Good Riddance, Ministry of Silly Talks
After weeks of conflicting reports, Lee Myung Bak’s transition team had made it official: the UniFiction Ministry goes to the ash-heap, along with the Ministries of Truth Information and Communication, Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, Science and Technology, and the Anti-Sex League Gender Equality and Family. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade will become a much larger and more powerful Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Unification. As a whole, the government will shrink by more than 5%, about 7,000 employees.
I would add to what GI Korea and Robert Koehler have said, but they’ve already said almost all of it well enough. Mourning UniFiction’s demise is reporter Choe Sang-Hun, who tries to give Roh and D.J. their legacy:
The two leaders, promoting a so-called sunshine policy, brought about profoundly closer relations with the North, but they have been faulted for pouring aid across the border without managing to end North Korean nuclear weapons programs and human rights abuses. [N.Y. Times]
Define “profoundly closer,” please. The DMZ is as impermeable as ever, although its countours have shifted to wall off two little subsidized Potempkin enclaves of reform and openness that couldn’t last for an instant in the real North Korea. North Korea has more artillery and more fearsome weapons aimed at South Korea today, not less. Commercial relations remain infinitessimal and dwarfed by aid. Families are still divided and can’t talk to each other. Talks aimed at reducing tensions still end in brawls. Prisoners of war and abductees are still hostages after decades. North Korea’s people are still terrorized, stunted, and starving. Can anyone really list one single significant way in which North Korea has become less ghastly to its people, less threatening to its neighbors, less open to the world, or less a quicksand for the hapless investor than North Korea in the last decade?
Like Choe, Robert thinks that the leftist opposition will fight this. Lee gave them a nasty beating in the December presidential election, and as things stand now, Lee’s Grand National Party is expected to give them another nasty beating in next April’s elections. Lee has a choice to make: either he can try to bulldoze his reforms through now, or later, after the election. The latter is the safer choice, though it won’t prevent this from becoming an election issue. But wouldn’t it be more fun for the rest of us if Lee opts for the former? If he plays this right, it’s a no-lose issue for him: either he gets his way, or he loses, capitalizes on the loss, and runs against the obstructionists in the do-nothing National Assembly. Plus, we’d get to see Lee Myung Bak actually defend his views in opposition to appeasing Kim Jong Il.