Most people have probably heard that  a South Korean tourist was killed by a North Korean soldier over the weekend. I — like any other member of the foreign community in Korea — have been very interested to see how this will be handled by the South Korean side (government, media and public included).

Several of the foreign-penned blogs in Korea are already fuming (here, here and here) in anticipation of a tempered South Korean reaction.

Some are aligning the situation with the recent mad cow debacle/protests, or with the past U.S. military/South Korean controversies. But I’ve still got B.R. Myers recent editorial for the Wall Street Journal online in my brain. I posted this in the comments section of a recent post but I want to call your attention to it again because I think it probably sheds more light on what is happening and what will ultimately happen than speculating what the reaction of South Korea ought to be in light of other recent political events.

From South Korea’s Real Beef (July 3, 2008):

Even after liberation in 1945, the Koreans continued to regard themselves as an inherently moral people. Researching in Seoul in the late 1990s, the American political scientist C. Fred Alford found that South Koreans never ascribe evil to their fellow citizens — not even to the perpetrators of the 1980 Gwangju massacre of pro-democracy protesters.

Although Mr. Alford jumped to the conclusion that Koreans deny the existence of evil altogether, they readily attribute it to the Americans who failed to stop that massacre from taking place.In the common view, a Korean who commits a crime is guilty only of a temporary weakness or error. The foreigner who commits a crime is “taking off his mask” (a favorite metaphor of anti-U.S. rhetoric) and revealing his true nature.

Thus it was that in June 2002 the accidental deaths of two schoolgirls under the treads of a U.S. Army vehicle caused a far greater furor than the North Korean navy’s killing of six South Korean sailors in the Yellow Sea that same month.

My guess is that the South Korean government will huff and puff a little about this and then it’ll largely disappear from view. There will be no mass protests. The media will speculate and ask a few questions but not much else.

At the end of the day a woman was trespassing into enemy territory. North and South Korea are technically at war. I’m not saying that justifies what happened, but when you’re dealing with North Korea — certainly everyone knows such a thing is possible. If anyone is to blame it’s the Hyundai Asan Corporation, the company allowed by the South Korean government to operate the tours in the first place.

How should the Korean government react? As always this is a terribly difficult question. South Korea has acted like the bitch guilty party for a long time. It’s obviously time to put a stop to that. North Korea has already come out and blamed South Korea for what happened. The South Korean government needs to come out and make a strong statement against this. There’s little use in cutting off food aid (although they should immediately). Why? Because as of last week North Korea is getting plenty of food aid…from the U.S.