Korean Endgame

Someone contacted me via Facebook to ask what I make of the South Koreans having talks with North Korea. As often, the IHT provides an excellent analysis:

The urgency from the North Korean perspective today derives from an understanding that America's presidential alternation often wipes out diplomatic momentum, and indeed, where the last two changes in Washington were concerned, wiped the policy slate clean toward Pyongyang altogether, requiring long, costly efforts to get going again.

Kim Jong Il, who is widely believed to have serious health concerns, and also appears to be preoccupied with engineering his own dynastic succession, likely feels that now is the best time to strike a deal that would end the state of war, win badly needed economic assistance, establish diplomatic guarantees for his regime and help ensure its survival.

Clearly, there is still a long road ahead for the peninsula but, 54 years after the end of the Korean War, we can but pray that the nuclear regime gets the help that it so urgently needs from the outside.

Last Week Changed The World

Imagine that the BNP were to kidnap a group of Pakistani Muslims, hold them to ransom, and negotiate directly with the government of Pakistan, who only secure their release on condition that all Pakistani Muslims working in the UK leave immediately and no Muslim from Pakistan be allowed to return in future.

Unthinkably preposterous as this sounds, that is comparable to what the Taleban have achieved in Afghanistan. Despite being an insurgent group (or, at best, a non-state actor), they were able to engage directly a modern state in negotiations. As a reward for their lawlessness, they have secured the withdrawal of all Christian workers and the promise that no other Christian workers will return in future from an entire country, South Korea. Never before has the removal of Christian missionaries from a location been permitted as a negotiable condition in any previous hostage case.

As a consequence of this precedent, we can surely expect to see further kidnappings of Christian workers (whether missionaries or relief workers) with attendant demands that Christian workers leave nations that the hostage-takers do not control. Not only in Afghanistan, but in any location where there is a clash of Christian and Muslim evangelism or where both Christian agencies (or, indeed, any international aid agencies from what are perceived to be "Christian" countries) and Muslim extremists operate, Islamist terrorists and insurgents wanting to elevate their own political status will take note of South Korea's concession.

The world of humanitarian relief and development just became significantly more problematic. It is the South Korean government, not the surviving South Korean aid workers, who should be apologising for the trouble they have caused.

Korea's Oskar Schindler

"There is no food here. We've had terrible floods. A kilo of rice costs 50 cents, and I only earn 70 cents a month. We are trying to change things, but it is very hard."If you only read one thing in the papers this weekend, make it the Daily Mail's Korea's Oskar Schindler.

Each month, hundreds of North Koreans flee their homeland. More than 7,000 are captured each year by the Chinese, Mr Lee tells me, and returned to face labour camps or the public executions I have just read about. And the risks are growing higher and higher, as the Chinese, with the 2008 Beijing Olympics in the offing, are becoming ever tougher in an attempt to clean up their country.

For the few who manage to evade capture, the road to freedom can often simply lead to another harrowing underground existence. A grotesque industry has grown up to exploit the escapees. Mr Lee explains that more than 95 per cent of the women who come out of North Korea are sold into prostitution or as "wives" to lonely Chinese farmers. Mr Lee is one of the few brokers who is trying to help the escaping refugees.

A number of people have confirmed that Mr Lee has helped more than 1,000 North Koreans. Each refugee costs him between £1,250 and £1,500.

I had been told that he was a wealthy entrepreneur who used his very successful fishing business to finance his altruism. So I was shocked when I was invited into this tiny, sparsely furnished flat. The sitting room, with its cheap TV and cooker hidden in a cupboard, was probably only 12ft by 8ft, and half of Mr Lee's belongings were piled on the balcony. This is the price the well-dressed, soft-faced South Korean has had to pay for his goodness.

Mr Lee is a hunted man, wanted by both the Chinese and North Korean authorities. He has already spent time in a Chinese prison, been beaten on another occasion and has had to bribe his way out of capture. And now he has to live in this small safe house.

Revitalising Silk Road Trade

While negotiations over a global trade deal sponsored by the World Trade Organisation have stalled, South Korea has opened talks with the European Union, already their second largest trading partner after China, on a free trade deal that could boost their present £40 billion bilateral trade by as much as a quarter.

Forging ahead with bilateral deals of its own, the world's tenth largest economy and Asia's third largest economy, South Korea just last month completed a bilateral trade pact with America, their third largest partner. This comes on top of other recent deals with Chile, Singapore, and the ten-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

South Korea is seeking to increase exports to the EU of automobiles, textiles, electronics, movies, music, and access for South Korean professionals such as architects and nurses. However, whereas the United States and Chile put pressure on Seoul to open up its tightly defended agriculture sector, Brussels is expected to be more lenient in this area and will focus on the auto sector, which is also heavily protected by South Korea.

While it is right that we should remove global barriers to trade, such bilateral agreements should not be at the expense of the world's weaker economies and the Doha development round of negotiations. As I wrote some years ago in The Times, if the benefits of globalisation are to be extended to the citizens of the developing as well as the developed world, what we need is not a new set of regional trading blocs vying against each other, but a Global Free Trade Association.