World/Coming Events

Korea’s ‘Berlin Wall’ symbol

of 1950s Col

Continued from page 1
Korean peninsula at the 38th parallel. One
of the world’s oldest continuous nation-
States, Korea, with a recorded history dating
back 1,500 years, has been the maximum
victim of the cold war. Other nations were
divided by the superpowers after WW II —
Germany, Austria, Vietnam — but have
since managed to achieve re-unification.
_ Korea remains the forgotten casualty.
Following WW IL, the Soviet occupation
of the North lasted barely three years before
the Soviet troops were withdrawn. What-
ever their manipulations may have been,
most historians agree that the Soviets left in
place the indigenous structures of self-
government — the People’s Committees —
from which the regime of the old guerrilla
leader, Kim Il Sung, drew its initial legit-
imacy.
The American legacy is rather different.
After arriving in Korea at the war’s end, the
American’s first act was to employ Japanese
troops and collaborators to crush the Korean
People’s Committees. Unlike the Soviets,
the U.S. set up a military occupation govern-
ment in South Korea (ironically, it turned out
to be harsher than they had imposed on the
defeated enemy, Japan).
Unable to govern through indigenous
forces, the Americans eventually imported
_ their own proteg), the U.S.-trained Dr. Syng-
man Rhee, who ruled South Korea with an
iron fist. The trauma of the Korean War —
a civil war of re-unification, tragically ag-
gravated by foreign intervention — cemen-
ted the division of the country and institu-
tionalized U.S. supervision over the South.
This continuing dependency upon the
U.S. may be the single most explosive factor
in Korean politics. Some 40,000 troops of
the U.S. Eighth army are permanently based
in South Korea, reportedly armed with 1,000
nuclear weapons — a concentration four
times greater than along NATO’s old front
line in Germany. The latest in a long series
of Washington-sponsored authoritarian
tulers is Roh Tae Woo, notorious as the

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general who ordered the massacre of up to
2,000 South Korean protesters at Kwangju
in 1980.

The resulting political weakness of the
South Korean regime is key to under-
standing why Korea doesn’t fit in with the
rest of the cold war world. The South jams
radio broadcasts from the North, and bans
travel there. These are the sort of actions we
are used to associating with discredited
communist regimes. At least three people
currently languish in South Korean prisons
for the simple crite of having visited North
Korea: the reverend Moon Ik Hwan, student
Im Su Kyung and pastor Moon Kyu Hyun.

Despite a much-touted “democratiza-
tion,” Western human rights groups report
that repression in South Korea is actually
intensifying, with an estimated 1,500 politi-
cal prisoners growing at the rate of four
arrests per day.

The insecurity complex of South Korea’s
tulers was graphically demonstrated last
Aug. 15, when thousands of students at
Seoul’s Yonsei University were brutally
beaten and tear-gassed by police to prevent
them from marching to Panmunjom to at-
tend a pan-national rally for Korean re-uni-
fication.

However, it is a few miles east of Pan-
munjom, from the northern side, that the
most incredible symbol of cold war excess
and paranoia can be viewed: an enormous
concrete wall, five metres high, extends
across the southern edge of the de-
militarized zone (DMZ), from horizon to
horizon. The North Koreans claim that it is
240-km long, literally partitioning the pen-
insula from coast to coast.

“The U.S. and South Koreans built that
wall between 1976 and 1979,” says colonel
Kan Ho Sop, a North Korean staff member
of the Military Armistice Commission. “In
this modem age such a wall has very little
military value. We believe its purpose is to
intimidate, to seal the division of Korea.

“Besides, why should they fear us? The
population of South Korea is more than 40
million, twice as great as North Korea. Their
army and reserves are correspondingly
larger. They claim their GNPis much greater
than ours. On top of that, they have all those
U.S. troops with their nuclear arms. What
are they really afraid of?”

Despite the bleak record of the past 40
years, the prospects for an end to the deep
freeze at Panmunjom are beginning to look

almost good.

The premiers of North and South Korea
met for the first time earlier this month in
Seoul. Though no agreements emerged,
their talks were relatively cordial and the
two sides agreed to meet again in Pyon-
gyang in October. ;

While hopes for a free exchange of visi-
tors last Aug. 15 were thwarted by tradition-
al bickering, it seems likely that this will
soon happen in some form. The popular
pressure for it on both sides is enormous,
probably irresistible.

When Panmunjom is finally opened to
free travel, Korean re-unification will be-
come an unstoppable express train. The only
question then will be what sort of re-unifica-
tion, on what terms?

Here the North enjoys a tremendous pol-
itical advantage. It is the side which has
carried the torch for re-unification all these

d Ward

ivisions

years, fought against anything that might
validate division —such as separate UN
membership — and advanced a comprehen-
sive program for bringing the two sides
together.

The Western media, applying familiar
perceptions, has been assuming that North
Koreans travelling south would not be able
to stand exposure to such prosperity, hence
the North would quickly crumble. There is
more than a little wishful thinking in this
view.

Indeed, the great weakness of North
Korea is its isolation from the world — both
economic and political. Although glib com-
parisons with Stalin’s USSR are unhelpful,

‘there seems little doubt that North Korea’s

hyper-centralized political system, epito-
mized by the intense personality cult of Kim
Il Sung, cannot carry on in its present form
much beyond the old leader himself.

Although economic growth in North
Korea has been truly amazing, the command
economy, isolated as it is from the rest of the
world, probably couldn’t sustain much fur-
ther modernization without major structural
changes.

By most accounts, the South has been
winning the economic competition in recent
years, though its import-and-export depend-
ent economy is highly vulnerable to the
winds of the global market. Greater GNP,
however, does not necessarily translate into
better living standards for the population.
South Korea has industrialized by a formula
that might be described as “market Stalin-
ism”: tough state control over all aspects of
the economy to encourage rapid accumula-
tion of capital while the police truncheon
enforces low consumption rates for workers.

Hence the World Bank — which has no
reason to be pro-Pyongyang — reported in
1984 that per capita calorie intake in North
Korea was 129 per cent of requirement,
somewhat higher than in the South, while
working hours were significantly shorter.
Housing conditions, health care and educa-
tion also appear to be generally better in the
North.

North Koreans visiting the South may
indeed be awed by conspicuous wealth, but
they will probably also be shocked by glar-
ing poverty, corruption and mass prostitu-
tion around the major U.S. bases. South
Koreans visiting the North will be surprised
to find that it is far from the miserable com-
munist hell their propaganda has depicted
for decades. They may not wish to identify
with the North’s political system, but they
will recognize the society as a fiercely inde-
pendent, authentically Korean one which
has registered impressive economic gains
without submitting to any form of foreign
dependence.

The two Koreas seem to be drifting
toward an approach that could bring them
together in a confederal state which preser-
ves political and economic autonomy for the
two very different entities. This idea, first
proposed by the North some ten years ago,
has reportedly gained wide favour among
intellectuals and oppositionists in the South.

In the final analysis, most current distor-
tions of both North and South Korean life
can be traced to the unnatural division of the
country 45 years ago. Like the left-and-right
brains of any living organism, the two halves
of Korea must be reunited in order to achieve
their full potential and proper place in the
moder world. ;

And that means it is time for Washington
to pack up its nuclear weapons and leave
Korea for good. No meaningful dialogue is
likely to develop in the shadow of the Eighth
Army. If the cold war is really ending, then
the last “Berlin Wall” should be pulled
down.

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