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Seoul struggling to maintain peace on the peninsula

News that North Korea may have joined an international nuclear black market, selling uranium hexafluoride to Libya, was only Page 2 news on Monday for South Korea's five most influential newspapers.

Instead, journalistic excitement here is vibrating around a meeting tomorrow between a North Korean general and a South Korean general, the first such meeting since the Korean War, half a century ago.

Once again, Seoul and Washington are separated by a deep panic gap. While the US struggles to ascertain whether North Korea is crossing an invisible line concerning its nuclear activities, South Korea struggles to keep the peace on the peninsula.

With half of South Korea's 47 million people living within 110km of the Demilitarized Zone and 70 percent of South Korea's economy dependent in some way on foreign trade, the government policy toward North Korea is officially called "Peace and Prosperity."

"Our economic and security circumstances offer us no other choice but to pursue a dual policy of peace-keeping and peace building," Jeong Se-hyun, South Korea's unification minister, said at a recent conference for foreign investors sponsored here by The Asia Society.

This means subsidizing trade and investment in the North, still South Korea's enemy according to national security laws.

Critics of North Korea have an increasingly hard time finding a live microphone in South Korea. Death threats are forcing Free NK, a new Internet radio station run by defectors, to move to a secret studio.

"There is practically no media criticizing North Korea in South Korea these days," Kim Sung-min, 42, the station director and a former army propaganda officer in North Korea, said on Monday. "South Koreans are being manipulated by North Korea's `One People' slogan, mobilizing sentiments to help people of the same race."

North Korea's news agency demanded last week that South Korea stop allowing tours of tunnels that North Korea built, largely in the 1970s, under the Demilitarized Zone. North Korea called the tours "an unpardonable grave political provocation."

But with millions of dollars in tourism revenue at stake, South Korea has ignored the demand.

With few voices critical of North Korea heard on television, radio or in schools in recent years, young South Koreans increasingly tell pollsters that they do not see North Korea and its nuclear weapons program as threats.

In a sign of the changes, Seoul District Court acquitted three conscientious objectors on Friday of criminal charges of failing to perform military service. Facing North Korea's 1.1 million-man military, South Korea relies on a universal male draft to maintain its 600,000-man military.
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