Where the sun don't shine

Seoul Tries Hard to Keep Its 'Sunshine Policy' Free of Clouds
By JAMES BROOKE

Being able to promote an image of peace and harmony on the peninsula helps South Korea keep its bond ratings low and offers a justification for reduced military spending. So South Korea goes to great length to avoid offending North Korea.

After North Korea's military grumbled this summer that when its soldiers looked across the demilitarized zone at night they saw neon-illuminated crosses atop churches, South Korea unplugged the crosses...

Few South Korean overtures are reciprocated. For example, under bills now in the National Assembly, South Koreans would be allowed to freely access North Korean Web sites and to travel to North Korea. South Korea's official defense papers would no longer describe North Korea as "the main enemy." Other bills would end national security laws banning advocacy of North Korea's Communist system.

None of these moves has been met with a wisp of a concession from North Korea. Instead, North Korea recently restricted cellphone use and travel to China.

"What is needed is a phased development program that draws the North Koreans out and opens them up," said C. Kenneth Quinones, an American aid worker who recently spent several days in Pyongyang, North Korea's capital. "But South Korea is doing a hodgepodge that is not going anywhere. The North Koreans are getting everything they need, without giving anything back."

The South Korean Unification Ministry likes to publicize the growth in inter-Korean travel and trade. But almost all the travel is from South Korea to North Korea. Much of the trade consists of South Korean gifts of rice to the North.

During the first six months of this year, 9,866 Koreans crossed the border for visits, a 74 percent increase over the same period of last year. But 9,545, or 97 percent, were South Koreans traveling to North Korea, compared with 321 North Koreans traveling to South Korea.

Those numbers do not count the 1,000 South Korean tourists a week who cross the demilitarized zone in buses to visit Mount Kumgang, a tourism enclave in the North. With minimal cost to North Korea, the resort was built with hundreds of millions of dollars invested by a South Korean company, Hyundai Asan. Even though North Korea levies a tourist tax estimated at $100 a head, South Korea's government promised in August to spend $2.6 million to build and pave roads in the area.

Mount Kumgang "is just a cash cow, it has no impact on the rest of North Korea," said Mr. Quinones, a former American diplomat who lived in Pyongyang in the mid-1990's.

...South Korea's government goes to great lengths to promote the image of reconciliation taking hold on the Korean peninsula.

In August, the two Koreas prepared to present a unified front to world television viewers, marching together behind a neutral "unification flag" at the opening ceremony of the Athens Olympics. But North Korea realized it did not have an athlete tall enough to match South Korea's flag bearer, a 6-foot-1 volleyball player named Koo Min Jung.

South Korea broke with protocol and agreed to let Kim Sung Ho, a North Korean coach, be a flag bearer. Mr. Kim, a 50-year-old former basketball player, is an inch taller than Ms. Koo. He also stood head and shoulder above most of North Korea's athletes, members of a generation whose growth was stunted during the famine of the mid-1990's.

Shiver.