[Editorial] Made Fool of By a Test

Seeing what it has been doing recently, North Korea must be intending to fool the South. Pyongyang had proposed to hold an inter-Korean meeting of liaison officers to prepare for an inter-Korean ministerial-level meeting just two days before it launched missiles. It pretended to make a peaceful gesture to confuse Seoul after completing the missile launch preparations. How the South was so belittled by the North?

However, the Ministry of National Defense did not disclose the North’s proposal for four days until yesterday. After the missile was launched, the ministry explained that it turned down the proposal, expressing its regret. Why did it not make public the proposal right away? If the ministry had believed that North Korea might offer a breakthrough to the missile crisis, that would be very lamentable. The ministry should know better than that, after having been fooled so many times by the North.

The South had it coming. With a president who says, “It makes sense that Pyongyang has nuclear weapons as a deterrent,” the North cannot be afraid of the South and the South Korean people cannot be on guard against the North. Even a councilor at North Korean Mission to the UN said, “Seoul should be proud of the missile launch as the same people as us,” threatening, “It would be no good for the South if it became a sea of flame due to a preemptive attack by the U.S.”

Even under these circumstances, the government says that it would participate in the inter-Korean ministerial-level talks scheduled for July 11. It said that it would do so at least to get the North’s apology for the missile launching and promise to come back to the six-party talks. But it seems to be a hopeless expectation. It is nonsense to expect officials at the North Korean Cabinet to express their position about what the military did. They would just use the meeting as a forum for propaganda.

What was mainly discussed in the 18 rounds of ministerial-level talks since July 2000 indicates the reason why the North wants to have the talks even after its series of missile launches. Pyongyang won all kinds of goods and help to build infrastructure from the previous talks. Some people even said sarcastically that the North considers the inter-ministerial talks as milking a South Korean cow.

The incumbent government has failed to hold a single inter-Korean defense minister talk to discuss political and military issues, but was taken aback by the missile launch. If the government wants to hold a ministerial-level talk in which it just gives things away, what would taxpayers feel? And what would the U.S. and Japan think? They would think that the South Korean government put national cooperation before the alliance with the U.S. and cooperation with Japan, which means the cooperation among the three countries against the missile crisis would not be easy. Under these circumstances, one might wonder where the incumbent administration is headed.