Park Geun-hye’s administration has placed some priority on economic reform in recent weeks, and has shifted focus back to the unification drive with North Korea, an initiative overshadowed by this past April’s ferry tragedy plus some escalation of provocations between the two divided sections of the Korean Peninsular.
President Park on Thursday ordered members of a newly-established 50-member special committee to draw up measures for building up infrastructure in North Korea and improving the lives of the North Korean people as a first step, reports Ji Myung-kil, of Arirang News.
The building up of North Korea’s infrastructure by the South and thus helping to improve the livelihoods of the people is a way to resolve the humanitarian issues, but it’s also basic to the preparations for post-reunification.
The committee will conduct joint government and civilian research for unification and add to the already aroused greater public interest in the issue.
President Park has said that a reunification of the two Koreas would be an economic bonanza for the peninsula and neighbouring countries. She said this during a speech in Dresden, Germany, in March this year, calling for bolstering cross-border exchanges as a first step toward building trust between the rival Koreas.
Surely it was no co-incidence that the German experience of the bringing down of the Berlin Wall and the successful amalgamation of East and West Germany was playing on her mind on seeing the excellence of Germany’s European way of life, the state of its infrastructure and the way the divided nation has fared since that momentous event – Germany being the top earning nation in Europe today with a contentedly settled populace.
The two Koreas have been divided for more than six decades following the 1950-53 Korean War, which ended in a cease-fire, not a peace treaty. This latter barrier needs to be the first to be tackled just to get the legal side straightened out.
