EVERY MORNING, a fleet of buses leaves central Seoul on a 90-minute time warp, heading from the capital city of the world’s 13th largest economy into one of the world’s poorest, most closed and idolatrous societies.
The 450 workers on board cross the DMZ to the Kaesong Industrial Park, about six miles north of a border separating two countries officially at war since the 1950s. Along the way, they surrender laptops, mobile phones and anything else that might link them to the outside world.
A complex of about 100 factories financed with Southern capital, making pots, suits and other cheap goods, Kaesong is the most tangible sign of progress between the two Cold War enemies.
“If they cut this link, everything will go back to the start again,” says Jin Joo Kim, a spokesperson for Hyundai Asan, the company that owns the contract to develop Kaesong. “We are hoping so much it survives.”
After a year of sabre-rattling that has sent inter-Korea relations back to the dark days of the mid-1990s, when Pyongyang threatened to turn Seoul into “a sea of fire”, the prognosis is not good.
The North summoned Southern officials to this complex yesterday – the first official bilateral meeting in a year – to deliver what it called an “important message”. Seoul fears that Pyongyang intends to shutter Kaesong’s factories, torpedoing an experiment that many believed would eventually employ 700,000 workers and lure the rusting Stalinist state in from the cold.
Kaesong already employs 40,000 people, but a South Korean chipmaker has just pulled out, following the lead of two other firms that recently got cold feet. Meanwhile, the North has been holding a Hyundai employee in custody for weeks for allegedly defaming leader Kim Jong Il.
Last month, Southern workers were kept hostage in Kaesong over a weekend, apparently in protest against the policies of South Korea’s conservative president, Lee Myung-bak. The detention infuriated the South. “Kaesong hangs in the balance,” warned the Korea Times.
Ostensibly, the latest threat to Kaesong has been sparked by Seoul’s decision to join a US-led initiative called the Proliferation Security Initiative, which plans to intercept ships – including Northern vessels – suspected of carrying “weapons of mass destruction”.
Washington accuses Pyongyang of selling these weapons to so-called rogue regimes, a charge considered by the North’s military leaders as the rankest hypocrisy. Last week they dusted off the blood-curdling rhetoric of the 1990s, calling the initiative “tantamount to a declaration of war”.
In reality, the crisis has been brewing since at least the election of President Lee last year. He has overseen a more aggressive approach toward the North, effectively mothballing the decade-old “Sunshine Policy” of gradual detente created by his predecessor President Kim Dae-jung.
President Lee and conservative supporters believe they have got little to show for sending millions of dollars in aid across the border. Pyongyang’s 2006 test of a primitive nuclear weapon and its launch of a rocket on April 5th appear to have strengthened their case.
Backers of the Sunshine Policy argue that hardliners in the South only embolden their counterparts north of the border. They point to news from the North this week that the military has strengthened its grip over several key policy-making posts, which would explain a “recent increase in bellicose statements”, one newspaper reported.
Chung Se-hyun, former unification minister under Kim Dae-jung, has asked what the end logic of the situation is. “We cannot go to war so we are left with no alternative but to engage in dialogue. I am confident that Lee Myung-bak will eventually return to the Sunshine policy.”
In the meantime, both sides play what the Korean Times calls “A risky game of chicken” for unimaginable odds.