Sunny Park has received more prestigious awards both in Atlanta and in Korea than you could count on all of your fingers. He also has been a member or board director of 15 nonprofit organizations and he is the first Asian to have served as vice chairman of the Georgia Ports Authority. He also has been a dedicated sponsor of programs mentoring high school dropouts throughout the United States.
Global Atlanta has reported on Mr. Park’s stunning career during which he built over the past 30-plus years his company, General Building Maintenance, a private cleaning service, with operations nationwide. But at a luncheon of the Atlanta Council on International Relations, at the Capital City Club downtown on Thursday, Feb. Feb. 15, he spoke of his view of South Korea‘s future from the perspective of a naturalized U.S. citizen who has remained closely involved with his native country.
Before sharing his views, he quite modestly deferred to a video of an interview appearing on the internet of In-Bum Chun, a three star lieutenant general in the South Korean army who retired 18 months ago after a 40-year career during which he headed for a period his country’s Special Forces.
At the opening of the interview Mr. Chun may have surprised some viewers by his support of U.S. President Donald Trump‘s harsh words directed at North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un. Calling Mr. Trump’s comments “eccentric,” the general added that he did make North Korea realize that “Americans are serious.”
“I think his tough-talking and the fact that it has brought sanctions against North Korea from not only the world community but from China has had an effect,” he added.
He also said that he was hopeful about developments taking place between North and South Korea during the Winter Olympics in PyeongChang.
“President Moon ( Jae-in of South Korea), he said, “ has given the North Koreans the benefit of the doubt” about realizing closer relations. The general, however, underscored that any permanent reconciliation would take a very long time, perhaps as long as it took North Korean to develop its nuclear weapons.
In the video interview, Mr. Chun sketches out a strategy based on four phases starting with a moratorium on the development of nuclear weapons and moving through the implementation of regulations, progressing to an easing of the sanctions and ending with an extensive humanitarian initiative.
Despite this optimistic path forward, he didn’t have any qualms about underlining how difficult that path would be. He compared the North Koreans’ view of Kim Jong-un to that of the view by Muslims of Allah. The Kim ruling family “compared themselves to the monarchs in Europe and they’ve done this through indoctrination and brainwashing for decades.”
“All dictatorships are paranoid,” he added, saying that the only way to combat the family’s hold on the North Korea population is “to fight one idea with another.” While not impossible, such a struggle will require “time and patience.”
Once the video was finished, Mr. Park provided his impressions of the current situation based in part on his most recent trip of a week or so earlier. He revealed his antipathy to Mr. Kim by showing a North Korean propaganda photo of Mr. Kim affectionately holding a malnourished child while being surrounded by a military coterie looking on.
He also showed a photo of Mr. Kim zooming along in a 95-foot luxury yacht, adding that if the North Korean leader “was ready to die he wouldn’t buy a yacht,” adding that he has heard Mr Kim has ordered another, even larger one.
In stark contrast to Mr. Kim’s high life, Mr. Park recalled the number of dead people he saw as an 8-year-old at the end of the Korean War including U.S. soldiers. While his generation can recall this period vividly, the younger generations, he said, do not.
Consequently, there is a disparity in terms of how South Koreans view recasting relations with North Korea with the older generations supporting Mr. Moon’s efforts to harmonizing relations, but the younger generations opposed because of the enormous costs and economic setback that South Korea would have to undergo should there by a reunification.
Mr. Park spoke with pride about the growth of personal income in South Korea since 1960. The annual per capita value of gross domestic product for South Korea that year, 1960, was $158. Today, he said, it has climbed to $27,000 per capita and is now the 14th largest economy in the world. Younger South Koreans, he said, are striving to have that annual figure climb to $30,000 and don’t want closer relations with the north to interfere with their goal.
For the luncheon attendees to better understand today’s situation in South Korea, Mr. Park began his presentation with a geography lesson citing its population of 51.25 million in 2016, with a geographic area roughly equivalent to that of the state of Indiana, but with less than half of Indiana’s livable area, meaning that its population fits in an area about the size of West Virginia.
Despite its size, he said that the country “was a great market for the U.S.” and the recipient of more than $10 billion in foreign direct investment annually. He cited the expansion of Starbucks throughout the country as a highly observable, anecdotal indication of the continued interest in South Korea as a market despite the threats from North Korea.
South Koreans, he said, didn’t seem overly concerned with North Korea’s nuclear threat with at least one million Chinese living within its borders and as many as 150,000 U.S. citizens in Seoul, the country’s capital.
“If North Korea just dropped a cannonball in downtown Seoul, not even a nuclear weapon, 200,000 people would be killed with 45 percent of them being foreigners,” he said. “This would immediately create 24 enemy countries.”
For this primary reason, he didn’t think that there would be a war with North Korea in addition to the North Korean regime’s wanting to hold power and enjoy its benefits.
His greater fear, he added, is that the long-standing alliance between the United States and South Korea might be undermined by the current situation. He also said that he is worried about North Korea’s nuclear arsenal being sold to Syria or Iran.
At the end of the luncheon, Takashi Shinozuka, the Japanese consul general, rose to express solidarity with the U.S. and South Korean governments to contain North Korea’s nuclear initiative. He mentioned a 35-minute telephone call that occurred the day before between Mr. Trump and Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, with at least half the time devoted, he said, to the situation with North Korea.
When the Olympic Games are over, he added, “the moment of truth” will be at hand once again and the strong alliance among South Korea, the U.S. and Japan will be as important as ever.
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