S. Korea on Eggshells Over Relationship With the North

These days, it is as if everyone in South Korea is walking on tiptoe, trying not to upset North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.

Euphoria has swept the South in the aftermath of dramatic reunions between families from both sides, the fruit of a historic summit in June between the leaders of the two nations.

But little is being discussed, publicly at least, of the sharp ideological and economic differences that were revealed when the 200 Koreans--100 each from the North and South--met recently with their families after half a century.

No one here wants to jeopardize the fledgling rapprochement and future reunions. Millions of South Koreans are hoping for their chance to reunite with their loved ones living in North Korea, stoked by the heart-rending scenes they saw on television.

To the alarm of conservatives in the South, the South Korean government scaled back its annual war games, which began last week. It has reduced field exercises and, according to a South Korean military source, decided not to simulate an invasion of North Korea in computerized exercises.

There has been no immediate demand that North Korea return hundreds of South Korean prisoners of war said to remain in the North, in exchange for the 63 former North Korean spies whom the South will return to North Korea on Saturday.

And groups calling for the return of an estimated 450 South Koreans allegedly abducted by the North, many of them fishermen, have gotten far more attention in the foreign media than in the domestic press.

“The government said this whole problem is like a hot potato and we should take it very slowly,” said Choi Woo Young, whose father’s fishing boat with a dozen people was allegedly seized by the North in 1987. “And the public is still wanting me to keep silent because they don’t want to jeopardize the reunification either.”

Instead, joint projects with the North are speeding ahead. Drafts are being made for a North-South highway to run through the demilitarized zone that divides the peninsula. Plans are in motion to reconnect the North-South railroad that last ran before war ravaged the peninsula in 1950. South Korean conglomerate Hyundai is proceeding with a large-scale industrial complex in the North. And a North Korean orchestra played for the first time in 50 years with a South Korean symphony.

A North Korean orchestra member began to cry when she saw a poster of her country’s leader that was getting drenched in the rain; she threatened not to perform unless something was done to keep it from getting wet.

She was not appeased when officials pointed out that South Korea’s president--Kim Dae Jung, shown on the poster with Kim Jong Il at their June summit--was also getting wet. She wasn’t comforted until the poster was moved to a dry spot.

South Korean newspapers have shied away from even mentioning the Communist ideological platitudes parroted by most of the North Koreans who were reunited with their families, although they were widely reported by foreign media.

The executives of most of South Korea’s largest newspapers had met with Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, just before the reunions and agreed to end their sniping about the North.

“We think we have to help the relationship between South and North Korea,” Kim Mi Ri said, echoing the comments of other reporters at major dailies that covered the reunions.

The opposition Grand National Party, which has a parliamentary majority, says it is troubled by “unification syndrome,” as party spokesman Lee Jae Yel calls it, which allows North Korea to call the shots.

“Kim Jong Il is the star of the show, not Kim Dae Jung,” Lee said.

It is the South’s general fear that the reunions will go the way of exchanges in 1985, when 50 people each from the North and South participated in one-day reunions. North Korea became upset that South Korea continued its annual military exercises, and no other exchanges followed. At the time, there was much reported about ideological differences between the two nations.

Lee Ki Tak, an international relations professor at Yonsei University who escaped North Korea with his family as a teenager in 1950, accuses the South Korean government of ignoring the reality of the North’s nuclear weaponry, missile development and heavy deployment near the demilitarized zone.

“Nobody knows what is right or wrong anymore,” Lee said. He accuses the media of being “very much muffled” and “duped.”

The level of self-censorship in South Korea is far greater than in the United States, said Scott Snyder, Korea representative of the Asia Foundation. “Old habits die hard. It was little more than a decade ago that the government was telling them which pictures to run. . . . Everybody knows who is in charge, and people are aware how instruments of state power are available for use in certain contexts,” he said, citing tax evasion charges against one newspaper.

Readily apparent but largely unreported has been the discomfort that many South Korean families felt with the ideological platitudes voiced by their North Korean family members, which were displayed largely in unedited broadcasts of individual meetings between reunited families.

Consider this exchange: South Korean Lee Mong Sup, 75, was reunited with his wife and daughter in North Korea.

The daughter, Lee Do Soon, now 55, was lecturing him in front of the camera: “You went away, we know you had to live a hard life in the South, but we were happy, our lives were happy. We were concerned about your family in the South, but don’t worry, we didn’t have such a hard time. . . .”

The father looked uncomfortable, but the daughter proceeded with her diatribe. “I don’t care what bad things you did in the South or what mistakes you made in the South. The problem is, the North and South have to work for national unification and building a strong nation.”

She kept on in this vein until her father quietly asked her to stop.

Most of the North Koreans tended to pay more homage to North Korean leaders--the late Kim Il Sung and son Kim Jong Il--when minders or cameras were around. But even when they weren’t, they were urging reunification, and thanking and praising their leaders for everything.

Some South Koreans view the platitudes as not at all ideological or, for that matter, news. “The way I understand North Korea, the way they admire Kim Jong Il is not propaganda, it is a way of life,” said Moon Chung In, a professor at Yonsei University who says the reunions transcend ideology.

Lee Jae Kyung, 80, who met with the 53-year-old daughter he last saw when she was 3, said he understood why his daughter would feel compelled to thank Kim for her clothes, house and children’s education. “Even if my daughter said that, I had to understand that she was brought up and educated with the Communist ideology,” he said.

But a friend of his on the trip was alarmed at the excessive ideological pronouncements his three sons made. “‘What are you doing, trying to brainwash me?” Lee said the agitated man told his children.

“I had to counsel him that we weren’t there to fight,” Lee said.

The South Korean Red Cross and South Korean government warned visitors not to argue or do anything that could jeopardize future reunions.

Kim Sang Hyun, who visited his elder sister, says he became a lot more conscious of the differences between the two sides and the difficulties of any reunification. “Here, if you work hard, you can be a rich man,” he said. “That’s the kind of freedom we have here compared with the North. We need to reunify, but there’s ideological difference. I see it now, and it could be really tough.”

Is he optimistic about being able to mail his sister letters and telephone her? He has never been able to do that, but it is something that Kim Dae Jung has proposed.

“It all depends on Kim Jong Il,” Kim Sang Hyun said. “It has nothing to do with Kim Dae Jung.”