Young S. Koreans blase about health of N. Korean dictator

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SEOUL, South Korea -- As the rest of the world buzzes over the news that North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il may be sick or incapacitated, the neighboring country that would be most affected by his demise -- South Korea -- is giving a collective shrug.Newspapers devoted matter-of-fact coverage to the fact that Kim had missed his country's 60th anniversary celebrations, with some papers consigning it to inside pages. There appeared to be little discussion about it on talk shows, in cafes or around office water coolers.At a coffee bar in downtown Seoul, Kim Seong-hun, 28, said he was too busy with his 12-hour-a-day job as an official at the national police agency to bother about Kim's health."We're living a stressed, pressured life in Seoul and there are lots of more fun things we want to talk about," he said over a cup of iced coffee. "It just doesn't have anything to do with our real lives."After decades of separation from their brethren in the north, South Koreans have become blase, often even indifferent, about developments there. A recent poll showed that just 3 per cent named North Korea as their main concern, compared with more than 60 per cent who named rising prices and other economic concerns.Interest in reunification of North and South, once a national imperative, has been falling steadily as incomes in the south rise and the poor and isolated North seems more and more like a foreign country.North Korea fatigue is especially acute among the young, who barely seem to think about the repressive regime that lies just an hour's drive north of the teeming South Korean capital."To them, it is almost another planet," said Tim Peters, an American who heads Helping Hands Korea, a charity that works for North Korean refugees.He said that southerners are so cut off from the North that they are often "dumbfounded" when he tells them about North Korean human-rights abuses from torture to prison-camp abuses. "I marvel at the depth of their ignorance."South Koreans' estrangement from the North is understandable. Since 1953, the Demilitarized Zone, the four-kilometer-wide strip that runs across the country from coast to coast, has cut them from all contact with northerners. No contacts with northerners are permitted, except for occasional, closely monitored family reunification visits and other rare and formal exchanges.As South Koreans have become more urbanized, globalized and wealthy, northerners seem more and more like distant country cousins, out of sight and out of mind. The per capita gross domestic product in the North is estimated at $1,900; in the South it is more than 10 times that.The new South Korean President, Lee Myung-bak, reflects the waning interest in the North. Elected in December, he promised to stop pandering to the Kim regime and stop wasting time with bridge-building efforts that never seemed to go anywhere. He even talked about abolishing the Ministry of National Unification, the main agency seeking reconciliation with the North.Most South Koreans see reunification with the North as far in the future -- for many, the farther the better. They fear that the sudden collapse of the Kim regime would send millions of impoverished northerners pouring across the border and saddle the south with the enormous cost of bringing the North out of its nearly medieval state of development.A recent poll showed that while 67 per cent of South Koreans believed the peninsula should be reunified, 56 per cent said South Korea would have more to lose than to gain.(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)