South Korea president-elect faces stern test over North
South Korean president-elect Park Geun-Hye will struggle to fulfill an election vow of engagement with North Korea given the global fury over Pyongyang’s recent rocket launch, analysts said yesterday.
Park, the daughter of former military ruler Park Chung-Hee, won a slim but historic election victory Wednesday over her liberal rival Moon Jae-In to become the country’s first woman president. Domestically, her main challenge will be addressing the issues that dominated the campaign: reviving a slowing economy, creating more jobs and funding a growing welfare burden.
But the international focus will be on her stance toward North Korea at a time when the UN Security Council is struggling to find a consensus on punishing Pyongyang over its rocket launch last week.
The launch, labeled a peaceful satellite mission by the North, was condemned by most of the international community as a disguised missile test that violated UN resolutions triggered by the North’s nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009.
During her campaign, Park had distanced herself from outgoing President Lee Myung-Bak’s hard-line policy toward Pyongyang and spoken of the need for greater engagement with the North.
But in her first post-victory policy statement yesterday, Park made it clear she still viewed Pyongyang as a serious threat and would put the South’s national security before any trust-building program.
“The launch of North Korea’s long-range missile symbolically showed how grave the security situation facing us is,” Park said.
“I will keep the promise I made to you to open a new era on the Korean peninsula, based on strong security and trust-based diplomacy,” she added. Analysts say any program of engagement was always going to be difficult given the resistance of hawks in her ruling National Frontier Party and now the fallout from the rocket launch.
“Given her basic stance toward Pyongyang and the rocket launch, she is unlikely to be the first mover in improving relations with the North,” said Hong Hyun-Ik of the Sejong Institute think-tank.
“But she won’t object if the second Obama administration moves to engage the North in dialogue after the dust over the rocket launch has settled,” Hong said. Park was due to meet separately with the US and Chinese ambassadors in Seoul later yesterday.
China and the United States are deeply divided over the best way to tackle North Korea’s flouting of Security Council resolutions, with Beijing resisting US-led efforts to order new sanctions.
Marcus Nolan, deputy director at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said Washington would be relieved by Park’s victory over Moon, who had promised to go much further in an effort to improve ties with Pyongyang. “The US will feel it’s dodged a bullet,” Nolan said. “Moon would have pursued a policy of engagement with North Korea that would have been much more at variance with what the US would like to have seen.
“His election would have bucked up the Chinese in the Security Council in the current negotiations over the missile launch,” he said.
North Korea had made its electoral preference very clear early on, devoting considerable energy to attacking Park, her party and her father’s divisive legacy. Even before Park won her party’s presidential nomination in August the state-run Korean Central News Agency had slammed her candidacy, warning that “a dictator’s bloodline cannot change away from its viciousness.”
