SEOUL (UCAN) - While welcoming Seoul's "softer" stance toward North Korea, a bishops' conference committee says that the government must go further and provide unconditional aid if it truly wants North-South reconciliation.
The Catholic Bishops' Conference of Korea Committee for the Evangelization of North Korea offered the advice in a message to be released June 21 to mark the 50th anniversary of the establishment of North and South Korea.
Since President Kim Dae-jung took power with a new government in February, there have been positive policy changes toward the North, said Benedictine Abbot Placid Ri Tong-ho, president of the committee and apostolic administrator of Hamhung and Tokwon Abbey territory, both in North Korea.
The changes, however, have not gone far enough to achieve national reconciliation, Abbot Ri said, because genuine reconciliation does not insist on reciprocity or conditions.
"If the new government wants to seek a veritable way for reconciliation of the Korean people, it should make positive efforts to help North Korean society open itself up, beyond the principal of reciprocity," he added.
"Far from reunification, we cannot even dialogue," Abbot Ri, head of Waegwan Benedictine Abbey in South Korea, said in the light of 50 years of the partition of Korea.
In April, South and North Korea held talks in Beijing to discuss a South Korean aid offer of 200,000 tons of fertilizer that would help secure food production in the famine-stricken North.
However, the first high-level talks since 1995 collapsed when North Korea rejected South Korea's demand, in keeping with the "principle of reciprocity," that the North must in turn allow separated family members to reunite.
President Kim has several times announced adoption of a softer policy toward the North than his predecessor Kim Young-sam and allowed unimpeded private aid to the North, saying he supports separation of economics and politics.
At the governmental level, though, he has demanded that North Korea uphold the reciprocity principle, saying that it must do its part to promote reconciliation and peace after more than 50 years of mutual hostility.
Although Kim Dae-jung's government is "favorable" for mutual exchanges and collaboration on the civilian level, Abbot Ri said that it is time for South and North Korea, both facing difficulty, to meet each other as brothers and sisters and together seek a way to achieve national reconciliation.
Meanwhile, on June 16, Chung Ju-young, head of the Hyundai Group and known as South Korea's richest man, made a historical visit to his native place in North Korea by being the first civilian to cross the cease-fire line.
He took with him some 1,000 cattle to give to North Korea, and the scene was televised by South Korea, raising speculation that the North might be ready to open its gate to South Korea.
UCAN 18. juni 1998