Roh (pronounced “No”) Moo-hyun, the startlingly left-wing president of South Korea from 2003 to 2008, offered a remarkable concession to the late North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il at a summit in Pyongyang in 2007. According to partial transcripts of the meeting, which were released for the first time last year by the South’s intelligence services, President Roh, who committed suicide in 2009, offered to stand down from the hotly disputed maritime border between North and South Korea. Even though the two Koreas remain technically at war, and despite the fact that the brutal dictatorship in North routinely violates the maritime border (most notably in 2010, when the North sunk a South Korean naval vessel, killing 46 sailors), Roh envisaged turning the border area into a “peace-economy zone,” where both the North and South would be allowed to fish. This would have represented a major concession to the North, which has agitated against the border for decades.
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