AFP
South Korea will need to show patience and magnanimity to persuade North Koreans that unification will benefit both halves of the Korean peninsula, a group of experts said at a recent panel.
The experts told an audience at Chapman University in Los Angeles that the South should emulate West Germany's approach to the former East Germany, taking time to explain its policies and winning the trust of its communist neighbors that made unification acceptable.
"West Germany had become in most East German minds seen as an entity that they could deal with," said Lynn Turk, a member of board of directors at the Pacific Century Institute.
"The West Germans did a good job of persuading the East Germans that it was tolerable, and the South Koreans have to do that as well," he said.
Turk recommended that Seoul propose a long-term target date for unifying the wealthy, capitalist South with its poor communist northern half -- a step that "gives them enough time to do all those things that will be necessary to cushion and make unification tolerable and pleasant."
Bruce Bennett, a senior research fellow at the Rand Corporation think tank, said that North Korean residents should frequently be exposed to broadcasts and consumer goods from outside their country. Unification requires slow preparations under a detailed plan to minimize side effects.
Bennett said a recent poll of North Korean citizens living in China showed 95 percent thought life would be better if the Koreas unified, but respondents believed that the elites of North Korea were "the stumbling block."
"It's the elites with which we've got to work," he said.
Bennett argued against the temptation to conduct "deBaathification" of North Korea -- removal of all former leaders and ruling party members as was done a decade ago in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was toppled.
"If you do that, the elites will never support that unification," he said.
North Korea has attempted to assassinate South Korea's president several times and committed numerous atrocities against the South since the 1950-53 Korean War sealed the division of the peninsula into two hostile states, Bennett noted.
Notwithstanding resentment toward the North Korean leadership over this history, "we've got to be prepared to consider compromise and that is politically very difficult," he said.
"We've got to consider retention of wealth, retirement, amnesty -- all things that are going to be hard to swallow politically in South Korea, but are essential," said Bennett.
Reported by Ji Seoung You for RFA's Korean Service. Translated by Yunju Kim. Written in English by Paul Eckert.
Your comment bespeaks moral blindness: you see no difference between murderers, and those who want them punished for their crimes.
Genocides continue, because those who plan genocides - and those, who carry out those plans - almost always escape punishment. That is simply wrong.
Mr. Kim - and those who help him to murder, rape, and rob - need to be punished.
Their bodies should be bured at sea, so that those - who admire him and them - should have no shrine to which to go.
The myriad statues of the Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il should be knocked down and recycled.
It will take many decades for North Korean to recover from the damage done by the Kims.
That recovery will be speeded, if those - who helped the Kims to commit their crimes - no longer are around to obstruct the recovery process.
May 15, 2015 08:03 AM
Your comments bespeak moral confusion: you equate the murderers with those, who punish them. To kill those, who have murdered hundreds of thousands (if not more), is altogether fitting and proper. To forgive those - who have committed mass murder - is to align with the murderers.
Genocides persist, because the planners and those who serve them, escape justice.
Those, who plan and carry-out genocides, should not be jailed. They should have done to them, what they did to their victims, with one exception. Most, murdered in genocides, are brutalized before being murdered and their remains rarely are treated respectfully.
Those, who plan and take part in genocides, should be shot carefullly (one-at-a-time) and their remains committed to the deep, as was done to Osama bin-Laden. Burial at sea ensures the murderers have no shrine, to which their supporters can go as a source of inspiration.
Had Osama bin-Laden been buried on land, his backers would have turned his grave into a shrine. Whoever in the US Navy determined that bin-Laden was to be buried at sea - in the presence of a Qadi (Muslim cleric) - did absolutely the right thing.
In short, those who have committed genocide in North Korea - as planners and as servants to the planners - must not escape retribution. They have shown no mercy and they deserve none.
May 13, 2015 10:25 PM
Mr. Bennett is in error. His proposal - that North Korea's murderous elites be "won over" - suggests that they face no personal consequences for decades of murder, rape, and robbery. Such a suggestion bespeaks a frightening moral blindness.
What would Germany be like, had not most die-hard Nazis got their wish: on battlefields and in Allied bombing raids?
Would Germany be peaceful and peaceable, if millions of Nazis - die-hards and those simply tolerant of Nazi evil - had survived the war? Would Japan be peaceful and peaceable had not millions - eager or willing to die for the Emperor - not gotten their wish?
My answer to these questions: certainly not. Germany and Japan are peaceful and peaceable because the Allies changed the DNA. Germans and Japanese, who embraced violence internally and externally, were so reduced in numbers, that their successors have been able to keep control.
In Iraq, to which Mr. Bennett refers, the US erred grievously by not killing every member of dictator Saddam Hussein's secret police (Mukhabarat, the Iraqi equivalent of the Nazi Gestapo), the Special Republic Guard (the Waffen SS), etc. Had the war with Iraq lasted for several years, many of these murderers would have been killed in combat or in bombing raids. But the US and its Allies imploded Saddam's reqime in a few weeks. Saddam's accomplices needed to have been rounded-up and shot. Had that been done, Iraq would be calm. The failure to kill those, who served Saddam, condemns Iraqis to a couple of decades of car-bombings and other murders.
North Korea's elites are murderers. They deserve no quarter. While ordinary Korean Workers' Party members might be spared, senior cadres must be shot. Every member of the secret police must be shot. There must be no exceptions.
The shooting of these murderers sends a message: anyone, who chooses to carry-out the will of a murderous dictator, can expect to face a firing square.
Evil-doers - such as those who run North Korea - commit murder, rape, and robbery, because they have no fear. They have no fear, because in the past 70 years, those who commit genocide and other, similar crimes, have not been punished.
In Rwanda, wherein a genocide occurred in 1994 - 800,000 murdered in just 119 days (7 April-19 July 1994) - has allowed most of the perpetrators to escape punishment.
North Korea requires to be purged of those, who serve the murderous Kim Jong-Eun. He, and all who serve him, should be shot. There should be no exceptions.
Apr 24, 2015 11:53 AM
