The government has officially declared its intention to help North Korea in the wake of flood damage there, following the lead of private groups that have already begun making preparations. It intends to match the money being given by aid groups and, through the South Korean Red Cross, send recovery equipment and a large amount of rice. We hope to see these donations help people living in the North in a big way. Love among fellow Koreans is most beautiful when it helps those in need.
What is significant about this is that it is happening with the full support of all the South’s political parties. The Uri and Grand National parties have agreed to send various necessities, pharmaceutical products, and construction equipment and set aside additional budget funds as necessary. The government should respond, deciding what kind of aid to give in a way that is of substantial and adequate assistance to regular North Koreans.
It is important that the government uses this sending of aid as an opportunity to create an atmosphere that helps put inter-Korean relations back on track. It says that the aid is an entirely separate issue from the rice and fertilizer it decided to withhold in response to Pyongyang’s recent missile tests, but both forms of assistance are the same in character, in the sense that they qualify as humanitarian aid. The government needs to consider whether it is appropriate to link humanitarian aid with the missile issue and then change its rigid attitude. Using the suffering of North Koreans as leverage may be effective over the short term, but the negative side affects will only grow with time.
It is also essential that the North have a profoundly changed attitude. Its non-governmental organizations have asked for recovery aid, but authorities in Pyongyang have remained silent. There are limits to how well groups on each side can communicate with each other, so that attitude makes things more difficult. Even the North surely is not so obsessed with needing a perfect excuse to talk that it loses an opportunity to make relations normal again. The right approach would be for the North Korean government to ask for rice officially, then resume separated-family reunion programs.
The rains that caused so much damage this summer were a reminder of how the Korean people are one community living on the Korean peninsula, and that is one more reason why inter-Korean relations must be advanced no matter what the situation. There needs to be progress in relations between North and South, if we are to be able to borrow from that momentum in the course of resolving the missile issue and having the six party talks resume.
[Editorial] Donations to North part of normalizing relations |
