KJ
Selections
SOUTH
OF THE BORDER
Consumed by Divisions
By Donald Kirk, from KJ
#60 [Drawings by Kim Song-hwan]
The two demonstrations I watched in the chills of early winter both
espoused causes that seemed undeniably just.
The first was in central Seoul, on the pavement near the Kwangwhamun
crossing, down a sweeping avenue from the gaping wooden gate that opens
onto the square in front of Kyongbuk palace, the renovated former residence
of Korean kings. Fewer than a hundred people carried signs, some in
English, protesting the stubborn insistence of Chinese authorities on
sending North Korean refugees back to face torture, imprisonment and
possible death. The demonstrators had wanted to carry on in front of
the Chinese embassy, but the police had said no and they had scrupulously
followed the rules. They had no notion of challenging Korean authority,
just a determination to make their views known to Koreans and to Chinese
and perhaps to make a difference, to embarrass South Korean leaders
into reconsidering their policy of reconciliation toward North Korea
— and to embarrass the Chinese into softening their harsh policy
toward refugees, viewed by China as “economic migrants,”
nothing more.
The demonstration attracted little more than curious stares. There were
no crowds, no spontaneous cheers, not enough activists on hand to justify
the effort. A number of the more influential personalities in the quest
for “human rights” in the North had stayed away, disdaining
the organizers, wanting to promote their own protests, a typical Korean
split among people who one would have thought were united in common
cause.
A day later,
in front of the great domed National Assembly Building on Yoido, the
long island of government offices, investment firms and high-priced
apartment blocks bounded by the Han River that roughly divides Seoul,
I watched a demonstration of a very different sort. Hundreds of young
people massed on a broad sidewalk beside tents displaying exhibits said
to represent the torture techniques employed during the presidency of
Park Chung Hee, who seized power in 1961 and ruled for 18 years until
his assassination by his intelligence chief in October 1979. There were
tiny barred cells — models of those in which prisoners had been
held without food and water. There were boards onto which prisoners
were strapped. There were electrical cords and whips — and written
descriptions of the ways in which Park and his successor, Chun Doo Hwan,
the general who seized power less than two months after Park’s
death, used them all to kill and maim their foes.
The message, shouted out and sung by the demonstrators, led by a succession
of speakers, was that the Assembly should totally repeal the infamous
National Security Law, invoked by Korea’s military leaders to
crack down on their opponents. The purpose of the law had been to block
out North Korean propaganda, espionage and subversion in the South,
but Park and Chun had had no compunctions about exploiting it as a tool
to silence domestic critics.
There was
no doubt as to which of the demos was the more impassioned, which inspired
the most debate, or reflected the deeper emotions. Refugees from North
Korea could tell all the tales they wished of unimaginable suffering,
of starvation and disease, public executions, hangings and shootings,
but to most South Koreans these stories were remote, of little interest,
someone else’s nightmares, yarns they tended to skim whenever
they saw them reported in the papers. When I asked demonstrators campaigning
for repeal of the National Security Law why they never raised their
voices in protest against torture and killing in North Korea, the answers
were always the same — so similar, in fact, that they might have
been taken from a textbook on what to say when asked. “We have
no proof of what goes on in North Korea,” said one young protester.
“We will know only after the Americans have gone home and we are
one country again.” On the highest level, then-President Kim Dae
Jung offered his usual rote response when I posed the question during
an interview in January 2001. First, Kim said, we have to reconcile,
to assure Kim Jong Il of our good-will — then we can persuade
the North Koreans to reform.
Korean society wraps itself in rationalizations born
of centuries of warfare, atrocities, divisions and exploitation at the
hands of marauding foreigners as well as the Koreans themselves. The
question of which is worse, subservience to a foreign power or to a
cruel home-grown despot, has 
confronted
Koreans throughout their history, never more so than in the 35 years
of Japanese colonial rule that ended only with the Japanese surrender
on August 15, 1945. It is a date celebrated by both Koreas as their
national day, but the North has long since obliterated any reminders
of the American war against Japan. Histories and monuments throughout
North Korea memorialize the struggle of Korean guerrillas led by Kim
Il Sung against the Japanese in Manchuria, raising to mythic levels
whatever he did from his base in Khabarovsk, where the Russians sequestered
him as a major in the Soviet army while waiting to send him back to
Korea. In the South, denigration of the U.S. role takes the form not
of rewriting history but of ignoring it — another form of revisionism
and denial. In the face of Japan, their common historical enemy, Koreans,
North and South, would prefer to harbor the mystique of their own struggle
rather than the embarrassment of reliance upon a foreign power, then,
now, or ever.
If Koreans seem to have adopted opportunistic interpretations of history,
they do so against a background of crushing threats from nations that
fought to swallow the peninsula whole rather than let it exist on its
own, as an independent entity. Fear of dismemberment, of encroachment
from all sides, of the steady shrinking of a land that once extended
deep into what later became Manchuria, permeates the Korean subconscious.
Older people in South Korea remember not only the ruination of the Korean
War but the fight afterwards to find food and work, to survive another
day. Younger South Koreans, emboldened by the trappings of the economic
miracle, have difficulty empathizing with the imprecations of their
elders, most of whom still look on the North as “the enemy,”
but they are no less nationalistic. For them, however, nationalism lies
in reunification, a revolution in outlook requiring the departure of
the American troops, whom they see as lording it over the government,
blockading Korea’s true renaissance as one nation from the Yalu
and Tumen Rivers on down to Jeju Island, the idyllic destination that
was itself the scene of a bloody communist revolt before the Korean
War.
But contradictions and divisions abound. How else does one
explain the love for Japan that is shared by many older Koreans? Theoretically,
Koreans may revere those who fought the Japanese. They may celebrate
March 1st — the anniversary of the outbreak of a short-lived revolt
against the Japanese in 1919 — as a national holiday equally as
important as August 15th, and they may curse the Japanese for forcing
hundreds of thousands of young Koreans to 
work
as slave laborers in Japan and thousands of young women to serve as
“comfort women” for Japanese forces, but they also know
that just as many thousands if not millions of Koreans worked closely
with the Japanese while they were here. The roll call of collaborators
is impressive — a famous former president of Ewha, the country’s
most prestigious women’s university, the founders of the Hyundai
and Samsung Groups and numerous other conglomerates, the founders of
the Big Three newspapers, the parents and grandparents of ministers,
ambassadors and bureaucrats — the list goes on and on, penetrating
every occupation, every corner of the country.
Probably no Korean, at least in the post-colonial period, got closer
to the Japanese than Park Chung Hee himself. A graduate of the Japan
Military Academy at Yokosuka, he served with the imperial army in Manchukuo,
as the Japanese called Manchuria, in the final year or two of World
War II as they battled the Chinese Nationalist Kuomintang as well as
the Communists, who would win it all four years after the Japanese surrender.
How could Park, the Japan-lover, have ever come to rule all South Korea,
and did he not deserve the bloody end that he met on October 26, 1979,
at the hands of the director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency?
Those questions echoed through Korea as never before with the release
this winter of a movie about Park’s assassination while two hostesses,
one a singer, the other a guitar player, were snuggling beside him in
a lavish safehouse/restaurant run by the KCIA near the Blue House, the
center of power that he himself had ordered constructed as a monument
to his rule.
In a society polarized between Park-haters and Park-lovers, the new
film raised issues that Park’s detractors want to elevate into
daily headlines — and investigations confirming their worst suspicions
about the abuses perpetrated during his 18-year rule. At the other extreme,
hard-line conservatives venerate Park as almost a folk hero, mainly
for his role in presiding over the “Korean miracle” —
the rise of South Korea from the ashes of the Korean War to a highly
competitive economic powerhouse. Less overtly, they also applaud his
tough, confrontational policy against North Korea while sneering at
the efforts of the current government, fully supported by Park’s
diehard critics, to arrive at some form of rapprochement with the North.
Would anyone a year ago have dared suggest the posthumous exoneration
of Park’s assassin, Kim Jae Kyu, executed along with three of
his confederates less than six weeks after the deed was done? The National
Intelligence Service (NIS), as the KCIA is now called, is looking into
what happened that fateful night, searching for clues and hints that
assassin Kim may have somehow been justified. The Blue House publicly
distances itself from the inquest, but members of the ruling Uri Party
make no secret of their view that there are “lingering questions”
and that now may be the time to do the unthinkable — deify as
a national “hero” the man who killed the conservatives’
champion. The film offers the perfect justification. Admittedly a “fictional”
retelling, its script has the Kim Jae Kyu character saying he must do
what he’s doing “for the sake of democracy.” That
view comes as a shock to a conservative older generation that assumes
Park’s assassin had to die even if Park himself were guilty of
annihilating his foes, ordering his loyal KCIA agents to jail, torture
and kill thousands of them. The assassin, himself humiliated by a personal
snub that showed Park had lost confidence in him and angered by Park’s
rejection of his advice to go easy on labor demonstrations, was undoubtedly
complicit in much of the abuse — a detail that is largely overlooked
in the heat of debate.
In this emotional climate of modern Korea, it is possible that the NIS
committee now reviewing and maybe rewriting history may stop short of
honoring Kim Jae Kyu. Nonetheless, some of the most notorious happenings
of that era are all coming up for a revision that reverberates through
every corner of Korean society. First of all, what really led to the
kidnapping of the dissident Kim Dae Jung, who had humiliated Park in
the 1971 presidential campaign by winning nearly half the vote despite
what he said was an assassination attempt in which his vehicle was run
off a road? What exactly led to his abduction the next year from a hotel
room in Tokyo and his boat ride to Korea, in which he was saved by the
intervention of the U.S., which demanded his release as soon as word
had spread of what was going on? These are only part of a litany of
past scandals now being disinterred, a list that also includes the jailing
and torture of members of what the government claimed were North Korean
spy rings, not to mention the mid-air explosion that sent a Korean Air
jet plunging into the Indian Ocean in 1987 with 115 people on board
— the handiwork, it was long assumed, of North Korean agents.
On the streets
of South Korean cities, though, the specter of Park Chung Hee’s
involvement in such dastardly plots against his own people is not exactly
the highest priority. The recriminations translate in the subconscious
into a sense of revulsion with government, any government, beginning
with the one now in power, under Roh Moo Hyun, who beat his conservative
rival by a narrow margin in 2002, and the one before it, under Kim Dae
Jung, who defeated the same conservative by an even slimmer margin in
1997. The fact that both Kim and Roh are reformers, that Kim initiated
the policy of reconciliation with North Korea, that Roh has battled
to carry the policy a long step further, opposing the hard-liners in
Washington, has undoubtedly done as much to offend much of the populace
as did the harsh abuses of Park and the corrupt generals who succeeded
him. Ask people what they think of Roh and the answer is almost invariably
a derisive shrug. Ask what they think of Kim Dae Jung and the answer
may be still more derisive.
But ask these critics what they would really do differently, whether
they have any better suggestions for avoiding a second Korean War, and
their response is yes, we want reconciliation — just not at such
a high price. What price, however, is the South paying — and who’s
footing the bill? The response is likely to be a list of complaints
of unequal agreements, of South Korean concessions to North Korean demands
for aid, of toadying by South Korean leaders to North Korean officials.
Try to get someone seriously recommending a policy of armed conflict,
though, and you’ll come up at most with a few calls for a strong
military as opposed to the corrupted officers and reluctant draftees
who now form the backbone of South Korea’s defense establishment.
I have yet to find any Korean, however right-wing, in favor of military
intervention as a solution to anything other than suppressing leftists.
This paradox implicit in Korean attitudes was never etched so clearly
as when North Korea said it was pulling out of the six-party talks on
its nuclear program and proudly confirmed what was already well known,
that it had made nuclear warheads. Never mind that no talks were then
going on from which to withdraw, that there had been no talks for eight
months. Never mind that North Korea had been telling visitors for more
than a year that it had revved up production at its nuclear complex
at Yongbyon. The North Korean statement, for a day or two, gave the
impression of sensational news as South Korean officials rushed to reassure
everyone that they would still provide fertilizer and rice for the North
while conservatives called for a halt to aid and a delay in the pullback
of U.S. troops in Korea.
Lost in the flurry of headlines was the question of the fate of North
Koreans. Consumed by divisions between regions, generations, income
levels, parties and corporate groups, South Koreans seem to come to
consensus only on the need for annual jumps in economic output and the
prolongation of peace. The most often-heard worst-case scenario is that
North Korean leaders, trapped like a rat in a corner, will attack in
desperation and frustration. The second worst-case scenario is that
North Korea will implode, sending millions of refugees hurtling across
the demilitarized zone into South Korea, crippling the economy, jeopardizing
the government and deepening the differences within the South. In a
society boiling with fiercely opposing views, relentless rivalries and
rampant corruption, the best-case scenario for many is the status quo
— the ultimate compromise in a body politic obsessed with peace
and prosperity while praying that North Korean nukes, like North Korea’s
suffering people, stay where they are: out of sight and mind.
KJ
contributing editor Donald Kirk first visited Korea as a newspaper correspondent
in 1972, and has been returning regularly ever since.He is the author
of hundreds of nrepaper and magazine articles on Kore as well as two
books, Korean
Dynasty: Hyundai and Chung Ju Yung, published 1994, and Korean
Crisis: Unraveling of the Miracle in the IMF Era, 2000
Website: donaldkirk.com
Him Song-hwan is one of South Korea's most famous
four-panel cartoonists. His cartoon strip "Ko Pa-u Yonggam"
appeared in the Dong-A Ilbo from
1955 to 2000
Copyright held by the author
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