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WAR WOUNDS. Thanks in part to these reforms, Korean products from companies such as Samsung and Hyundai are an increasingly competitive threat to Japanese rivals. The Pew survey showed 59% of Koreans liked American ideas about business practices, while 32% opposed them. In line with this, President-Elect Roh Moo Hyun has pledged to step up the pace of economic reform.
Second, Korea's leadership needs to remind its people that their country wouldn't exist were it not for the U.S., which lost 33,000 soldiers in the Korean war. If not for the allied forces that fought the North Koreans and their communist Chinese allies to a standstill in the 1950s, the South would not be one of the industrial powerhouses of the world, a leader in world trade, and a member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development.
American troops died fighting for a dirt-poor country that few of them liked and fewer understood. Yet the allied contribution to the war effort is scarcely mentioned in Korea. Tellingly, the war museum in downtown Seoul, a rifle shot from the sprawling U.S. base, makes hardly any mention of this sacrifice. Schools make even less.
TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT. Third, both governments need to articulate why 37,000 U.S. troops are on South Korea soil, at tremendous material and psychic cost to both sides. What are the benefits to this presence? How can the relationship be adjusted to minimize friction?With Seoul just 30 miles from the North's million-man army and its formidable array of biological, chemical, and perhaps nuclear weapons, it's no surprise that the South wants to avoid war at almost any cost. Indeed, for this reason and to preserve stability on the Korean peninsula, South Korea and China are traveling down parallel roads in their approach to this crisis.
The South has plenty of legitimate grievances. U.S. troops occupy an area the size of Central Park in downtown Seoul -- and they are largely immune from South Korean laws. How would Americans like it if Japanese or German or Russian troops occupied Central Park as a garrison and were immune to local or federal prosecution?
TALKING IT OUT. The issue of prosecution isn't just academic. The candlelight vigils I mentioned were protests against the acquittals of two U.S. servicemen who accidentally crushed a pair of South Korean schoolgirls to death while driving in a military vehicle. Under the Status of Forces Agreement, only U.S. authorities could deal with them.
Washington has promised for a decade to move out, but squabbling between it and Seoul has stymied the process. U.S. Ambassador to Seoul Thomas Hubbard says the two sides are going to make this issue a higher priority. They should.
Unfortunately, conflict looks likely to get worse before it gets better. Since September 11, the Bush Administration has embarked on an ambitious agenda of limiting the spread of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons that frightens and angers even some of it allies. If the North is a threat in this regard, the fear in South Korea is that Washington will consider its own interests first.
Of course, Seoul wants to keep a hot war from breaking out, which would result in untold Korean casualties. But if U.S. troops are going to stay, it needs to be on the basis of a more clearlyarticulated policy on both sides -- and on a more equitable basis.
Clifford is Asia bureau manager for BusinessWeek and author of Troubled Tiger: Businessmen, Bureaucrats and Generals in South Korea Edited by Douglas Harbrecht
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