Despite Enmity, a Sacrosanct Ideal : Dream of a Reunified Korea Proves Illusory

Park Yoon Yi never really had a chance to say goodby. He fled his family’s home in Shinuiju, near the Chinese border in North Korea, sneaking out under cover of darkness after being tipped off that he might be arrested for arguing against dogma with Communist Party cadres in a school seminar.

That was in 1947, two years after the liberating armies of the United States and the Soviet Union truncated the Korean Peninsula along the 38th Parallel. Now, Park says his heart aches over not knowing what happened to the parents and three younger brothers he left behind, traveling south for what he believed would be temporary refuge.

“I planned to go back after things cooled off in about a year,” said Park, who runs a small kitchenware manufacturing business in Seoul. “I never dreamed that this country would still be divided 41 years later.”

Emotional Landscape

Park’s personal dilemma is an allegory for the emotional landscape of 40 million Koreans in the south--and for their 20 million brethren across the demilitarized zone.

At the core of the Korean national character is an ideal that is both sacrosanct and seemingly illusory: the desire somehow to reunite the two hostile halves of the peninsula, without bloodshed, after four decades of enmity.

With a rigid Communist regime on one side and a staunch, authoritarian capitalist state on the other, Koreans remain hopelessly divided by two irreconcilable systems. Yet the reunification issue dominates political rhetoric and colors the ethos of a proud and stubborn people.

“It is Korea’s motherhood and apple pie. Nobody is against it,” said Ed Poitras, a longtime American missionary and theology professor in Seoul. “If you want to really understand Korea, you’ve got to understand that this is a whole nation of people who want to be reunified but at the same time don’t see how it can possibly be done.”

Ironically, the myth of reunification has been pushed even further from reality by friction over the Olympic Games, which Seoul sees as a festival of peace and national achievement. Failure to work out a co-hosting arrangement for the Olympics, which begin Sept. 17, made the north so frustrated and angry, security analysts say, that it resorted to a terrorist bomb attack on a South Korean airliner last November in an apparent attempt to spoil the south’s moment of glory.

Despite an atmosphere approaching hysteria over the threat of North Korean Olympic terror, a radical protest movement by South Korea’s university students has succeeded in shattering inertia and placing the issue of reunification high on the public agenda.

South Korean President Roh Tae Woo responded to violent demonstrations in June and earlier this month by making a series of proposals aimed at improving relations with the north, including an appeal last Monday for a summit meeting with his archrival, North Korean President Kim Il Sung.

Roh used brutal police force to crush attempts by students to hold border talks with their counterparts from the north, but he also affected an air of reconciliation that led to meetings over the weekend between legislators at the border truce village of Panmunjom. Delegates to the meetings plan another session today.

First Talks in 3 Years

The sessions are preliminary and so far have not resolved the key question of North Korea’s participation in the Olympics, which Pyongyang has said it will boycott unless it can be a co-host. But it was the first time in nearly three years that there has been any official contact between the two nations’ lawmakers.

Park Chan Jong, an independent member of Seoul’s National Assembly and not a member of the south’s delegation to Panmunjom, dismissed the talks as largely futile.

“I’m skeptical,” Park said. “The Olympics should be a festival for all Koreans, not just the people of the world. We should be discussing how to put together a common team, but instead it has become a contest between north and south. We may be meeting at Panmunjom, but we have mistrust and hatred in the backs of our minds.”

Visceral anti-communism among South Koreans who recall how troops from the north invaded in 1950, starting the three-year Korean War, remains one of the major stumbling blocks to easing tension.

“To the average citizen who lived through the Korean War, communist is a synonym for murderer because of the brutality of the North Koreans,” said Kim Jin Hyun, chief editorial writer at Dong-A Ilbo, South Korea’s most prestigious newspaper.

Reforms Needed in North

Also an obstacle is the widespread perception that no progress can be made on reunification until North Korea emerges from isolation and follows the lead of China and the Soviet Union by undertaking social and economic reforms.

Though vague and lacking details, President Roh’s softened rhetoric “represents what the people in the south believe in now,” said Park, the refugee kitchenware maker who spent 23 years in the South Korean military and intelligence services before going into private business.

“But up north, they haven’t changed their attitude since 1945,” he said. “There are a lot of people who think the north won’t change until Kim Il Sung dies. After that, there may be a degree of liberalization and a window of opportunity.”

Kim Il Sung, 76, has ruled North Korea since 1945, fostering a totalitarian, Mao-style personality cult that analysts expect will be inherited by his son, Kim Chong Il, in what would become the world’s first Communist dynasty.

Nevertheless, many South Koreans think the tide of history will eventually run in their favor.

“We should absorb the north,” said Kim, of the Dong-A Ilbo. “We have more population. We’ve maintained traditional Korean culture. Our economy is far more developed, and we have more sophistication dealing with the outside world. Seoul has become the center of the Korean Peninsula.”

Students Push Reunification

Some of the more radical student leaders, on the other hand, favor reunification first, before sorting out what kind of political system would be best for Koreans. That concept prompted one of Roh’s Cabinet ministers to blast the students for advocating a “Vietnam-style reunification” that presumes the overthrow of the Seoul government.

Such extremes in hyperbole add an element of fantasy to the dialogue on reunification. Nonetheless, the dialogue, banned in the 1970s and restricted in the early 1980s, has blossomed under recent democratic reforms.

“I want one country and two governments,” said a 31-year-old engineer in Seoul. “But the military government doesn’t desire reunification. They are protecting the interests of the military and the upper class, and using anti-communism to suppress the people.”

The United States, in backing the Seoul government, is also increasingly being blamed for thwarting reunification, amid a rising tide of anti-Americanism. Dissidents embracing a revisionist view of history contend that America alone was responsible for carving up the former Japanese colony at the 38th Parallel at the end of World War II.

A more upbeat mood is reflected in a pop song about reunification, “Our Land,” which is now the object of frequent requests at Seoul radio stations. “You frozen Yalu River, flow down into the Han River,” a woman sings in a lilting, cheerful melody. “Isn’t it right that you two meet and mix, and flow into the East Sea?”

“In the north, the desire is the same,” said Lt. Col. Yun Ki Un, who serves as joint duty officer for the North Korean People’s Army in Panmunjom. “We are all the same blood, the same nation, and we have 5,000 years of history in common. The feelings about reunification for our country are very strong.”

But ultimately, the two Koreas are caught in a stalemate over how to converge.

“They’re talking about reunification under communism. We’re talking about reunification under democracy and capitalism,” said Cho Dong Yong, secretary general of the Korean Assembly for the Reunion of 10 Million Separated Families. “We’re on parallel tracks.”

Initial Stage

Many South Koreans hold out hope that a solution could follow an initial stage involving arms reduction, humanitarian exchanges and economic ties, as Roh proposed. But Pyongyang has dismissed such suggestions as deception, saying no progress can be made until a 35-year-old armistice is replaced with a peace treaty and the United States withdraws the 43,000 troops stationed here under U.N. command. Roh did not address the peace treaty or U.S. troops in his overtures.

Adopting a hard line, the north recently rejected a request by the Korean Red Cross to reopen talks on arranging cross-border visits by separated families. In September, 1985, 50 people from each side were allowed to cross the demilitarized zone in search of lost relatives.

Moving the dialogue on reunification out of the realm of the abstract and into concrete terms is a persistent problem.

In April, the South Korean National Council of Churches drew criticism from conservatives for boldly proposing that U.S. troops be withdrawn, but only after nuclear weapons are removed from the peninsula, trust is restored with the north through civilian exchanges and a treaty and nonaggression pact are enacted that would be guaranteed by an international peacekeeping structure.

A time frame for achieving reunification, meanwhile, remains as elusive as the mechanics of the task. Roh, in a dramatic speech delivered July 7, voiced the hope of reuniting Korea before the end of the century. But no one is watching the clock.