INDEPTH: NORTH KOREA
The Korean standoff
CBC News | April 2003
Reporter: Joe Schlesinger
Producer: Jet Belgraver
Editor: Bob Hilscher
Confirmation that North Korea has nuclear weapons has underlined the tense situation on the Korean peninsula. U.S. diplomats now face the complex problem of ridding the North of nuclear weapons and restarting the long process to ease decades of tension in the Koreas.
It looks to be a difficult and dangerous task, and it's left South Koreans stuck in the middle. While the country is protected by the U.S., it's also trying to improve relations with the North.
All is calm in the eye of the Korean storm – the demilitarized zone (DMZ) that separates the two Koreas. A tangle of barbed wire is the last leftover of the iron and bamboo curtains that once divide the whole world. It is the final battleground of the Cold War.
A North Korean guard post on the DMZ |
South Korean soldiers watch their adversaries to the north. On the other side, North Koreans also keep a close eye on anything that moves. But nothing really does, even though just beyond the DMZ more than a million soldiers face each other, ready to go to war.
For all the calm, the military might assembled along the fenced strip of land makes it probably the most fortified place on Earth – and now one of its most dangerous.
During the Korean War, the area was fought over and over again. Just a few kilometres from away, Canadian forces battled troops hill by hill. Then for the next 50 years, it became a routine training ground.
The United States sees North Korea's nuclear weapons program as a clear and present danger.
The U.S. military could, of course, overpower anything North Korea could muster. The trouble is, as in Iraq, it would take time, and time works in the North Koreans' favour. If they are attacked, North Korea could all but destroy South Korea in a few hours.
Soeul, South Korea |
Seoul is a city under the gun – thousands of them, in fact. Nearly half of the South Korea's population lives in and around Seoul with an artillery range only 50 kilometres to the north. That military threat makes South Koreans nervous, says Shim Jae Hoon, a journalist for the South China Morning Post and Jane's Defence Weekly.
"They have artillery positions that can fire half a million shells a day at Seoul," he says. "Militarily we are a target, and we are a hostage of North Korea."
In Seoul though, to many it's not North Korea that is the threat. It's the United States.
Marching on the U.S. embassy has become a regular event these days. As elsewhere, the demonstrations in Seoul have recently concentrated on opposition to the war in Iraq. For Koreans though, the war has a very direct meaning.
"After Iraq, it could be us," this woman says |
"I don't believe in the Americans," says one young woman. "After Iraq, it could be us."
For many in South Korea the question of the American presence goes beyond the present confrontation on the peninsula. The young woman and others like her want U.S. troops to leave Korea. She says they're not needed because the danger of a North Korean invasion is exaggerated.
In the fish market however, they look at the Americans a lot more kindly.
"When we had a difficult time, the Americans helped us, and we are grateful to them," one woman says.
CBC's Joe Schlesinger (right) chats with a South Korean man who is grateful for the Americans' support |
What's apparent is that there is a generational spread in South Korea. In the park where the old men congregate to share memories, they haven't forgotten the bad old times.
"If it weren't for the Americans," one man says, "all this would be a sea of red. The reds would have occupied us."
That generational gap is the crux of South Korean politics. More than in most countries, politics there is a matter of very personal memories. For all the Koreans, a vast war cemetery in Seoul is a repository for the sacrifice and destruction of three years of war.
War cemetary in Seoul |
The soldiers buried there are only a fraction of Korea's war dead. All together in both North and South, more than two million people died. Most of them were civilians. But that was more than 50 years ago, and to the millions of the young born to the peace and prosperity that is now South Korea, that's ancient history. Seoul now glitters with newness, energy, and prosperity.
"Two generations of the South Koreans have worked and worked and worked and created this economic prosperity, which they understandably want to guard," says journalist Shim Jae Hoon. "They do not want war to destroy everything because they are fairly certain that North Korea is capable of destroying the economy here. They are being extra cautious."
But there is now a third generation out there, and they've known nothing else but the prosperity their parents and grandparents built, and they see things differently. The long-term trend is clear. The young are getting increasingly impatient with the status quo, with the cycle of crises between the two Koreas that's been going on for longer than they can remember. They want South Korea to be less dependent on the U.S., and they want better relations with the people of the north, who, after all, are their countrymen.
Roh Moo Hyun, president of South Korea |
Short of a catastrophe such as the present crisis or the next spiraling out of control into war, with time on their side the young will surely get their way. In a way, they already have. The new president, Roh Moo Hyun, who was inaugurated just two months ago, owes his election to them. He won riding the rising tide of anti-Americanism and by promising to pursue closer relations with North Korea under the so-called sunshine policy.
The anti-American mood in the streets and the government's eagerness for closer ties with North Korea have angered Washington. The Americans have put South Korea on notice that if it persists with its sunshine policy the U.S. might re-assess its military presence in Korea.
Protestors clash with police outside South Korea's national assembly |
To placate the Americans, Roh pledged South Korea's support for the U.S. War on Iraq, but when the president asked the national assembly to approve sending 700 non-combat troops to Iraq, he ran in to trouble. Protestors besieged the assembly and repeatedly clashed with police. After postponing a vote twice because it could not muster a majority, the government finally got the measure passed, but the strength of the protests and the reluctance of the legislators weakened the symbolic value of the support for the U.S.
Most South Koreans seem to realize they need the Americans but wish they didn't, but many of them are equally ambivalent about their North Korean brethren and reunification.
"North Korea doesn't appreciate our help," says one man. "They never say thank you, they just cause trouble. We should get rid of them."
Park Jin, a member of the opposition party the Korean National Assembly, believes the sunshine policy needs to be overhauled.
Park Jin |
"The sunshine policy was implemented with the belief that if we provide peaceful assistance, economic assistance towards North Korea, then they will change their attitude and become more friendly with the South," says Park Jin. "The intention was benign, but the result was the opposite. Instead of softening North Korean attitude, actually it has softened the South Korean perception of North Korean threat, which I call backfired."
But Moon Chung-In, a political science professor at Yonsei University in Seoul who has close ties to both the North and South Korean governments, argues the sunshine policy hasn't backfired, that, in fact, it has helped bring about reforms that are changing the face of North Korea.
Moon Chung-In |
"Judging from the incremental face of opening reform, yes, he has made a big change, I witnessed in Pyongyang during the past three, four years," he says. "Also, North Korea open up the ground route in the east coast, and also the North has agreed to opening up the railroad system between Seoul."
They are indeed busy laying tracks across the DMZ to connect the South's railway system to the North's. Building the connection is one thing, though, having trains actually rolling across it is quite another.
A road built across the DMZ for automobile traffic was opened earlier this year. A few buses went through. Then, a few days later, the North Koreans closed it and it's remained closed since.
On the southern side of the DMZ there is an impressive new railroad station waiting for the trains from and to the north. It's been standing empty since it was opened a year ago.
The wait for that train from Pyongyang to come rolling in across the DMZ could be a long one.
The DMZ, with its minefields, guard posts and barbed wire fences, makes the Iron Curtain that used to split Europe look like a sieve. Even at the height of the Cold War there were holes in the Iron Curtain. Trains and road traffic, however limited, however controlled, passed through. But at the DMZ, nothing but the wind moves through from one Korea to the other.
South Korean tourists |
However, there is a way, and only one way, to get to North Korea directly from the South. It's by sea, by ship, and each week thousands of Koreans eager to get a glimpse of the other Korea make the trip.
On our way around the DMZ along Korea's east coast to Mount Kumgang, a place of legendary beauty inside North Korea, we entered North Korean waters. Last call for picture taking. There are strict rules there. No photos of the coast. No pictures of military areas. Nor of North Koreans, not just soldiers but civilians, too. No talking to them either, or for that matter even pointing a finger at them.
We were allowed to take photos of the South Korean tourists though, the floating hotel we stayed in, the tour buses, and pictures of the hills. But that didn't include the mountain across the water that has a huge sign carved into it saying "Kim Jong Il is heaven's gift to us."
At one point, North Korean guards ordered the CBC's Bob Hilscher to stop taping. They took Hilscher and his camera away to their office, screened the tape, yelled at him and accused him of having filmed a prohibited area. They confiscated his camera and the exit visa without which he couldn't leave the country. But they let him go.
Two hours later, after negotiations between North Korean authorities and the South Korean Hyundai Co. managers who run the Kumgang resort, we got our camera back, but not the offending tape nor the exit visa.
We could film again, but only in Hyundai's tourist complex and on the mountain trails beyond. We were permitted to shoot the tourists lounging inside this sheltered capitalist enclave, but not the barbed wire topped fence that separates it from the rest of the Stalinist country.
We were allowed to film the store where they sell western goods and a few North Korean products, but not the North Koreans we could clearly see working and walking beyond the barbed wire barrier.
Hyundai has spent nearly $1 billion US to establish the enclave on North Korean soil and plans to spend hundreds of millions more. The company wants to make money, of course, but it also hopes that this place will help transform the North into a prosperous capitalist society, and that this transformation will end with the unification of the two Koreas.
But the project is in trouble.
The company is losing buckets of money. There's talk in Seoul that Hyundai may have to pack it in. The problem: too few paying customers. It would take three times as many visitors to make it pay.
Why don't they come?
For one, climbing Mount Kumgang is about the only thing to do there. That's fine if you've come to see the beauty of the mountains and admire the various monuments along the way praising the dear leader Kim Jong Il or his father the beloved leader Kim Il Sung. But it's not so hot if you came in your city shoes hoping to see not just rocks and slippery snow slops but something of North Korea and its people. The only North Koreans the tourists meet are the silent official minders rushing along the trail making sure they don't wander where they shouldn't, and, of course, the waitresses in the North Korean restaurant.
North Korean performers |
The closest contact between North and South comes at the resort theatre between the South Korean audience and the North Korean ensemble onstage. As they sing Tashimanayo ('Til We Meet Again), a song they all know, the political as well as physical gap between spectators and performers, between South and North, gives way to emotions of ethnic kinship. As they wave to each other, they are for a brief moment not North Koreans and South Koreans just Koreans.
After two days at Kumgang it was back to the ship, and back to Bob Hilscher's problem. It was settled in negotiations beforehand – we paid a $200 fine, Bob apologizes and erases the offending pictures.
And we're out of there.
Our run-in with the North Koreans may have been trifling. Not so long ago, though, we wouldn't have got into North Korea as easily nor got off as lightly. That we did is a sign that a few rays of South Korean sunshine have managed to pierce, however feebly, North Korea's Stalinist darkness at noon.
But the North has little choice. The capitalist world did provide North Korea with aid such as food and fuel, but the North Koreans found themselves shut off from what they wanted and needed most: help in developing a modern economy that would allow them to stand on their own feet.
Political scientist Moon Chung-In, who just returned from a trip to Pyongyang, says the main problem is the "rogue state" label the U.S. has hung on North Korea.
"North Korea still is... one of those seven terrorist-sponsoring states. North Korea is not entitled to join the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, IMF, whatever international organizations," he says. "Because of these pending political and military issues, North Korea is not entitled to get foreign capital and technology."
Shim Jae Hoon |
But journalist Shim Jae Hoon argues that the North's biggest problem is strictly home-grown.
"The dilemma North Korea faces is this – it changes too quickly and it will collapse. It changes too slowly, it will collapse. It gives too much freedom to its people and it'll collapse. So it's an impossible situation."
For now, all is quiet in the eye of the Korean storm.
Panmunjom |
At Panmunjom, at the heart of the demilitarized zone, where 50 years ago they signed the truce that ended the fighting, it is in fact quieter than ever. The truce village was the only place where the two sides used to meet regularly to try to settle their problems. No longer. The North Koreans are boycotting the meetings.
The only activity is schoolchildren brought to learn something of their nation's history. They learn that there really is no peace in Korea, just a truce that in a way is just a pause button between peace and war. Hit the play button and there can be peace, real peace throughout Korea. Hit rewind and Korea would be back to the miseries their grandparents suffered half a century ago.
Right now the finger is poised once more between peace and what could be a replay of the Korean War, this time, possibly with nuclear weapons on both sides.
Barbed wire lines the walls and fences in the DMZ |
If Koreans are lucky, the last battle of the Korean War will not be fought across the DMZ. It will be an internal, political struggle inside both Koreas. The North will have to end its isolation and open itself up, as Russia and China have done, to the winds of change. The South will have to feel secure enough to be able to step away from its dependence on American arms. Only then will Koreans truly have peace and eventually perhaps even unity.
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Watch Joe Schlesinger's documentary "The Korean Standoff"
Part 1
(Runs 13:13)
Part 2
(Runs 11:28)
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Population: 22 million
Area: 121,000 square kilometres, about twice the size of Nova Scotia
Borders: China, Russia and South Korea
Languages: Korean
Religion: Mostly Buddhist and Confucianist.
Government: authoritarian socialist; one-man dictatorship
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