50 Years Later, an Uneasy Peace

From across banquet tables laden with shrimp, roast beef and sushi, veterans peered out at a skinny North Korean soldier staring back barely 50 yards away at the military demarcation line that separates the Koreas.

The occasion today was a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the armistice that ended the Korean War. More than 2,500 people attended, most of them veterans of the 21-nation U.N. command that fought against North Korea and its Chinese ally in the war.

To many veterans, the event only underscored the futility of the three-year war that cost millions of lives, ended without a formal peace treaty and reinforced with barbed wire and land mines the division of the Koreas along the 38th parallel.

“Why can’t they come over and join us? Why can’t we have peace and not fear?” demanded 82-year-old James Cerra, a retired U.S. Air Force officer, as he gazed from the banquet room at the North Korean soldier.

“They are strange fellows, the lot of them,” grumbled Bill Hall, 74, an Australian veteran of the war. The ceremonies this morning were held at the so-called joint security area at Panmunjom, the village in the demilitarized zone where the armistice was signed July 27, 1953. It was the largest such event staged there, with veterans flying in from as far as Ethiopia and New Zealand. Many wore their medals from the war.

The most conspicuous absence, of course, were the North Koreans. Lt. Col. Steve Tharp, a senior U.S. policy officer and one of the organizers, said the North Koreans had been invited to a meeting at which they were to be invited to the celebrations. But they refused to go even to that meeting.

“It was our intention to invite them, but we were not able,” Tharp said.

The bitterness that remains between the Koreas was evident in the speeches at the ceremony. Paik Sun Yup, an 82-year-old retired general and the most celebrated South Korean hero of the war, used the occasion to criticize the leadership of the impoverished and famine-prone North.

“North Korean leader Kim Jong Il is not only going against world peace and order by producing such weapons of mass destruction as nuclear weapons ... but he is also isolating himself from the international community, turning his face away from the misery of his own people and focusing only on maintaining his dictatorship,” Paik said in an emotional address.

The U.S. organizers of the commemoration tried nonetheless to put a positive spin on the armistice.

“The armistice represents nothing short of victory,” declared Gen. Leon J. LaPorte, commanding officer of the U.S. troops now stationed in South Korea. “It was nothing short of an international stand against communism.”

The celebrations taking place this weekend, planned more than five years ago, are taking place at an inconvenient time, with tensions higher than they have been in years over North Korea’s precipitous race to build nuclear weapons.

At the same time, many South Koreans are growing restless with the 37,000 U.S. troops in their country, believing that the U.S. presence is an irritant to relations between North and South. Especially among younger people, there is a fear that the Bush administration will go after North Korea as it did Iraq, possibly triggering another Korean War more catastrophic than the first.

“We are in no mood for celebrating,” said Han Won Sang, a prominent South Korean sociologist and president of Hansung University in Seoul. “Relations between North and South are deteriorating because of the Bush doctrine of preemption.”

Several hundred South Korean demonstrators chanted antiwar and anti-American slogans Saturday outside the Korean War Memorial in Seoul, where many visiting U.S. veterans were touring. On Friday, a smaller group of students pushed its way onto a U.S. military base and burned an American flag.

The North Koreans, meanwhile, marked the anniversary by highlighting the unresolved nature of the conflict.

“The arrogant and outrageous moves of the U.S. imperialists ... are being carried into extremes,” North Korea’s army Chief of Staff Kim Yong Chun was quoted as saying in official media Saturday. North Korea “will promptly beat back any precision strike, surgical operation-style strike and preemptive nuclear attack with the powerful war deterrent force.”

The armistice, which was intended to be a temporary measure, has remained controversial among South Korean conservatives, many of whom regard it as a cowardly capitulation to communist aggression. South Korea’s wartime president, Syngman Rhee, opposed the armistice, which was signed only by the U.N. command on one side and North Korea and China on the other.

“At the time, we were not happy. We wanted to go North. We thought we could win. But Mr. Truman said no,” recalled Lee Chi Op, an 81-year-old retired South Korean officer who attended today’s event.

South Koreans’ ambivalence is evident in their muted reaction to the ceremonies this weekend. President Roh Moo Hyun did not attend the Panmunjom ceremony, although he was to dedicate a new Korean War monument later today in Seoul.

Michael Breen, a Korea expert and author, notes that South Koreans tend to mark with great fanfare the anniversary of North Korea’s invasion, June 25, 1950, which he said is “like Pearl Harbor, an event that emphasizes Korean victimhood,” but not the armistice.

“What’s there to celebrate about the armistice? It sealed the division of Korea in blood, and it was the most severe of all national divisions,” Breen said.

War historian Max Hastings, in his account of the Korean War, notes that the U.S. commander who signed the pact found the experience equally repugnant.

“I cannot find it in me to exult in this hour,” U.S. Gen. Mark Clark, the U.N. supreme commander, said in a radio broadcast afterward, according to Hastings.

In his memoirs, Clark regretted being “the first U.S. Army commander in history to sign an armistice without victory” and declared that the signing “capped my career, but was a cap without a feather.”

Among political leaders, the armistice anniversary has been an occasion to increase calls for a negotiated settlement to the increasingly dangerous standoff over North Korea’s nuclear program.

“A diplomatic solution is imperative,” said U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in a statement released Saturday. “It is also a realistic possibility.”