North Korea’s decision to start the new year with its fourth nuclear test guaranteed a downturn in inter-Korean ties. Its successful satellite launch in early February, which also served as a partial ballistic missile test, was the last straw for South Korea, which appeared to finally run out of patience. On Feb. 10 President Park announced the suspension – but in all probability, permanent closure – of the Kaesong Industrial Complex (KIC): the last surviving North-South joint venture from the “Sunshine” Era of engagement. But, parliamentary elections in April saw a rebuff for Park’s conservative ruling Saenuri Party. This increases the center-left’s chances of regaining the Blue House in late 2017 and a return of some form of outreach to Pyongyang.  Right now it is sunset for “Sunshine” on the Peninsula, but the sun may yet rise again. Never say never in Korea.

The usual China-US discord over tactics and wording meant it took almost two months for the UN Security Council (UNSC) to agree a new resolution and fresh sanctions. Finally adopted (unanimously, as always) on March 2, UNSCR 2270 imposed measures much more severe than any previously applied to North Korea. Meanwhile on the specifically inter-Korean front, which is our focus here, the big event was the Feb. 10 suspension – but in all probability, permanent closure – of the Kaesong Industrial Complex (KIC): the last surviving North-South joint venture from the “Sunshine” Era of engagement (1998-2007). Kaesong has shut before, in April 2013 when Pyongyang abruptly pulled out its 55,000 workers. On that occasion South Korea’s then newly elected President, Park Geun-hye, worked patiently and successfully to mend fences, and the zone reopened five months later in September. (All this was of course fully chronicled and analyzed in Comparative Connections at the time.)

This time it is Park who has pulled the plug on Kaesong, as discussed in detail below. With all trade and aid now cancelled, as of May 2016 the two Koreas have no contact of any kind, but have reverted to mutual hostility comparable to the height of the Cold War. Infuriating as the North’s nuclear recidivism is, it is hard to see this “back to the future” trajectory as any kind of progress. With Pyongyang’s insults of Park plumbing new depths of juvenile smut, the standoff looks set to last for the remainder of her term of office, which ends Feb. 25, 2018; her successor – a second term is not permitted – will be elected on Dec. 19, 2017.

So a lengthy freeze looms – but despite current appearances, not necessarily a permanent one. Parliamentary elections on April 13 saw an unexpected rebuff for Park’s conservative ruling Saenuri Party, which lost its majority in the National Assembly, and a striking win for South Korea’s liberal opposition, even though it is currently split into two parties. This increases the center-left’s chances of regaining the Blue House in late 2017, after a decade in opposition. If that happens, then from 2018 some form of outreach to Pyongyang is likely to resume, albeit probably more cautious than the full-blown engagement pursued during the “Sunshine” decade (1998-2007) by Kim Dae-jung and his successor Roh Moo-hyun. Right now it is sunset for “Sunshine” on the Peninsula, but the sun may yet rise again. Never say never in Korea.

KIC, RIP

Clutching at straws, the best one can say of the current inter-Korea situation is that it has at last brought clarity to Park Geun-hye’s Nordpolitik – which is now dead. As regular readers of this journal know, for the past three years Park had been hard to read. Her original slogan of Trustpolitik, and her Dresden Declaration in 2014, suggested a will to engage Pyongyang, whose fierce response from the very start of her presidency in early 2013 (nuclear and missile tests, and sabotaging Kaesong) showed how tough a task that would be, and can hardly have encouraged her. On the other hand, her new-found enthusiasm for unification – conceived as a happy contingency, rather than a partnership effort with the North – unnerved Pyongyang. It was hard to see how these disparate thrusts added up to a coherent policy or strategy.

Last year’s events exemplified and amplified the uncertainty. In August, the Peninsula lurched from high tension to a seemingly positive accord – negotiated by very senior emissaries, in talks live-fed to both Park and Kim Jong-un – and family reunions resumed. Yet when the two sides met again in December they could agree on nothing, not even a date to meet again. But by then, as we now know, Kim Jong Un had already signed off on January’s nuclear test.

Did Kim not realize this would be a deal-breaker with Seoul? – just as his April 2012 satellite launch (regarded by the US, and indeed the UN, as a quasi-ballistic missile test) aborted that year’s Leap Day Accord with Washington. Maybe not. Only this time, the deal destroyed was nothing tentative or hypothetical, but a solid and successful already existing project with a decade of history: the last North-South joint venture still surviving from the “Sunshine” Era.

Hitherto the Kaesong zone had led a charmed life, tacitly ring-fenced by both sides from wider inter-Korean disputes; although those did stop it growing to the much larger scale originally envisaged. (By 2012 an expanded zone was slated to employ as many as 700,000 North Koreans; one can only wonder whether the DPRK labor market, or indeed polity, could ever have handled that many). Thus in May 2010, when the ROK’s then president Lee Myung-bak banned all trade with and investment in the North in reprisal for the sinking of the ROKN corvette Cheonan that March, he exempted Kaesong. While anomalous logically – so large an exception made nonsense of the rule – this made political sense, as a tacit attempt to retain at least one last exemplar of win-win inter-Korean cooperation. Similarly, the newly elected Park Geun-hye’s successful efforts in 2013 to revive the KIC after Kim Jong Un had closed it suggests that she too, at that point, shared this vision. Indeed, Seoul insisted on inserting a new clause that the zone henceforth was “not to be affected by inter-Korean situations under any circumstances.” (“Second Chance for Trustpolitik?” was our headline at the time.)

Notably, in 2013 Park did not treat North Korea’s then recent third nuclear test as any reason to stop mending fences, much less leave the Kaesong zone shut. Why then, three years later, did she do the opposite and make a U-turn, breaking a deal she herself had crafted and taking the drastic step of closing the KIC altogether? Two reasons are plausible, while a further one proffered is implausible. Seoul initially cited fears for the safety of its citizens when it reacted to January’s nuclear test by slightly restricting which of them could enter the zone. But that is hardly convincing. Were such fears serious, the South should and would have pulled everyone out – as it eventually did a month later, after North Korea’s satellite launch in February.

Even then, personal safety was not the issue. The real reason seems to be that Park Geun-hye finally lost patience with “the runaway Kim Jong Un regime,” as she termed it in a Feb. 16 speech that declared “enough [is] enough.” Supposedly, the Unification Ministry (MOU) wanted less drastic action than total closure of the KIC, but was overruled by the Blue House. If that is true, then a reinforcing factor and second reason may well have been foreign pressure. Some Seoul media claimed that both the US and China pointed out the inconsistency of the ROK keeping the KIC open, while lobbying other states to cut cash flows to the DPRK.

The cash issue loomed large in explanations proffered. Both Park and Unification Minister Hong Yong-pyo claimed that Seoul’s payments – 616 billion won ($500 million) in total since the zone opened in 2004, with 132 billion won ($107m) in 2015 alone – were going to fund nuclear and missile development. It is unclear whether this reflects any hard data or intelligence on financial flows and budgetary allocations in Pyongyang, or is just a plausible assessment of fungibility and probable virement with any cash dollar payments made to the DPRK. Most of these monies were supposedly for wages, but the KIC’s 55,000 workers saw only a fraction of the sum paid to their government; how much exactly is disputed.

Few observers, probably including Kim Jong Un, had expected Park to go so far as closing Kaesong. Events then moved fast. Rather than playing hostage games, the North added its own expulsion order to the South’s recall. The victims of both governments were the 124 ROK SMEs who had invested in good faith in the zone, enduring many vicissitudes over the past decade. Their owners and employees had just a few hours to stuff their cars and trucks with all the goods they could carry, and then some, for the last journey home; leaving behind all their equipment and most of their inventory. The 2013 closure by the North had been a body-blow from which these firms were just starting to recover. Motivated by patriotism as well as profit, they never expected their own government to sabotage their livelihoods. Estimates of their total losses this time run as high as 2 trillion won. Compensation for the 2013 shutdown was seen as inadequate, and a similar row is shaping up this time. On May 9, the companies filed suit with the ROK Constitutional Court, claiming that the KIC’s closure was illegal and violated their property rights. A favorable ruling might increase monetary compensation, but the damage is done: at least one businessman involved has attempted suicide.

On a wider canvas the Kaesong Zone is dead, and hope with it. Some analysts, including Ruediger Frank and the present writer, mourned the closure as a short-sighted and retrograde step. Critics no doubt view this as sentimental, and in any case there is no going back now. Inevitably, Kaesong’s demise also precipitated the unraveling of what little still remained of wider inter-Korean cooperation. The North declared the KIC a military zone – as it had been before this small part of the front line briefly became a front door – and cut all hotlines. The South for its part ended most humanitarian aid and all civilian cooperation, both in any case very limited. All that now survives is some funding of UN health programs in the DPRK.

The ROK appeared unconcerned by collateral damage, some of it international. As previously noted in these pages, a puzzling exception to Park Geun-hye’s overall refusal to lift sanctions on North Korea had been her enthusiasm to import Russian coal via the DPRK port of Rajin. Three ROK companies were encouraged to buy into a Russian-built cross-border rail link and a project to upgrade Rajin port. Trial coal shipments were sent three times during 2014-15, and the companies made two inspection visits – but seem not to have actually invested yet. Just as well, since even though Russian pressure secured this project’s exemption from the latest UN sanctions, Seoul suspended it as part of its further unilateral anti-DPRK sanctions (over and above the UNSC package) announced on March 9. Moscow was not pleased. For that matter, suppose Park Geun-hye’s quixotic quest in 2013-14 to attract foreign investment to Kaesong – the idea was to stop Pyongyang playing political games with the complex in future – had succeeded? (At least two German firms took a look.) In that case, could or would Seoul have killed off the KIC so summarily? But such counterfactuals are water under the bridge now.

Dirty bombs

It goes without saying that cross-border tensions rose during the past four months. In reaction to January’s nuclear test, South Korea resumed the loudspeaker propaganda broadcasts across the DMZ which had so riled the North last August. As noted in our last issue, not everyone thought this a great idea: British Foreign Secretary and former Defense Minister Philip Hammond, on a visit to Japan, urged Seoul to be bigger than Pyongyang and not rise to its bait. That was ignored, and at this writing the powerful speakers continue to blast away, causing headaches (literally) to those unlucky enough to live nearby. Naturally the North retaliated: switching on its own speakers, which are much less powerful. It also took a leaf from the book of defectors who regularly send propaganda into the North, carried on helium-filled balloons across the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Here again the DPRK’s efforts were low-grade, in several senses. At least one load failed to disperse crashing onto a parked car in the ROK city of Ilsan. The Northern leaflets were crude in message and style: calling on South Koreans to kick out Park Geun-hye, cartooned in a red bikini and trashed as “political filth.” Some consignments also contained more literal filth, including cigarette butts and even, incredibly, used toilet paper.

Filth is also the only word for the depths DPRK propaganda descended to. In the past we have sought to fully catalogue such episodes, like the sickening cartoons in 2012 of Park’s predecessor Lee Myung-bak as a rat being killed in multiple ways, for the record, and in hope of shaming Pyongyang into civilized behavior. There seems no chance of that. This time the rhetoric went off the scale. Park was endlessly insulted, most inventively in a March 3 Rodong Sinmun diatribe headlined “Ugly Female Bat-Disgrace of Worst Traitor” (sic). Just as rabid were the menaces; these included videos showing the Blue House and Park personally in the crosshairs before being blown up, not to mention a threat to nuke Manhattan and burn it to ashes.

These paroxysms grew even more frenzied during the almost two months (most of March and all of April) when the US and ROK held, as every spring, their joint military exercies Key Resolve and Foal Eagle. Each year the DPRK shrilly denounces these as a supposed rehearsal for invasion, and this time they had a point. In the wake of the nuclear test and satellite launch the allies decided a show of overwhelming force was required. Not only were these the largest US-ROK exercises ever, but they explicitly incorporated a recently-signed operational plan, OPLAN 5015, which provides that in the event of war the allies will launch precision attacks on not only the DPRK’s nuclear and other bases but also its top leadership. The charmingly topical metaphor “decapitate” was bandied about in this context. No doubt the aim was to send an unambiguous warning, but this did nothing to lower tensions on the peninsula.

The North’s lurid propaganda is of course two-faced: meant to scare off the enemy, but also to rally its own people around the Leader. South Korea does it less outlandishly, but the aim is the same. The time-honored but tiresome habit of parliamentarians leaking supposedly secret intelligence briefings was deployed in February, when a lawmaker of the ruling Saenuri Party claimed that the North was plotting terrorist attacks, including cyber warfare, poisoning, and kidnappings. President Park warned of the “risk of cyber-attacks, biological warfare, and new types of terrorist threat.” A hit-list of top ROK officials was reported, and a prominent Northern defector in Seoul had his police guard quadrupled after death threats.

With one major exception none of this happened, nor was it ever likely. Cyber-attacks are a constant, and the ROK did suffer a brief spell of another kind of electronic warfare: jamming of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) signals, which can only have come from north of the DMZ. But the rest was far-fetched. The DPRK is capable of anything, so precautions were sensible. Yet it is hard to see why Kim Jong Un would risk reverting to terror. Some saw here a cynical bid to sway April’s parliamentary elections by playing the Northern card, which in the past has often scared voters into swinging to the right. The new mood did affect what at this stage was a demoralized and divided progressive camp, many of whom expected to lose heavily in April. On March 2 the National Assembly passed nem.con. (the vote was 212-0) a long-stalled bill on human rights in North Korea, first tabled as long ago as 2005, after liberals stopped blocking it (their view had been that it would make inter-Korean dialogue harder). However, being chronically suspicious of handing yet more powers to the scandal-ridden National Intelligence Service (NIS), the main opposition Minjoo Party maintained its hostility to an even more delayed anti-terrorism bill, first filed in 2001 shortly after 9/11. Only after a world record eight-day Minjoo filibuster did Saenuri ram that through, also on March 2.

Southern voters rebuff Park

Domestic politics per se are not in this journal’s remit, but sometimes they impinge mightily on bilateral issues. This time that applies to both Koreas, highlighting how very differently each conducts politics. In April, Southern voters gave Park Geun-hye an unexpected slap. A month later, not unexpectedly yet very disappointingly, the North’s first Party Congress for 36 years praised Kim Jong Un to the skies while offering no hint of change on any front.

For its first 12 years (1999 through 2010) Comparative Connections appeared quarterly. Were that still the case, writing in early April one could easily have prophesied not just sunset for sunshine, but night without end. Yet this goes to show how easy it is to mistake a moment for a movement. On April 13, as every four years, South Korea held parliamentary elections. President Park’s ruling Saenuri Party expected, and was predicted, to win. The liberal opposition, long ineffectual, had plumbed such depths of factional disarray that in December it split into two separate parties, seemingly suicidal in a first-past-the-post voting system. Saenuri thus hoped not just to retain its majority – it had held 157 out of 300 seats in the outgoing 19^th National Assembly – but to increase it. There was talk of gaining a super-majority: 180 seats would have allowed Saenuri to railroad legislation, with 200 it could even change the Constitution, subject to a referendum.

Dream on. Saenuri blew its big chance with a last-minute eruption of factional strife. Several lawmakers viewed as critics of Park were deselected: they quit the party, ran as independents and retained their seats. On the day, against all opinion polls, disillusioned voters rebuffed the ruling camp and swung firmly leftward. Saenuri was reduced to 122 seats: one fewer than the 123 won by the main opposition party, whose name changes often but since the split has been Minjoo (meaning democratic: Saenuri translates as new frontier, but both choose to use the Korean words as their official Romanized names). The new breakaway People’s Party gained 38 seats. With the far-left Justice Party having six, progressive parties will hold a combined 167 seats in the new 20^th National Assembly, due to open on May 30.

This shocking result has far-reaching implications, both immediate and longer-tern. Unable now to get her legislative program (much was already stalled) passed without opposition support, Park Geun-hye risks becoming a lame duck throughout the final third of her single five-year presidential term. Admittedly, North Korea was hardly an election issue. As everywhere, voters were more concerned with the economy, whose performance is lackluster and where Park’s policy stance – as hitherto on the DPRK – has been both inconsistent and ineffective.

Looking further ahead, this result greatly improves liberals’ chances of regaining the Blue House from February 2018 – provided they can reunite behind a single candidate at the next presidential elections in December 2017. If that happens, South Korea’s policy toward the North will swing back toward some form or degree of engagement. How much, depends on the individual. Moon Jae-in, who ran Park a close second in 2012, still favors a return to the former “Sunshine” policy. Other Minjoo figures, as well as People’s Party leader Ahn Cheol-soo, have either lost hope of Pyongyang or doubt that this is a vote-winner. But as Yonsei University’s John Delury notes in a perceptive recent article, no future liberal ROK president will maintain the hard line Park Geun-hye has now embraced. That may not please whoever occupies the White House from 2017, but US policymakers had better brace themselves.

North’s Party Congress looks inward, not South

Strictly, the Seventh Congress of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) fell outside the period under review. Announced last October, 35 years after the Sixth Congress in 1980, this was held in early May (5-8). Yet it would be perverse to omit so important an event, which neatly bookends the first third of 2016 and was expected to provide pointers on key policy issues.

That expectation went unfulfilled. The Seventh Congress was long on loyalty to Kim’s past and especially present. Kim Jong Un, thunderously cheered by the 3,400 delegates, gained a new title as chairman of the WPK. But nothing much was said about the economy, and ditto South Korea. As ever, to avoid taking phrases out of context, we reproduce here in full the short section of Kim’s three-hour report to the Congress which addressed unification isssues:

The WPK aroused all the Koreans to the struggle for national reunification based on the idea and line on independent reunification and the proposal for founding the Democratic Federal Republic of Koryo initiated by Kim Il Sung.

In the crucible of the nationwide struggle for the great unity of the nation the Pan-national Alliance for Korea’s Reunification was formed comprising broad patriotic forces in the north and the south and abroad, reunification events took place one after another to demonstrate the wisdom of the nation and the movement for national reunification further developed into a nationwide one.

The noble patriotic will for reunification of Kim Jong Il and his bold decision resulted in two rounds of north-south summit and the adoption of the June 15 joint declaration and the October 4 declaration, its action program, guided by the idea of By Our Nation Itself, the first of their kind in the history of national division. This was an epochal event that provided a historic milestone for independent reunification and opened up a turning phase for national reunification.

Thanks to the wise guidance of the great leaders, the cause of national reunification could advance along the orbit of national independence for decades despite the complicated situation where the separatist forces at home and abroad got all the more frantic in their moves, and the driving force of national reunification could steadily grow stronger to prevail over the anti-reunification forces.

We should consistently keep a firm hold on the three charters for national reunification which comprehensively deal with the will and requirements of all the Koreans and whose vitality was proved in practice and should pave the road for reunification.

There is naught for any South Koreans’ comfort here, only a rehash of Pyongyang-centric tropes as familiar as they are unacceptable. In separately reported comments, Kim was  slightly more concrete and forthcoming: he called on both Koreas to “respect and cooperate with each other as partners for unification” while ceasing hostile acts, and proposed military talks to ease tensions. Yet even this included the statutory demand for US forces to leave Korea. The ROK rejected the talks offer as insincere, absent any movement on the nuclear issue. Not all South Koreans agreed: the moderate Korea Times ran an article headlined “It’s time to talk about dialogue with N. Korea.” That seems unlikely while Park Geun-hye is president.

MOU counts the cost

Again trespassing a little into the second quadrimester – but aptly, since this looks backward – on May 12 MOU published its annual White Paper, covering 2015. Three aspects are worthy of note. The number of Northern defectors reaching South Korea continues to fall: last year’s total of 1,276 was the lowest for 14 years. Second, even before this year’s rupture, Southern aid to the North was very low. With an optimistic spin, Yonhap said that in 2015 this “soared to a six-year high of 25.4 billion won ($21.8 million)”; but that is still minuscule compared to the “Sunshine” decade (1998-2007). Third, the MOU revealed how well Kaesong was doing before Seoul abolished it. Over 1,000 extra Northern workers brought the total to 54,988, nearly as many as before 2013’s temporary closure. Southern managers’ cross-border commutes totaled 132,101, an eight-year high. In 2015 the zone’s output was worth a record $563.3 million, pushing last year’s inter-Korean trade (of which Kaesong since mid-2010 has been the sole component) to a record $2.71 billion. The KIC’s cumulative output in its 11 years of existence was worth $3.23 billion. That is paltry compared to the scale of the China-Taiwan interactions that Kaesong hoped to emulate. But it was a start. Now it is finished. History will judge whether Park Geun-hye made the right move in closing it all down.