South Korea struggles to open rails
By Choe Sang-Hun International Herald Tribune
MONDAY, JUNE 12, 2006
At a park in this village 40 kilometers north of Seoul, where South Korea’s Highway No. 1 comes to a dead end at the barbed wire that fences off the Demilitarized Zone, a lone steam locomotive stands on a rusting northbound track.
A sign in front of the locomotive captures a sentiment felt by many in South Korea: ”The iron horse wants to gallop.”
With North Korea blocking overland access to China and Europe, South Korea’s two fastest-growing export markets, the dream of opening up the Korean Peninsula to rail travel for freight and passengers between North and South has captured the imaginations of many South Koreans.
From Busan, the port city on the southern tip of South Korea, trains laden with consumer goods would trundle through the Demilitarized Zone, chug up the Korean Peninsula and gallop across Eurasia on an ”Iron Silk Road” all the way to Berlin.
Or so the hope goes.
In a sobering reminder that any plan for the future of the Korean Peninsula is part of a complex political game, there is no sign that a South Korean train bound for Europe will leave the station soon.
A land route through North Korea to Europe could reduce considerably the time it takes to bring to market Korean goods that are now shipped by sea. From the Chinese interior, for example, proposed rail links to Europe are expected to cut transport times in half.
South and North Korea had planned to conduct test runs on two newly built tracks on their border in late May, which would have been the first train connection across the sealed, mine-infested frontier in half a century. But a day before the highly symbolic event, the North canceled it, saying that conducting the test runs without resolving military tensions was ”as silly as planting beans in a minefield.”
In economic talks that ended last week, North Korea insisted that it would not agree to the test runs until the two armies could resolve their dispute over a western sea borderline dating to the Korean War.
South Korea ended the meeting with a dangling carrot: It said it would ship raw materials for shoes, textiles and soap to the North as early as August - but only if it agreed to the railroad test runs.
South Korea’s ”Iron Silk Road” dream began in 2000 when the two Koreas held their first summit meeting. By 2003, the two sides had relinked their old tracks at two points along the Demilitarized Zone. Since then, the project has stalled, even though it had strong backers in the region.
After half a century of division, the ”reunification express” project to reconnect the railroads of the two Koreas would have far-reaching implications.
Breaching the DMZ and letting trains rumble through the North would test its willingness to open up, an unparalleled milestone toward a Korean reunification.
A trans-Korean railroad would allow South Korean cellphones and auto parts to reach Chinese, Russian and European markets faster and more cheaply than can be done currently in congested sea lanes.
”An inter-Korean railway is a key to the South Korean hopes of becoming a logistics hub in Northeast Asia, a Far Eastern gateway to Eurasia,” said Oh Ji Taek of the Korea Railroad Research Institute, a government-financed entity in South Korea.
”South Korea has already built a new airport and is expanding port facilities. But without an inter-Korean rail link, the plan is not complete.”
An inter-Korean railroad would also have important implications for other powers in the region.
For China, the rail link would reinstate a connection with South Korea, an increasingly important trade partner. For Russia, the railroad would strengthen its role as a bridge between Asia and Europe, increase its trade with a resource-hungry South Korea and bring more revenue in transit fees on its trans-Siberian railroad.
Moscow has been especially aggressive in urging North Korea to open its territory to train traffic between South Korea and Russia.
Hundreds of Russian engineers have conducted a feasibility study along the North’s east coast for a rail link between Russia and South Korea.
Even North Korea sees something to gain from re-establishing the link.
Since as early as 1994, North Korea has been expressing hopes of turning the country into an international transport hub.
Shortly before he died in July that year, Kim Il Sung, the North Korean leader, told a visiting Belgian delegation that his cash-strapped government could earn $1.5 billion a year in transit fees if its railroads were reconnected to South Korea’s booming export economy.
International traffic through its territory would enhance North Korea’s ability to resist pressure from the United States by providing the country with a new source of cash, experts say, because countries with cargo flowing through North Korea would fear instability and urge Washington to become more flexible. But at the same time, the experts say, a rail link would encourage economic reforms, openness and more responsible behavior from the North Korean regime.
”It will to some extent decrease the risk of military conflict on the Korean Peninsula because a multinational railway system will affect many countries,” said Alexander Vorontsov, a former Russian diplomat in Pyongyang who is now a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, the research organization in Washington.
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