Seoul Searching: Thinking Outside the Box

• Share

Things were a lot simpler in the old days, before relations with the North started to thaw. North Korea was the Evil Empire, ready at any minute to rain missiles down on Seoul and send its troops swarming across the border.

Following heavy-handed government directives, South Korea's media painted a distorted, one-dimensional picture of the North. But South Koreans knew who the bad guys were. Then, at the North-South summit last June, North Korea's Bad Boy Leader, Kim Jong Il, suddenly morphed into a cuddly teddy bear with a boyish grin and nothing was simple any more.

Now South Korea is abuzz with speculation over when the North Korean leader will visit Seoul -- the betting is it will happen as early as this spring. That of course would be another giant step toward easing the decades-old tensions on the Korean peninsula. But as they await the arrival of the Great Leader and his entourage, many Koreans are confused; are the Reds still the bad guys or what?

For the relatives of people killed in 1987 when a North Korean agent blew up a South Korean passenger jet, things are still simple. They recently filed a lawsuit against the North Korean leader, hoping to land him in legal trouble a la Augusto Pinochet when he touches down in Seoul. They aren't the only ones who still deeply distrust the North. But many Koreans prefer to see Pyongyang through rose-tinted glasses, willing themselves to believe their longtime enemy has really changed its spots. The government encourages this attitude, preferring to downplay a hard-to-digest past in the interest of overcoming decades of bitterness. There is something to be said for that -- Koreans on both sides of the border have to think outside the box for detente to move forward. But Seoul seems more interested in marketing its so-called "Sunshine policy" of reconciliation with the North rather than stimulating real debate over it.

Just as disturbing is the South Korean media's reluctance to ask tough questions of its own. Most South Korean news organizations have decided to pull their punches when reporting on the North. This isn't just about avoiding terms like "Evil Empire" -- with some exceptions, stories on the North avoid critical comments and tough questions about human rights and other topics that might make Pyongyang uncomfortable. Sure, this is the kind of issue of immense national importance that forces responsible journalists to weigh the impact of what they write very carefully. The closest analogy is journalists covering their country at war -- in this case it is reunification of a cruelly divided nation that is at stake. But trying to pretend North Korea is somehow a normal country rather than an oppressive, dictatorial regime doesn't help the South Korean public make the informed judgements it needs to be making at this crucial time.

An acquaintance told me recently you can get more information about North Korea in Tokyo or New York than you can in Seoul. That is disturbingly like the old days, when things were simpler.