South Korea's point man on North Korea said Tuesday his country will continue to expand and increase its economic cooperation with communist North Korea despite recent criticism from the international community.
Unification Minister Lee Jong-seok said the security conditions on the Korean Peninsula are much better now than only a few years ago.
Lee said the country has two major issues to resolve to guarantee peace and security on the peninsula. These are peacefully settling the ongoing dispute over North Korea's nuclear weapons program and easing military tension between the divided Koreas.
"What we have decided is clear. We must successfully resolve the North Korean nuclear dispute, but at the same time, easing the military tension between the North and South is a task that we cannot put off by for even a minute," the unification minister told a meeting of the presidential National Unification Advisory Council at a Seoul hotel.
The annual conference of the council's overseas chapters, attended by some 540 delegates from the United States, Canada and 12 Latin American countries, including Mexico and Brazil, opened earlier in the day for a three-day run.
Lee's remarks follow international criticism, mainly originating from the United States, that the Seoul government has done little to improve the dismal human rights conditions in the North.
The United Nations' Human Rights Commission has adopted three separate resolutions since 2003 calling on Pyongyang to stop its human rights abuses, while the world body's General Assembly passed its first North Korean human rights resolution late last year in a 84-22 vote, with 62 countries, including South Korea, abstaining.
Despite its repeated abstentions at U.N. votes on the human rights resolutions, the unification minister said the country has done more than others to help North Koreans by providing economic assistance and cooperation with the reclusive North.
Pyongyang continues to depend heavily on international handouts, largely from the South, to feed its 23 million population since a nationwide famine struck in the mid-1990s, causing as many as 2 million deaths from starvation.
"At least since 2000 when we began providing assistance to the North, no one there has been starving to death," Lee said. He also claimed South Korea was the only country in the world until very recently that accepted and provided for North Korean defectors.
"(Others) are starting to accept North Korean defectors, but a few are only trying to save face by accepting a small number of defectors," Lee said.
More than 8,200 North Koreans have defected to the South since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War, according to the minister.
The remarks follow a claim by Washington's special envoy for North Korean human rights, Jay Lefkowitz, last week on Seoul's joint project with the North to develop an industrial complex in the North's border town of Kaesong. Lefkowitz said Seoul is trying to take advantage of the North's cheap work force, which he described as slave labor based on his assertion that all the workers in the communist state are enslaved.
Lee dismissed the claim as missing the real point of the inter-Korean project, and said his country plans to continue to pursue the joint project.
"The Kaesong complex is located north of the military demarcation line. About 6,500 North Korean workers are currently working at the complex with the number expected to increase to 60,000 or 70,000 before the end of next year," the minister said.
"It provides actual help to North Korea's economy while also providing a chance for the North to learn the basics of a market economy," he added.
"Our main objective is to do something that benefits both of us."
(Yonhap News Agency)
[National] Seoul Vows to Continue Kaesong Project Despite U.S. Criticism |
