Ethics of Sunshine
By Michael Breen
Korea Times
October 27, 2006

Five years ago, a Chinese ship called the Chuxing visiting the port of Pusan was found to be carrying 91 kilograms of methamphetamine. Customs officials and prosecutors let it go.

Two years later, officials nabbed 45 kgs of the same drugs from the same vessel. Again, they let it go.

In fact, according to customs and prosecution data, the plucky Chuxing has been caught smuggling drugs and counterfeit cigarettes no less than 12 times. And I think we may safely assume that on many occasions its cargo has made it unobserved into the Korean market.

The normal explanation for such a limp-wristed approach to law enforcement would be corruption: the gangsters must have got to the customs people. Or maybe they had a man on the inside. But in this case, it's something else. The Chuxing is distinct because it plies an unusual route. For many years, it has been making a weekly run between Pusan and the North Korean port of Rajin.

Yes, it's those North Koreans again. This time, they're running drugs and counterfeits into South Korea. But the authorities here have been turning a blind eye in the greater interests of the sunshine engagement policy with North Korea.

You'd think that this story, revealed last week by a national assemblyman, would have billowed into a national scandal. But it does not appear to have stirred much interest in the Korean press and society. That, in this foreign observer's opinion, is because it represents a type of moral lapse that typifies this society: my willingness to subvert the rules for the perceived greater good of whatever it is that I want to do.

There are good historical reasons for this. The law was never an arbiter of justice in Korea. Rather, it was employed by the powerful to justify their abuse of the weak. But in modern democratic Korea, the inability to overcome this deep aversion to the rule of law explains why citizens have such a low level of trust of one another and of their institutions.

The Chuxing revelation should have the effect of a grenade rolled into the church of North-South unification. It's certainly timely. Not only, we find, has North Korea's morally crippled regime been building nuclear weapons while we've been feeding its people, but it's also been using our ships (Chuxing is owned by a Korean) to peddle drugs to gangsters who prey on our young people. Right now, the international community is debating whether South Korea should continue its turn-the-other-cheek engagement policy with North Korea, or whether it should side with the U.S. in its squeeze-'em-till-the-pips-squeak sanctions approach. Both policies have moral right on their side and both could produce results.

What makes them worthy of equal consideration in the public debate is that they are policies considered and undertaken by democracies, proposed in an honorable fashion, guided by law, and mindful of individual rights and all that. But suddenly those qualifications seem absent. Such things happen. The most glaring example in recent years is the American-led invasion of Iraq, the pre-emptive nature of which in retrospect seems to have been entirely unjustified. The suggestion that the case for war was argued with deception puts it, in the minds of tens of millions of people, up there with rogue acts conducted by dictatorships.

It is the biggest global controversy of the decade. America fortunately is such an open country that it can correct itself. The debate can continue because that democratic, legal underpinning remains strong. But can we say the same about Korea?

Ironically, there is no need for correction for the ship of government has not even listed. President Roh's sunshine policy should have been majorly discredited -- not just because of North Korea's behavior, but also because of his own government's willingness to allow drug running to go unpunished.

But, it hasn't.

In fact, that ship might already be back in Pusan.