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(News Focus) Inter-Korean ties unlikely to improve despite worker's release
By Byun Duk-kun
SEOUL, Aug. 13 (Yonhap) -- South Korea will not likely resume official dialogue with North Korea in the near future, despite the release of a detained South Korean worker Thursday, as it has long insisted the communist nation must first drop its hostility toward the South, as well as its nuclear ambitions, officials and experts here said.
They noted the release of the worker -- a technician named Yu Seong-jin, who was detained 137 days ago at a joint industrial park in the North's border town of Kaesong -- certainly removed a large stumbling block between the two Koreas, but added there are many obstacles remaining.
"Yu's release will have a positive effect on South-North relations," said Kim Yong-hyun, a professor of North Korea studies at Seoul's Dongguk University.
"But this also means the North has now tossed the ball into the South's court, which means what kind of message President Lee Myung-bak offers to North Korea in his Aug. 15 Liberation Day speech is now so much more important," he added.
Yu was accused of slandering the North's political system and trying to incite the defection of a female North Korean worker at Kaesong, but he has never been formally charged.
Yang Moo-jin, a professor from the University of North Korea Studies in Seoul, said Yu's release at least gave the Seoul government a way to resume dialogue with Pyongyang without losing face.
Inter-Korean relations have steadily deteriorated since Seoul's Lee Myung-bak government was inaugurated early last year, as the North strongly protested Lee's hard-line stance toward its communist regime and nuclear programs. Seoul only responded with harsher remarks.
Yang said the worker's release could give Seoul much more room to maneuver, implying Seoul's reluctance to change its stance partly had to do with the South Korean public's growing dissatisfaction with the communist state.
North Korea conducted its second nuclear test in May, prompting condemnations and suspicions here that the impoverished country may have diverted a large part of Seoul's humanitarian and economic assistance to its nuclear programs.
Four other South Koreans currently remain held in the North after their fishing boat was seized off the east coast early this month, although South Korean officials have said the fishermen will likely be released in the near future.
Still, the two sides have a number of issues they need to address before they can even try to restore inter-Korean relations to their previous state. These issues include the shooting death of a female South Korean tourist in the North's Mount Kumgang resort last year, which led to the ongoing suspension of the tourism program.
Seoul says the tourism program to Mount Kumgang will not be resumed until North Korea agrees to measures that will prevent a recurrence of such an incident, but Pyongyang refuses to do so, let alone apologize for the death of Park Wang-ja.
"The government has always dealt with North Korea based on its North Korea policy and will continue to do so in the future," an official at the presidential office, Cheong Wa Dae, told Yonhap News Agency.
The remarks were repeated again soon afterward by Cheong Wa Dae spokesman Lee Dong-kwan, who said the government "will continue to maintain its policy consistency toward North Korea."
The key point of the Lee administration's policy toward Pyongyang states Seoul will make massive donations and assistance efforts that will help develop North Korea into a country whose per capita income will exceed US$3,000 in less than a decade, but only if North Korea completely abandons all its nuclear ambitions.
North Korea, one of the few remaining totalitarian regimes in the world, has repeatedly dismissed the offer as a great insult and vowed to take hostile action against the Lee administration.
bdk@yna.co.kr
(END)
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