Enhancing cultural understanding and expanding economic relations between South Korea and members of the Arab League are the main goals of the newly formed Korean-Arab Society (KAS) recently launched in Seoul, the capital of South Korea. “We observed with joy the birth of the Korean-Arab Society, a new mechanism to give fresh impetus to various existing cooperation between Korea and the Arab world on bilateral and multilateral levels,” said Abdullah Al-Aifan, Saudi Ambassador to South Korea. More than 200 dignitaries from across the Arab World attended the launching in Seoul including Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir, Djibouti President Ismail Guelleh, Prince of Jordan Mired Bin Raad and Princess Hussah Sabah from Kuwait. From the Kingdom, Hussein Abdulrahman Al-Athel, Secretary General of Riyadh Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Yusuf Kaysar Lahhud, Vice Chairman of Olayan Group and Mohammad Saleh Al-Sheikh, General Manager of General Contracting Company of Olayan Group participated. Other Saudis included Assistant Secretary General of the OIC, Ezzat Kamil Mufti and Abdulrahman Rabiah, board member at the World Assembly of Muslim Youth. “Korea's investments in Middle East, which includes the Arab region is expected to grow, driven by our need for a steady oil supply and interest in expanding trade opportunities amid the regions' burgeoning economy,” said Cho Chang-hoon, deputy manager of the Middle East-Africa and CIS team at the Korea Trade Investment Promotion Agency. The International Monetary Fund projects the Mideast economy to grow 6.1 percent in 2008 with the current record high oil prices. With Mideast and Africa accounting for about 43 percent of the world's oil production and the region planning big scale construction projects, South Korea is hoping to tap into large contracts especially among the Gulf countries. South Korea is already a major contracting partner in the Gulf. The Kingdom was one of Korea's big construction partners in the ‘70s when Saudi Arabia started its construction boom. “Many of the schools, universities, hospitals and ministry buildings were built by Korean workers and by Korean contracting companies,” explained the Saudi Ambassador. Despite the geographical and cultural distance between Korea and the Arab World, the Gulf countries and especially the Kingdom placed a major role in the development of Korea itself. “The construction companies which worked in the Kingdom in the 1970s were the primary source of our hard currency,” explained Ma Young-sam, Director General of African and Middle Eastern Affairs Bureau at the Korean Foreign Ministry. Today, the trade between the Kingdom and Korea includes exports of construction machinery, chemical machinery; steel plates, which is expected to rise as the Gulf countries, continue to build. In 2007, $5 billion worth of construction contracts were signed between the Kingdom and Korea while in 2006 it was only $ 3.6 billion. Trade between the two countries is worth around $20 billion. __
