by Rachel Ogbu

South Korea has elected its first female president. On Monday, Park
Geun-hye technically took over at the struck of midnight and she’ll be
returning to the presidential mansion where she grew up with her
father who many described as a dictator.
Park is already faced with a number of issues needing serious
attention, perhaps the celebrations can come later.
According to reports, her first weeks as president will be
problematical as North Korea’s warning of unspecified “second and
third measures of greater intensity,” comes as Washington and others
push for tightened U.N. sanctions as punishment for the February 12
atomic test, the North’s third since 2006.
Also she will have to address the increasing panic South Koreans have
about a growing gap between rich and poor.
She will have to prove that she can return the country to the strong
economic growth her strong-man father oversaw.
Her swearing-in ceremony was to be attended by dignitaries including
U.S. National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, Thai Prime Minister
Yingluck Shinawatra and Japanese Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso, even
South Korean superstar PSY was to perform his song “Gangnam Style.”
AP News reports:

Park’s last stint in the Blue House was bookended by
tragedy: At 22, she cut short her studies in Paris to return to Seoul
and act as President Park Chung-hee’s first lady after an assassin
targeting her father instead killed her mother; she left five years
later after her father was shot and killed by his spy chief during a
drinking party.
As president, Park will face stark divisions both in South Korean
society and with rival North Korea, which detonated an underground
nuclear device about two weeks ago. North Korea’s atomic test will
also present a challenge to her vow to soften Seoul’s current
hard-line approach to its northern rival.
Pyongyang, Washington, Beijing and Tokyo are all watching to see if
Park pursues an ambitious engagement policy meant to ease five years of animosity on the divided peninsula or if she sticks with the tough stance of her fellow conservative predecessor, Lee Myung-bak.

Park’s decision is important because it will likely set the tone of
the larger diplomatic approach that Washington and others take in
stalled efforts to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons
ambitions.

Park has said she won’t yet change her policy, which was built with
the high probability of provocations from Pyongyang in mind. But some
aren’t sure if engagement can work, given North Korea’s choice of
“bombs over electricity,” as American scientist Siegfried Hecker puts
it.

“Normalization of relations, a peace treaty, access to energy and
economic opportunities ? those things that come from choosing
electricity over bombs and have the potential of lifting the North
Korean people out of poverty and hardship ? will be made much more
difficult, if not impossible, for at least the next five years,”

Hecker, a regular visitor to North Korea, said in a posting on the website of Stanford University’s Center for International Security and
Cooperation.

As she takes office, however, Park will be mindful that many South
Koreans are frustrated at the state of inter-Korean relations after
the Lee government’s five-year rule, which saw two nuclear tests,
three long-range rocket launches and attacks blamed on North Korea
that killed 50 South Koreans in 2010.
Park’s policy calls for strong defense but also for efforts to build
trust through aid shipments, reconciliation talks and the resumption
of some large-scale economic initiatives as progress occurs on the
nuclear issue. Park has also held out the possibility of a summit with
new North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Much is riding on Park’s conclusion.

“The overall policy direction on North Korea among the U.S., Japan and
South Korea will be hers to decide,” said Victor Cha, a former senior
Asia adviser to President George W. Bush. “If Park Geun-hye wants to
contain, the U.S. will support that. But if Park Geun-hye, months down
the road, wants to engage, then the U.S. will go along with that too.”

Her father was a staunch anti-communist who made no secret of his
antipathy toward Pyongyang during his 18-year rule in the 1960s and
’70s. In 1968, 31 North Korean commandos staged a failed raid on the
Blue House that ended with nearly all of them dead. In 1974, Park’s
wife was shot and killed by a Japan-born Korean claiming he was acting
on assassination orders by North Korea founder and then leader Kim Il
Sung.

Critics say Park Geun-hye’s North Korea policy lacks specifics. They also question how far she can go given her conservative base’s strong
anti-Pyongyang sentiments.

But Park has previously confounded ideological expectations. She
travelled to Pyongyang in 2002 and held private talks with the late
Kim Jong Il, the father of Kim Jong Un, and her gifts to Kim Jong Il
are showcased in a museum of gifts to the North Korean leaders. During
the often contentious presidential campaign, she responded to liberal
criticism by reaching out to the families of victims of her father’s
dictatorship.

She said in her 2007 autobiography that she visited Pyongyang because
she thought her painful experiences with the North made her “the one
who could resolve South-North relations better than anyone else.”

She also wrote that Kim Jong Il apologized for the 1968 attack.

“I don’t think this latest spike in the cycle of provocation and
response undermines her whole platform of seeking to somehow re-engage the North,” said John Delury, an analyst at Seoul’s Yonsei University.
North Korea wants a return of large-scale aid and investment from
South Korea.

Before the election, Pyongyang’s state media repeatedly questioned the
sincerity of Park’s engagement overture. Since the election, however,
although regular criticism of Lee continues ? one report said he was
the “rubbish of history” ? the North’s official Korean Central News
Agency hasn’t mentioned Park by name, though her political party is
still condemned.

Pyongyang sees the nuclear crisis as a U.S.-North Korea issue, Delury
said. “From a North Korean mindset, ramping up the tension and
hostility with the U.S. does not equal jettisoning relations with the
South.”

Park may take a wait-and-see stance in coming months.

Analyst Hong Hyun-ik at the private Sejong Institute in South Korea
predicts that the United States will seek nuclear talks with North
Korea in a few months, something that could help Park’s efforts to
engage North Korea.

“The nuclear test sets back and complicates but does not necessarily
doom her engagement efforts over the long term,” said Ralph Cossa,
president of Pacific Forum CSIS, a Hawaii-based think tank.

Park warned after the test that North Korea faces international
isolation, economic difficulties and, eventually, a collapse if it
continues to build its atomic program. But she also pressed Pyongyang
to respond to her overtures.
“We can’t achieve trust with only one side’s efforts,” she said.