Word: seoul
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Park Youn Hee, a 27-year-old in Seoul who is about to enter graduate school, remembers well the rush of hope that overcame her nine years ago during the first summit between North and South Korea. As she watched then South Korean President Kim Dae Jung and North Korea's paramount leader Kim Jong Il shake hands in Pyongyang on television, Park believed the Cold War conflict on the Korean peninsula might finally come to an end. "We all thought that something was going to change right away," she recalls...
...Many South Koreans feel the same way. In recent years, Seoul has tried just about everything - from hard-line demands to generous food and fertilizer aid - to convince the isolated regime to end its controversial nuclear-weapons program and improve ties with its southern neighbor. But relations between the two Koreas have remained more or less unchanged. The stalemate on the peninsula that began after the Korean War of the early 1950s continues, with Pyongyang still regularly hurling threats and insults at the South. The North's stubbornness has left South Koreans feeling helpless and uncertain about what an effective...
...That kind of frustration has only intensified in recent days as tensions on the peninsula have escalated. In late May, Pyongyang earned global condemnation by undertaking a second nuclear test, and now Kim Jong Il may be preparing another test of a long-range missile. Seoul's response to Pyongyang's actions has been unusually tough. After the nuclear test, South Korean President Lee Myung Bak agreed to join a U.S.-led effort to crack down on the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. North Korea called Lee's decision tantamount to a declaration of war. "Many [South Koreans...
...Some South Koreans place at least part of the blame for the deteriorating North-South relationship on their own conservative President. Lee's two predecessors pursued an agenda of engagement with Pyongyang called the "sunshine policy," in which Seoul gave North Korea aid and investment - including the development of an industrial park just north of the border - in the hopes of defusing tensions. The "sunshine policy" produced two North-South summits - in 2000 and 2007 - but Pyongyang offered Seoul no meaningful concessions in return for its help. Upon taking office last year, Lee changed course and linked further economic cooperation...
...might produce. "For the past 10 years, we've been giving them things and now that they're not getting it, they're acting up," says Youn Bong Sug, 57. "If we give, they should know how to be grateful. The nature of those people is rotten." Some in Seoul have become annoyed that Pyongyang continued to spend money on its weapons programs even as South Korea donated large amounts of fertilizer and food to its much poorer Northern brethren. "What we're unhappy with is the fact that even if we send them aid, they...