Democratic Party Chairman Chung Se-kyun met with Democratic Labor Party leader Kang Ki-kap at the National Assembly on Tuesday and said the reasonable thing for the government to do would be to shift its policy toward North Korea and adhere to the principles of the June 15 and October 4 declarations. When North Korea informed South Korea it was going to halt tours to Kaesong and other inter-Korean projects on Dec. 1, a spokesperson for the DP on Monday said the government and ruling party should completely overhaul their North Korea policy so the Kaesong Industrial Complex does not collapse. This is like telling the South Korean government to kneel in front of North Korea.

The DP’s calls assume that the present government is wholly to blame for the present situation. But even the DP cannot deny that immediately after the launch of the Lee administration, North Korea rejected dialogue with the South and has demanded the unconditional implementation of the two inter-Korean agreements. In early April, even before the Lee administration could settle in, Pyongyang called the South Korean president a “traitor.” In July, North Korean soldiers killed a South Korean tourist in Mt. Kumgang but blocked an investigation, let alone apologize. And since October, North Korea has been threatening the Kaesong complex, taking issue with the dissemination of propaganda leaflets by South Korean civic groups.

On Oct. 4 last year, the summit between president Roh Moo-hyun and North Korean leader Kim Jong-il was preceded by warnings that the South could end up making too many concessions to Pyongyang since the Roh administration was in its final days. When the October 4 declaration announced the results of the summit, serious questions were raised whether the objectives in the agreement could ever be realized because of the tremendous costs. The Roh administration and the ruling party at the time, now the DP, did not explain to the public why such high costs needed to be shouldered by the South. Yet even though the summit produced such results, President Lee told lawmakers in July that he would closely negotiate with North Korea how to implement the June 15 and October 4 declarations and other inter-Korean agreements. It was North Korea that rejected the offer.

Looking at the DP spokesman describing the end of tours to Kaesong as equivalent to the collapse of a building that took 10 years to erect, the opposition party seems to believe that the North Korea policies of the Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun administrations over the past 10 years were successes. If so, the DP should say so and tell the public in what way.

The reality is that the Sunshine Policy led to just two summits after pouring in W14 trillion (US$1=W1,502) into the North, including both government and private sector spending, with Seoul unable to prevent North Korea from developing and testing nuclear weapons. Roh instead rationalized North Korea’s nuclear weapons program saying it was for “self-defense.”

Even the DP probably does not have the nerve to tell the public that such policies were a success. If so, the main opposition party must have the courage to tell North Korea what it needs to be told and make realistic demands on the Lee administration.