With Tensions Easing, South Korea Tones Down War Commemoration

In ceremonies today that were significantly scaled back after fledgling signs of rapprochement with North Korea, thousands of aging South Korean and U.S. veterans here marked the 50th anniversary of the onset of the war that permanently split the Korean peninsula and left millions of people dead.

The tone of the ceremonies at a war memorial in downtown Seoul was notably subdued, in deference to the historic summit earlier this month between South Korean President Kim Dae Jung and Kim Jong Il, the leader of the nation that the South has long described as its “main enemy.”

Kim Dae Jung, for his part, called today for lasting peace on the peninsula, because any new war would mean that “the whole nation would be decimated by the use of extremely advanced weapons of mass destruction.” He also reiterated the need for the continued presence of 37,000 U.S. troops in Korea.

“There should not be another war within the Korean people, but instead we should pursue coexistence and co-prosperity through harmony and cooperation. Eventually, we have to achieve peaceful unification. This is the call of history for us,” he said.

But the commemorations left many veterans disappointed. For the first time, an annual parade of 15,000 veterans through the city was canceled, as were reenactments of battles at sites throughout South Korea planned for later dates.

In the spirit of the June 13-15 summit--at which the two leaders of the technically-still-at-war Koreas clinked champagne glasses, hugged each other and promised to focus on the future instead of the past--North Korea said it will scale back its own commemoration July 27. That date, the anniversary of the signing of the 1953 armistice, traditionally has been observed in the North with a celebration of victory.

On Saturday, South Korean veterans, in particular, said they were worried that the post-summit euphoria focusing on rapprochement and peaceful negotiations is softening the country’s stance on communism and might put its security at risk.

“We are educating our people that, if your readiness is not enough, you get attacked,” said Lee Chip Op, 78, who served as a general in the Korean army and estimates that at least 1,000 of his men died in combat. “In peacetime, you must prepare.”

Moreover, the aging South Korean veterans--most well into their 70s--are worried that the conflict between the Koreas, which has become known as the forgotten war in the United States, is rapidly becoming a forgotten war in their own country.

“The vets are very strongly determined to remind the Cold War generation that the Korean War happened because of communism,” said Lee Sang Hoon, 74, head of the Korean War Veterans Assn., which is sponsoring exhibits and seminars as part of the commemoration to “remind people what happened on the peninsula.”

Given the estimated 2 million Korean military and civilian casualties and the influence the war had in shaping the peninsula--about 1.9 million troops face off across the most fortified border in the world, which cuts along the 38th parallel and separates North from South--it is somewhat hard to believe that the civil war could be forgotten on the very soil where so many battles occurred.

Today is the 50th anniversary of the day that North Koreans stormed across the 38th parallel--which had been set up as a dividing line after World War II ended the Japanese occupation of Korea--and forced South Korean troops to retreat at the beginning of the bloody three-year war.

But amid relative prosperity and South Korea’s rise to the world’s 11th-largest economy, many young Koreans interviewed last week seemed not the least bit interested in or concerned about the conflict or its influence.

Lee Jig Hye, a 20-year-old college student sporting a backpack and huge platform sneakers, said she remembers the anniversary only because it’s also her mother’s birthday.

“Ask all the people here,” she said, gesturing at a busy sidewalk in front of a Seoul department store. “They know what the Korean War is, but I bet none of them is really interested. I think it’s important in history, I guess, but I just don’t think anybody is seriously concerned.”

Jang Je Kyu, 27, owner of a small women’s clothing shop, said, “The Korean War--isn’t that something that happened a really long time ago? Sometime after World War II, right?”

Lee Ki Tak, 65, who teaches diplomatic history and international relations at the prestigious Yonsei University, said the trend is both sad and dangerous because the country is letting down its guard in the face of a man he describes as a master of “psychological warfare,” Kim Jong Il.

North Korea’s leader emerged as “Mr. Personality” during the summit, meeting the South Korean president at the airport in Pyongyang, the North’s capital, and cracking jokes throughout the three-day meeting. About 75% of Koreans these days belong to “the new generation, with no experience of the Korean War,” Lee said, and can be easily influenced.

A hostility toward the United States and particularly its military is emerging in South Korea, Lee said. The U.S. still has troops posted in this country as a deterrent, and Lee characterized the anti-Americanism as “very bizarre.” Not only did the South receive military help from the U.S., but it also received “Western civilization, technology and capital,” he said, adding that most Korean college professors were educated at American universities.

Leading a U.S. “Presidential Mission” to the ceremonies were Veterans Affairs Secretary Togo West Jr. and Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.), a Korean War veteran who was traveling with 13 former members of the 503rd Field Artillery Battalion, an all-black unit. Most of their comrades were among the nearly 37,000 U.S. forces killed in the war.

Rangel, now 70, was posted at an Army base in Washington state when his unit was sent to Korea in 1950.

“We didn’t have the slightest clue where Korea was, much less the distinctions between the north and south of this peninsula,” he said Saturday in Seoul.

In a bloody battle in 1950 at Kunu Ri in the North, the battalion lost all its equipment and half its 600 men when it was surrounded and massacred by North Korean and Chinese soldiers.

“How we survived is a miracle,” Rangel said.

Before the summit, Rangel had asked permission of North Korea’s representative to the United Nations to visit the Kunu Ri site, but he was turned down.

Asked if he was disappointed that the South Korean commemoration had been toned down, Rangel said: “When countries at war for 50 years concentrate on peace rather than war, then the olive leaves and doves of peace are more important than parades and the display of military power. . . . If this takes us closer to peace and avoidance of loss of life, then that’s where we want to be.”