traditional English.
Stupid goddam commies. Bring back the days when posters offering rewards for turning in commie spies graced every subway station I say!
What makes this really annoying is that the only political party that doesn't go along with this BS is the Han Nara Dang (One Nation Party) which is a bunch of corrupt, anti-democratic holderovers from the old military dictatorship. Bleck
The whole mess started out as a sleazy political gimmic on the part of South Korea's ex-President Kim Dae Jung(also known for his idiotic economic policy of doing everything he could to encourage people to run up huge credit card debts) in which with the help of the Chaebols (the conglomerates that dominate the country to a disgusting extent) a few hundred million dollars was secretly sent north to Kim Jung Il in order to bribe him to take part in a summit and engage in a lot of talk about how much everyone wants reunification and Kim Dae Jung's plan for a new happy, peaceful, friendly foreign policy vis a vi the North.
Pretty impressive piece of political threatre that was good enough to fool the Nobel Prize people and just about everyone else until the story about the bribery came out (just recently a whole bunch of pardons have been handed out to pretty much everyone involved since they were doing their illegal acts for the "good of the nation"). Built on this foundation of lying, sleaze and corruption the whole thing just keeps on getting worse and worse.
You get little minor concessions from the North such as allowing families to be reunited. Which makes what the North has to give up the priviledge of feeding, providing medical care for and pointing a gun at some old guy so he doesn't run off. Wow, what a concession it is to no longer force a member of your population who is too longer providing Kim Jung Il with more caviar to not be able to see his family. Of course it is nice to have families reunited and have some people be able to get out of the hellhole of North Korea but its all political theatre, the South Korean government is really dropping the ball on doing anything to really help North Koreans (more on this later).
In exchange for photo-ops and the like that Southern politicians get they then shell out lots and lots of aid to the North. The transparency of how much of this aid is benefiting only the elite is sickening at times. A while back there was a big train wreck in the North, (after which Northern media announced that several children died trying to save pictures of the Dear Leader from the wreckage, I'm not sure if it would be more disgusting if this was the truth or a lie) and the South got ready to send medical supplies north. The North then said that medical supplies for the people weren't what was needed, so they asked nicely for the money to be spent on TVs and other expensive consumer electronics instead.
So we get a lot of nice photo ops of one Northern and one Southern kid hugging in the middle of the DMZ with a big banner about unification while everyone predends that the immense concentration camps in the North don't exist. But there's not much that the Southern government can do about that, but when there is a chance to actually help people who've suffered from Northern tyranny the South does ****-all.
The best example of this are the people (who as of 7/24/2003 are believed to number over 100,000 http://www.refugeesinternational.org...letin?bc=00617 and are certainly more by now as this is a record year for defections from the north) have escaped from Northern tyranny into the dubious promised land of the People's Republic of China (much easier to escape to China then go through the DMZ of course). If the Chinese police come across them these illigal immigrants are deported to Korea, the North of course. There have been cases of Chinese police grabbing North Koreans right outside of embassies that the North Koreans were trying to enter in order to get out of China.
Because of this, generally the only easy way for refugees from the North to get to the South is be high profile enough for the Chinese, in order to avoid bad press, to quietly send them to south via a third country. For regular people what generally happens is they hide out in China working illegally with the threat of deportation to the North constantly over their heads or try to sneak into another country (generally SE Asian ones I believe and from there get to South Korea) where in a number of cases they've been hauled from China's southern border all the way back to North Korea.
What does the South do about Korean people getting hauled back to the North? As far as I can tell, nothing. I've been reading Korean newspapers for about a year now and I've never heard of any real complaint from Korean politicians about Chinese sending fellow-Koreans back to what must certainly be pretty nasty punishments for defectors. If the government had any balls at all it would put the entire resources of the KCIA behind smuggling North Korean refugees out of China (taking a page out of the Mossad's efforts to get Jews out of Middle-eastern Countries after 1948) and let China and the North ***** all they want.
And then, as part and parcel of all of this is the white washing of the image of the North in public discourse in the South. There's less coverage of the North in South Korean than in American newspapers, strangely enough, and very little of it is negative.
The most sickening example of this is the case of a small group of people who've escaped from the North and have pooled enough money to start an internet radio station to talk about their experiences. Since the radio station has started getting publicity there's been constant demonstrations in front of their offices denouncing them for trying to damage the South's relations with the North (which is laughable considing how few people in the North have internet).
You get the same sort of thing all the time. A while back the North's navy shot some South Koreans (although the North has recently promised to stop shooting South Koreans at sea, unless it really wants to) and some American soldiers ran over two school girls by accident. The North Koreans shooting people get buried while the "murder" of the girls becomes a national outrage and stays on the front pages for weeks and weeks and from what I've heard things got hysterical enough for a while that lots of "No Americans Served" signs went up on businesses. Of course a while after things died down (i.e. after the last Presidential election, when the need for political theatre had abated for a bit) a Korean employed by the US military goes and runs over some people and it gets one mention deep in the english language paper I read and then is promptly ignored.
Then you get the personal things. I had one adult student who was planning to go to America for the summer to enroll her 4 year old kid in intensive English classes (and who wanted to go to America to have her kid so he would've been born a US citizen but didn't have enough money to do so at the time). I was doing some role playing with her about what questions people in America would ask about Korea. I think about the 10th was "what do you think about North Korea" and her answer was (to paraphrase) "Its a good place because it stands up America." Good to keep your priorities straight, ya know...
I've also been told a number of times how nice it is that the North is preserving Korean culture and language instead of being all infested with English. While the amount of Konglish in the South has gotten really ridiculous the North isn't any better. Not only do they not call ice cream i-su-ka-rim (nothing wrong with that) but they've started taking Korean words of Chinese origin out and replacing them with Newspeak neologisms. Chinese cultural influence has been HUGE in Korea since waaaay back before Korea's unification. This means that the North Koreans are scrapping words for really basic things like "teach" and replacing them with neologisms like "learning giving" it also probably means scrapping most Korean personal names since they're all based on Chinese characters. Hell everything from numbers, to the cardinal directions is based on Chinese so that the North is working on is as ridiculous as radomly scrapping English words that was coined after 1066 and making up neologisms to fill in the spaces and then fall this preserving traditional English.
Stupid goddam commies. Bring back the days when posters offering rewards for turning in commie spies graced every subway station I say!
What makes this really annoying is that the only political party that doesn't go along with this BS is the Han Nara Dang (One Nation Party) which is a bunch of corrupt, anti-democratic holderovers from the old military dictatorship. Bleck
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