SEPTEMBER
6, 2017
The
US and North Korea are on the brink of hostilities that if begun would almost
certainly lead to a nuclear exchange. This is the expressed judgment of
most competent observers. They differ over the causes of this
confrontation and over the size, range and impact of the weapons that would be
fired, but no one can doubt that even a “limited” nuclear exchange would have
horrifying effects throughout much of the world including North America.
So
how did we get to this point, what are we now doing and what could be done to
avoid what would almost certainly be the disastrous consequences of even a
“limited” nuclear war?
The
media is replete with accounts of the latest pronouncements and events, but
both in my personal experience in the closest we ever came to a nuclear
disaster, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and from studying many other “flash
points,” I have learned that failure to appreciate the background and sequence
of events makes one incapable of understanding the present and so is apt to
lead to self-defeating actions. With this warning in mind, I will recount
in Part 1 how we and the Koreans got to where we are. Then in Part 2, I
will address how we might go to war, what that would mean and what we can do to
stay alive.
*
* *
Throughout
most of its history, Korea regarded China as its teacher. It borrowed
from China Confucianism, its concepts of law, its canons of art and its method
of writing. For these, it usually paid tribute to the Chinese emperor.
With
Japan, relations were different. Armed with the then weapon of mass
destruction, the musket, Japan invaded Korea in 1592 and occupied it with more
than a quarter of a million soldiers. The Koreans, armed only with bows
and arrows, were beaten into submission. But, because of events in Japan,
and particularly the decision to give up the gun, the Japanese withdrew in less
than a decade and left Korea on its own.
Nominally
unified under one kingdom, Korean society was already divided between the Puk-in or
“people of the North” and the Nam-in or “people of the
South.” How significant this division was in practical politics is
unclear, but apparently it played a role in thwarting attempts at reform and in
keeping the country isolated from outside influences. It also weakened
the country and facilitated the second intrusion of the Japanese. In search of
iron ore for their nascent industry, they “opened” the country in 1876.
Hot on the Japanese trail came the Americans who established diplomatic
relations with the Korean court in 1882.
American
missionaries, most of whom doubled as merchants, followed the flag.
Christianity often came in the guise of commerce.
Missionary-merchants lived apart from Koreans in segregated
American-style towns, much as the British had done in India earlier in the
century. They seldom met with the natives except to trade. Unlike their
counterparts in the Middle East, the Americans were not noted for “good
works.” They spent more time selling goods than teaching English,
repairing bodies or proselytizing; so while Koreans admired their wares all but
a few clung to Confucian ways.
It
was to China rather than to America that Koreans turned for protection against
the Japanese “rising sun.” As they grew more powerful and began their
outward thrust, the Japanese moved to end the Korean relationship to
China. In 1894, they invaded Korea, captured its king and installed
a “friendly” government. Then, as a sort of byproduct of their 1904-1905 war
with Russia, they seized control, and, in accord with the policies of all
Western governments, they took up “the White Man’s burden.” American
politicians and statesmen, led by Theodore Roosevelt, found it both inevitable
and beneficial that Japan turned Korea into a colony. For the next 35
years, the Japanese ruled Korea much as the British ruled India and the French
ruled Algeria.
If
the Japanese were brutal, as they certainly were, and exploitive, as they also
were, so were the other colonial powers. And, like other colonial
peoples, as they gradually became politically sensitive, the Koreans began to
react. Over time, they saw the Japanese intruders not as the carriers of
the “white man’s burden” but as themselves the burden. Some reacted by
fleeing. Best known among them was Syngman Rhee. Converted to Christianity by
American missionaries, he went West. After a torturous career as an
exile, he was allowed by the American military authorities at the end of the
Second World War to become (South) Korea’s first president. But most of those
who fled the Japanese found havens in Russian-influenced Manchuria.
The best known of these “Eastern” exiles, Kim Il-sung, became an
anti-Japanese guerrilla and joined the Communist Party. At the same time
Syngman Rhee arrived in the American-controlled South, Kim Il-sung
became the leader of the Soviet-supported North. There he founded the
ruling “dynasty” of which his grandson Kim Jong-un is the current leader.
During
the 35 years of Japanese occupation, no one in the West paid much attention to
Syngman Rhee or his hopes for the future of Korea, but the Soviet government
was more attentive to Kim Il-Sung. While distant Britain, France and
America played no active role, the near-by Soviet Union, with a long frontier
with Japanese-held territory, had to concern itself with Korea.
It
was not so much from strategy or the perception of danger that Western policy
(and Soviet acquiescence to it) evolved. Driven in part by sentiment,
America forced a change in the tone of relations with the colonial world during
the Second World War and, driven by the need to appease America, Britain and
France acquiesced. It was the tide of war, rather than any preconceived plan,
that swept Korea into the widely scattered and ill-defined group of “emerging”
nations.
As
heir to the dreams of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed that
colonial peoples deserved to be free. Korea was to benefit from the great
liberation of the Second World War. So it was that on December 1, 1943,
the United States, Britain and (then Nationalist) China agreed at the Cairo
Conference to apply the revolutionary words of the 1941 Atlantic Charter:
“Mindful of the enslavement of the people of Korea,” Roosevelt and a reluctant
Churchill proclaimed, they “are determined that in due course Korea shall
become free and independent.” At the April-June 1945 San Francisco
conference, where the United Nations was founded, Korea got little attention,
but a vague arrangement was envisaged in which Korea would be put under a
four-power (American, British, Chinese and Soviet) trusteeship. This policy was
later affirmed at the Potsdam Conference on July 26, 1945 and was agreed to by
the Soviet Union on August 8 when it declared war on Japan. Two days later
Russian troops fanned out over the northern area. It was not until almost
a month later, on September 8, that the first contingents of the US Army
arrived.
Up
to that point, most Koreans could do little to effect their own liberation:
those inside Korea were either in prison, lived in terror that they soon would
be arrested or collaborated with the Japanese. The few who had reached
havens in the West, like Syngman Rhee, found that while they were allowed to
speak, no one with the power to help them listened to their voices. They
were to be liberated but not helped to liberate themselves. It was only the
small groups of Korean exiles in Soviet-controlled areas who actually fought
their Japanese tormentors. Thus it was that the Communist-led Korean
guerrilla movement began to play a role similar to insurgencies in Indochina,
the Philippines and Indonesia.
As
they prepared to invade Korea, neither the Americans nor the Russians evinced
any notion of the difference between the Puk-in or “people of
the North” and the Nam-in or “people of the South.” They were
initially concerned, as least in their agreements with one another as they had
been in Germany, by the need to prevent the collision of their advancing
armed forces. The Japanese, however, treated the two zones that had been
created by this ad hoc military decision separately. As a Soviet army
advanced, the Japanese realized that they could not resist, but they
destroyed as much of the infrastructure of the north as they could while
fleeing to the south. On reaching the south, both the soldiers and the
civil servants cooperated at least initially with the incoming American
forces. Their divergent actions suited both the Russians and the
Americans — the Russians were intent on driving out the Japanese while the
Americans were already beginning the process of forgiving them. What
happened in this confused period set much of the shape of Korea down to the
present day.
The
Russians appear to have had a long-range policy toward Korea and the
Communist-led insurgent force to implement it, but it was only slowly, and
reluctantly, that the Americans developed a coherent plan for “their” Korea and
found natives who could implement it. What happened was partly ideological and
partly circumstantial. It is useful and perhaps important to emphasize
the main points:
The
first point is that the initial steps of what became the Cold War had already
been taken and were quickly reinforced. Although the Yalta
Conference included the agreement that Japan would be forced to surrender
to all the allies, not just to the United States and China,
President Truman set out a different American policy without consulting
Stalin. Buoyed by the success of the test of the atomic bomb on July 16,
1945, he decided that America would set the terms of the Pacific war
unilaterally; Stalin reacted by speeding up his army’s attack on Japanese-held
Korea and Manchuria. He was intent on creating “facts on the ground.”
Thus it was that the events of July and August 1945 anchored the policies – and
the interpretations of the war — of each great power. They shaped today’s
Korea.
Arguments
ever since have focused on the justifications for the policies of each Power.
For many years, Americans have argued that it was the atomic bomb attack on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, not the threat or actuality of the
Soviet invasion, that forced the Japanese to surrender.
In
the official American view, it was America that won the war in the Pacific.
Island by island from Guadalcanal, American soldiers had marched, sailed
and flown toward the final island, Japan. From nearby islands and from aircraft
carriers, American planes bombed and burned its cities and factories.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the final blows in a long, painful and costly
process. Truman held that the Russians appeared only after the Japanese
were defeated. Thus, he felt justified – and empowered — to act alone on Japan.
So when General Douglas MacArthur arranged the ceremony of surrender on
September 2, he sidelined the Russians. The procedure took place on an
American battleship under an American flag. A decade was to pass before
the USSR formally ended its war with Japan.
The
second crucial point iswhat was happening on the peninsula of Korea.
There a powerful Russian army was present in the North and an American army was
in control of the South. The decisions of Cairo, San Francisco and
Potsdam were as far from Korea as the high-flown sentiments of the statesmen
were from the realities, dangers and opportunities on the scene. What America
and the Soviet Union did on the ground was crucial for an understanding of
Korea today.
As
the Dutch set about doing in Indonesia, the French were doing in
Indochina and the Americans were doing in the Philippines, the American
military authorities in their part of Korea pushed aside the nationalist
leaders (whom the Japanese had just released from prison) and insisted on
retaining all power in their own (military) government. They knew almost
nothing about (but were inherently suspicious of) the anti-Japanese Koreans who
set themselves up as the “People’s Republic.” On behalf of the US, General
John Hodge rejected the self-proclaimed national government and declared that
the military government was the only authority in the American-controlled zone.
Hodge
also announced that the “existing Japanese administration would continue in
office temporarily to facilitate the occupation” just as the Dutch in Indonesia
continued to use Japanese troops to control the Indonesian public. But
the Americans quickly realized how unpopular this arrangement was and by
January 1946 they had dismantled the Japanese regime. In the ensuing
chaos dozens of groups with real but often vague differences formed themselves
into parties and began to demand a role in Korean affairs. This
development alarmed the American military governor. Hodge’s objective,
understandably, was order and security. The local politicians appeared
unable to offer either, and in those years, the American military
government imprisoned tens of thousands of political activists.
Although
not so evident in the public announcements, the Americans were already
motivated by fear of the Russians and their actual or possible local
sympathizers and Communists. Here again, Korea reminds one of Indochina,
the Philippines and Indonesia. Wartime allies became peacetime
enemies. At least in vitro, the Cold War had already begun.
At
just the right moment, virtually as a deux ex machina,
Syngman Rhee appeared on the scene. Reliably and vocally anti-Communist,
American-oriented, and, although far out of touch with Korean affairs,
ethnically Korean, he was just what the American authorities wanted. He
gathered the rightist groups into a virtual government that was to grow into an
actual government under the US aegis.
Meanwhile,
the Soviet authorities faced no similar political or administrative
problems. They had available the prototype of a Korean government.
This government-to-become already had a history: thousands of
Koreans had fled to Manchuria to escape Japanese rule and, when Japan carried
the war to them by forming the puppet state they called Manchukuo in 1932, some
of the refugees banded together to launch a guerrilla war. The
Communist Party inspired and assumed leadership of this insurgency. Then as all
insurgents – from Tito to Ho Chi-minh to Sukarno — did, they proclaimed
themselves a government-in-exile. The Korean group was ready,
when the Soviet invasion made it possible, to become the nucleus of the
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). The USSR recognized it as
the sole government of (all) Korea in September 1948. And, despite its
crude and often brutal method of rule, it acquired a patina of legitimacy by
its years of armed struggle against the Japanese.
*
* *
Both
the USSR and the US viewed Korea as their outposts. They first tried to
work out a deal to divide authority among themselves. But they admitted
failure on December 2, 1945. The Russians appeared to expect the failure
and hardly reacted, but the Americans sought the help of the United Nations in
formalizing their position in Korea. At their behest, the UN formed the
“Temporary Commission on Korea.” It was supposed to operate in all of
Korea, but the Russians regarded it as an American operation and excluded it
from the North. After a laborious campaign, it managed to supervise
elections but only in the south, in May 1948. The elections resulted in
the formation on August 15 of a government led by Syngman Rhee. In
response, a month later on September 9, the former guerrilla leader, Communist
and Soviet ally Kim Il-sung, proclaimed the state of North Korea. Thus,
the ad hoc arrangement to prevent the collision of two armies morphed into two
states.
The
USSR had a long history with Kim Il-sung and the leadership of the North.
It had discretely supported the guerrilla movement in Manchukuo (aka Manchuria)
and presumably had vetted the Communist leadership through the purges of the
1930s and closely observed them during the war. The survivors were, by
Soviet criteria, reliable men. So it was possible for the Russians to
take a low profile in North Korean affairs. Unlike the Americans, they felt
able to withdraw their army in 1946. Meanwhile, of course, their attention was
focused on the much more massive tide of the revolution in China. Korea must
have seemed something of a sideshow.
The
position of the United States was different in almost every aspect.
First, there was no long-standing, pro-American or ideologically
democratic cadre in the South. The leading figure, as I have mentioned, was
Syngman Rhee. While Kim Il-sung was a dedicated Communist, Rhee was certainly
not a believer in democracy. But ideology aside, Rhee was deeply
influenced by contacts with Americans. Missionaries saved his eyesight
(after smallpox), gave him a basic Western-style education, employed him and
converted him to Christianity. Probably also influenced by them, as a young man
he had involved himself in protests against Korean backwardness, corruption and
failure to resist Japanese colonialism. His activities landed him in
prison when he was 22 years of age. After four years of what appears to have
been a severe regime, he was released and in 1904 made his way into exile in
America.
Remarkably
for a young man of no particular distinction – although he was proud of a
distant relationship to the Korean royal family – he was at least received if
not listened to by President Theodore Roosevelt. Ceremonial or
perfunctory meetings with other American leaders followed over the years. The
American leaders with whom he met did not consider Korea of much importance and
even if they had so considered it, Rhee had nothing to offer them. So I
infer that his forty-year wanderings from one university to the next (BA in
George Washington University, MA in Harvard and PhD in Princeton) and work in
the YMCA and other organizations were a litany of frustrations.
It
was America’s entry into the war in 1941 that gave Rhee the opportunity he had
long sought: he convinced President Franklin Roosevelt to espouse at
least nominally the cause of Korean independence. Roosevelt’s kind words
probably would have little effect — as Rhee apparently realized. To give
them substance, he worked closely with the OSS (the ancestor of the CIA) and
developed contacts with the American military chiefs. Two months after the
Japanese surrender in 1945, he was flown back to Korea at the order of General
Douglas MacArthur.
Establishing
himself in Seoul, he led groups of right wing Koreans to oppose every attempt
at cooperation with the Soviet Union and particularly focused on opposition to
the creation of a state of North Korea. For those more familiar with
European history, he might be considered to have aspired to the role played in
Germany by Konrad Adenauer. To play a similar role, Rhee made
himself “America’s man.” But he was not able to do what Adenauer could do
in Germany nor could he provide for America: an ideologically controlled
society and the makings of a unified state like Kim Il-sung was able to give
the Soviet Union. But, backed by the American military government
and overtly using democratic forms, Rhee was elected on a suspicious return of
92.3% of the vote to be president of the newly proclaimed Republic of Korea.
Rhee’s
weakness relative to Kim had two effects: the first was that while Soviet
forces could be withdrawn from the North in 1946, America felt unable to
withdraw its forces from the South. They have remained ever since.
And the second effect was that while Rhee tried to impose upon his society an
authoritarian regime, similar to the one imposed on the North, he was unable to
do so effectively and at acceptable cost.. The administration he partly inherited
was largely dependent upon men who had served the Japanese as soldiers and
police. He was tarred with their brush. It put aside the positive
call of nationalism for the negative warning of anti-Communism. Instead of
leadership, it relied on repression. Indeed, it engaged in a brutal
repression which resembled that of North Korea but which, unlike the North
Korean tyranny, was widely publicized. Resentment in South Korea against
Rhee and his regime soon grew to the level of a virtual insurgency. Rhee
may have been the darling of America but he was unloved in Korea. That
was the situation when the Korean war began.
The
Korean war technically began on June 25,1950, but of course the process began
before the first shots were fired. Both Syngman Rhee and Kim Il-sung were
determined to reunite Korea, each on his own terms. Rhee had publicly
spoken on the “need” to invade the North to reunify the peninsula; the
Communist government didn’t need to make public pronouncements, but events on
the ground must have convinced Kim Il-sung that the war had already begun.
Along the dividing line, according to one American scholar of Korea, Professor
John Merrill, large numbers of Koreans had already been wounded or killed
before the “war” began.
The
event that appears to have precipitated the full-scale war was the declaration
by Syngman Rhee’s government of the independence of the South. If allowed
to stand, that action as Kim Il-sung clearly understood, would have prevented
unification. He regarded it as an act of war. He was ready for war.
He had used his years in power to build one of the largest armies in the world
whereas the army of the South had been bled by the Southern rulers. Kim Il-sung
must have known in detail the corruption, disorganization and weakness of
Rhee’s administration. As the English journalist and commentator on Korea
Max Hastings reported, Rhee’s entourage was engaged in a massive theft of
public resources and revenues. Money intended by the foreign donors to
build a modern state was siphoned off to foreign bank accounts; “ghost
soldiers,” the military equivalent of Gogol’s Dead Souls, who
existed only on army records, were paid salaries which the senior officers
pocketed while the relatively few actual soldiers went unpaid and even unclothed,
unarmed and unfed. Bluntly put, Rhee offered Kim an opportunity he could
not refuse.
We
now know, but then did not, that Stalin was not in favor of the attack by the
North and agreed to it only if China, by then a fellow Communist-led state,
took responsibility. What “responsibility” really meant was not clear,
but it proved sufficient to tip Kim Il-sung into action. He
ordered his army to invade the South. Quickly crossing the
demarcation line, his soldiers pushed south. Far better disciplined and
motivated, they took Seoul within three days, on June 28.
Syngman
Rhee proclaimed a fight to the death but, in fact, he and his inner circle had
already fled. They were quickly followed by thousands of soldiers of the
Southern army. Many of those who did not flee, defected to the
North.
Organized
by the United States, the UN Security Council – taking advantage of the absence
of the Soviet delegation — voted on June 27, just before the fall of Seoul, to
create a force to protect the South. Some 21 countries led by the
United States furnished about three million soldiers to defend the South. They
countries like Thailand, South Vietnam and Turkey with their own problems of
insurgency, but most of the fighting was done by American forces. They
were driven south and nearly off the Korean peninsula by Kim Il-sung’s
army. The American troops were ill-equipped and nearly always
outnumbered. The fighting was bitter and casualties were high. By
late August, they held only a tenth of what had been the Republic of Korea,
just the southern province around the city of Pusan.
Wisely
analyzing the actual imbalance of the American-backed southern forces and the
apparently victorious forces commanded by Kim Il-sung, the Chinese statesman
Zhou Enlai ordered his military staff to guess what the Americans could be
expected to do: negotiate, withdraw or try to break out of their foothold at
Pusan. The staff reported that the Americans would certainly mobilize
their superior potential power to counterattack. To guard against intrusion
into China, Zhou convinced his colleagues to move military forces up to
the Chinese-Korean frontier and convinced the Soviet government to give the
North Koreans air support. What was remarkable was that Zhou’s staff
exactly predicted what the Americans would do and where they would do it. Led
by General MacArthur, the Americans made a skillful and bold
counterattack. Landing at Incheon on September 15, they cut the bulk of
the Northern army off from their bases. The operation was a brilliant
military success.
But,
like many brilliant military actions, it developed a life of its own.
MacArthur, backed by American Secretary of State Dean Acheson and General
George Marshall and ordered by President Truman, decided to move north to implement
Syngman Rhee’s program to unify Korea. Beginning on September 25,
American forces recaptured Seoul, virtually destroyed the surrounded
North Korean army and on October 1 crossed the 38th parallel.
With little to stop them, they then pushed ahead toward the Yalu river on the
Chinese frontier. That move frightened both the Soviet and Chinese
governments which feared that the wave of victory would carry the American into
their territories. Stalin held back, refusing to commit Soviet forces,
but he reminded the Chinese of their “responsibility” for Korea.
In
response, the Chinese hit on a novel ploy. They sent a huge armed
force, some 300,000 men to stop the Americans but, to avoid at least formally
and directly a clash with America, they categorized it as an irregular group of
volunteers — the “Chinese People’s Volunteer Army.” Beginning
on October 25. the lightly armed Chinese virtually annihilated what
remained of the South Korean army and drove the Americans out of North Korea.
Astonished
by the collapse of what had seemed a definitive victory, President Truman
declared a national emergency, and General MacArthur urged the use of 50
nuclear bombs to stop the Chinese. What would have happened then is
a matter of speculation, but what did happen was that MacArthur was replaced by
General Matthew Ridgeway who restored the balance of conventional forces.
Drearily, the war rolled on.
During
this period and for the next two years, the American air force carried out
massive bombing sorties. Some of the bombing was meant to destroy the
Chinese and North Korean ability to keep fighting, but Korea is a small
territory and what began as “surgical strikes” grew into carpet bombing. (Such
bombing would be considered a war crimeas of the
1977 Protocol I of
the Geneva
Conventions). The attacks were enormous. About 635,000
tons of high explosives and chemical weapons were dropped – that was far more
than was used against the Japanese in the Second World War. As
historian Bruce Cumings has pointed out, the US Air Force found that “three
years of ‘rain and ruin’” had inflicted greater damage on Korean cities “than
German and Japanese cities firebombed during World War II.” The north
Korean capital Pyongyang was razed and General Curtis LeMay thought American
bombings caused the deaths of about 20% — one in each five — North Koreans.
LeMay’s
figure, horrifying as it is, needs to be borne in mind today. Start with
the probability that it is understated. Canadian economist Michel
Chossudovsky has written that LeMay’s estimate of 20% should be revised to
nearly 33% or roughly one Korean in each three killed. He goes on to
point to a remarkable comparison: in the Second World War, the British
had lost less than 1% of their population, France lost 1.35%, China lost 1.89%
and the US only a third of one percent. Put another way, Korea suffered roughly
thirty times as many people killed in 37 months of American carpet
bombing as these other countries lost in all the years of the Second World War.
In all, 8-9 million Koreans were killed. Whole families
were wiped out and practically no families alive in Korea today are without
close relatives who perished. Virtually every building in the North was
destroyed. What General LeMay said in another context – “bombing them back to
the Stone Age” – was literally effected in Korea. The only survivors were
those who holed up in caves and tunnels.
Memories
of those horrible days, weeks and months of fear, pain and death seared the
memories of the survivors, and according to most observers they constitute the
underlying mindset of hatred and fear so evident among North Koreans
today. They will condition whatever negotiations America attempts with
the North.
*
* *
Finally,
after protracted battles on the ground and daily or hourly assaults from the
sky, the North Koreans agreed to negotiate a ceasefire. Actually achieving it
took two years.
The
most significant points in the agreement were that (first) there would be two
Koreas divided by a demilitarized zone essentially on what had been the line
drawn along the 38th parallel to keep the invading Soviet and
American armies from colliding and (second) article 13(d) of the agreement
specified that no new weapons other than replacements would be introduced
on the peninsula. That meant that all parties agreed not to introduce
nuclear and other “advanced” weapons.
What
needs to be remembered in order to understand future events is that, in
effect, the ceasefire created not two but three Koreas:
The
North set about recovering from devastation. It had to dig
out from under the rubble and it chose to continue to be a
garrison state. It was certainly a dictatorship, like the Soviet Union,
China, North Vietnam and Indonesia, but close observers thought that the regime
was supported by the people. Most observers found that the memory of the war,
and particularly of the constant bombing, created a sense of embattlement that
unified the country against the Americans and the regime of the South.. Kim
Il-sung was able to stifle such dissent as arose. He did so brutally. No
one can judge for certain, but there is reason to believe that a sense of
embattled patriotism remains alive today.
The
South was much less harmed by the war than the North and, with large injections
of aid and investment from Japan and America, it started on the road to a remarkable
prosperity. Perhaps in part because of these two factors – relatively
little damage from the war and growing prosperity – its politics was
volatile. To contain it and stay in power, Syngman Rhee’s government
imposed martial law, altered the constitution, rigged elections, opened fire on
demonstrators and even executed leaders of the opposing party. We rightly
deplore the oppression of the North, but humanitarian rights investigations
showed little difference between the Communist/Confucian North and the
Capitalist/Christian South. Syngman Rhee’s tactics were not less brutal than
those of Kim Il-sung. Employing them, Rhee managed another
electoral victory in 1952 and a third in 1960. He won the 1960 election
with a favorable vote officially registered to be 90%. Not surprisingly,
he was accused of fraud. The student organizations regarded his
manipulation as the “last straw” and, having no other recourse, took to the
streets. Just ahead of a mob converging on his palace — much like the
last day of the government of South Vietnam a few years later — he was hustled
out of Seoul by the CIA to an exile in Honolulu.
The
third Korea, the American “Korea,” would have been only notional except for the
facts that it occupied a part of the South (the southern perimeter of the
demilitarized zone and various bases elsewhere), had ultimate control of
the military forces of the South (it was authorized to take command of them in
the event of war ) and, as the British had done in Egypt, Iraq and India,
it “guided” the native government it had fostered. Its military forces
guaranteed the independence of the South and at least initially, the United
States paid about half the costs of the government and sustained its economy.
At the same time, the United States sought to weaken the North by imposing
embargos. It kept the North on edge by carrying what the North regarded
as threatening maneuvers on its frontier and, from time to time, as President
Bill Clinton did in 1994 (and President Donald Trump is now doing), threatened
a devastating preemptive strike. The Defense Department and the Joint
Chiefs of Staff also developed OPLN 5015, one of a succession of secret plans
whose intent, in the words of commentator Michael Peck, was “to destroy North
Korea.”
And,
in light of America’s worry about nuclear weapons in Korea, we have to confront
the fact that it was America that introduced them. In June 1957, the US
informed the North Koreans that it would no longer abide by Paragraph 13(d) of
the armistice agreement that forbade the introduction of new weapons. A
few months later, in January 1958 it set up nuclear-tipped missiles capable of
reaching Moscow and Peking. It kept them there until 1991. It
wanted to reintroduce them in 2013 but the then South Korean Prime Minister
Chung Hong-won refused. As I will later mention South Korea joined the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1975, and North Korea joined in 1985. But
South Korea covertly violated it from 1982 to 2000 and North Korea first
violated the provisions in 1993 and then withdrew from it in 2003. North
Korea conducted its first underground nuclear test in 2006.
There
is little moral high ground for any one of the “three Koreas.”
*
* *
New
elections were held in the South and what was known as the Second Republic was
created in 1960 under what had been the opposition party. It let loose
the pent-up anger over the tyranny and corruption of Syngman Rhee’s government
and moved to purge the army and security forces. Some 4,000 men lost
their jobs and many were indicted for crimes. Fearing for their jobs and
their lives s they found a savior in General Park Chung-hee who led the
military to a coup d’état on May 16, 1961.
General
Park was best known for having fought the guerrillas led by Kim Il-sung as an
officer in the Japanese “pacification force” in Manchukuo. During that
period of his life, he even replaced his Korean name with a Japanese
name. As president, he courted Japan. Restoring diplomatic
relations, he also promoted the massive Japanese investment that jump-started
Korean economic development. With America he was even more forthcoming.
In return for aid, and possibly because of his close involvement with the
American military – he studied at the Command and General Staff school at Fort
Sill – he sent a quarter of a million South Korean troops to fight under
American command in Vietnam.
Not
less oppressive than Rhee’s government, Park’s government was a dictatorship.
To protect his rule, he replaced civilian officials by military officers.
Additionally, he formed a secret government within the formal government; known
as the Korean Central Intelligence Agency it operated like the Gestapo.
It routinely arrested, imprisoned and tortured Koreans suspected of opposition.
And, in October 1972, Park rewrote the constitution to give himself virtual
perpetual power. He remained in office for 16 years. In response to
oppression and despite the atmosphere of fear, large scale protests broke out
against his rule. It was not, however, a public uprising that ended his
rule: his chief of intelligence assassinated him in 1979.
An
attempt to return to civilian rule was followed within a week by a new military
coup d’état. The protests that followed were quickly put down and
thousands more were arrested. A confused scramble for power then
ensued out of which in 1987 a Sixth Republic was announced and one of the
members of the previous military junta became president. The new
president Roh Tae-woo undertook a policy of conciliation with the North and
under the warming of relations both North and South joined the UN in September
1991. They also agreed to denuclearization of the peninsula.
But, as often happens, the easing of suppressive rule caused the
“reformer” to fall. Roh and another former president were arrested, tried and
sentenced to prison for a variety of crimes — but not for their role in
anti-democratic politics. Koreans remained little motivated by more than the
overt forms of democracy.
Relations
between the North and the South over the next few years bounced from finger on
the trigger to hand outstretched. The final attempt to bring order to the
South came when Park Geun-hye was elected in 2013, She was the daughter of
General Park Chung-hee who, as we have seen, had seized power in a
coup d’état 1963 and was president of South Korea for 16 years. Park
Geun-hye, was the first women to become head of a state in east Asia. A
true daughter of her father, she ruled with an iron hand, but like other
members of the ruling group, she far overplayed her hand and was convicted of
malfeasance and forced out of office in March 2017.
Meanwhile
in the North, as Communist Party head, Prime Minister from 1948 to 1972 and
president from 1972 to his death in 1994, Kim Il-sung ruled North Korea for
nearly half a century. His policy for his nation was a sort of throw-back
to the ancient Korean ideal of isolation. Known as juche, it
emphasized self-reliance. The North was essentially an agrarian society
and, unlike the South which from the 1980 welcomed foreign investment and
aid, it remained closed. Initially, this policy worked well: up to
the end of the 1970s, North Korea was relatively richer than the south, but
then the south raced ahead with what amounted to an industrial revolution.
Surprisingly,
Kim Il-sung shared with Syngman Rhee a Protestant Christian youth; indeed, Kim
said that his grandfather was a Presbyterian minister. But the more
important influence on his life was the brutal Japanese occupation. Such
information as we have is shaped by official pronouncements and amount to a
paean. But, probably, like many of the Asian nationalists, as a very
young man he took part in demonstrations against the occupying power.
According to the official account, by the time he was seventeen, he had
spent time in a Japanese prison.
At
nineteen, in 1931, he joined the Chinese Communist Party and a few years later
became a member of its Manchurian fighting group. Hunted down by
the Japanese and such of their Korean collaborators as Park Chung-hee, Kim
crossed into Russian territory and was inducted into the Soviet
army in which he served until the end of the Second World War. Then, as
the Americans did with Syngman Rhee, the Russians installed him as head of the
provisional government.
From
the first days of his coming to power, Kim Il-sung focused on the acquisition
of military power. Understandably from his own experience, he
emphasized training it in informal tactics, but as the Soviet Union began
to provide heavy equipment, he pushed his officers into conventional military
training under Russian drillmasters. By the time he had decided to invade
South Korea, the army was massive, armed on a European standard and well
organized. Almost every adult Korean man was or had been serving in
it. The army had virtually become the state. This allocation of
resources, as the Korean war made clear, resulted in a powerful striking force
but a weakened economy. It also caused Kim’s Chinese supporters to
decide to push him aside. How he survived his temporary demotion is not
known, but in the aftermath of the ceasefire, he was again seen to be firmly in
control of the Communist Party and the North Korean state.
The
North Korean state, as we have seen, had virtually ceased to exist under the bombing
attack. Kim could hope for little help to rebuild it from abroad and
sought even less. His policy of self-reliance and militarization were
imposed on the country. On the Soviet model of the 1930s, he launched a
draconian five-year plan in which virtually all economic resources were
nationalized. In the much-publicized Sino-Soviet split, he first sided
with the Chinese but, disturbed by the Chinese Cultural Revolution, he
swung back to closer relations with the Soviet Union. In effect, the two neighboring
powers had to be his poles. His policy of independence was influential
but could not be decisive. To underpin his rule and presumably in part to
build the sense of independence of his people, he developed an elaborate
personality cult. That propaganda cult survived him. When he died
in 1994 at 82 years of age, his body was preserved in a glass case where it
became the object of something like a pilgrimage.
Unusually
for a Communist regime, Kim Il-sung was followed by his son Kim Jong-Il.
Kim Jong-Il continued most of his father’s policies, which toward the end of
his life, had moved haltingly toward a partial accommodation with South
Korea and the United States. He was faced with a devastating drought in
2001 and sequential famine that was said to have starved some 3 million
people. Perhaps seeking to disguise the impact of this famine, he
abrogated the armistice and sent troops into the demilitarized zone.
However, intermittent moves including creating a partly extra-territorialized
industrial enclave for foreign trade, were made to better relations with the
south.
Then,
in January 2002, President George Bush made his “Axis of Evil Speech” in which
he demonized North Korea. Thereafter, North Korea withdrew from the 1992
agreement with the South to ban nuclear weapons and announced that it had
enough weapons-grade plutonium to make about 5 or 6 nuclear weapons. Although
he was probably incapacitated by a stroke in August 2008, his condition was
hidden as long as possible while preparations were made for succession.
He died in December 2011 and was followed by his son Kim Jong-un.
With
this thumbnail sketch of events up to the coming to power of Kim Jong-un and
Donald Trump, I turn in Part 2 of this essay to the dangerous situation
in which our governments – and all of us individually — find ourselves today.
To
be continued.
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