The long dark road to reunification (통일을 위해 힘든 길을)

Posted on December 25, 2008
Filed Under North Korea, South Korea | 5 Comments

The road to Kim Il Sung’s Mausoleum.

When I left North Korea in 2007, my guide, a thirty-something mother of three children, told me that I must return “in a few years, when we are re-unified.” It was a warm-hearted, guileless remark, and I remember being moved both by her sincerity and her naiveté. I agreed that I would return, but I didn’t tell her how long I thought that might take, if I was bound by her precondition – the rest of my life, at the least.

My guide – her name escapes me now – was not alone among the North Koreans I met in her belief that reunification was just around the corner. In fact, the idea is held up in the DPRK as a sort of hallowed goal, a prize awaiting them at the end of a long, hard road. My western guide, a man who had come and gone from North Korea at least fifty times, by his own estimation, told me that the hope of reunification was the unchanging theme of North Korean life. “It’s sad,” he told me, “But it’s the only thing they’ve got left.”

It is understandable that regular North Koreans should pine for such a miracle, given the depressing state of their country. Yet for all the fervent hope and desire for a unified nation, I never once saw during my stay – not in any official propaganda or from any private conversations (the two, albeit, never being too far separate) – any indication that the North Koreans intended to compromise on their chosen system of government or relinquish, either wholly or in part, their claim to hegemony over the peninsular.

In other words, though the North Koreans (those who wield the power, anyway) believe zealously in the idea of a single sovereign state, they intend such an event to happen only on their terms, or not at all.

Ostensibly, the South Korean stance is the same: a unified Korea eventually functioning under their own liberal democratic system (though some recent voices contend that a period of federated power-sharing may need to briefly precede it). The ROK position is understandable, given the relative success of their political and economic model compared to that of their northern neighbor. Yet the end result of this general unwillingness by both states to compromise is (again ostensibly) an ideological deadlock that has already endured for 55 years.

Official relations show no sign of thawing, yet popular sentiment north and south of the DMZ continues to remain (at least superficially, in the case of many southerners) hopeful. History, on the other hand, so far as it can be regarded as an adjudicator of the future, paints a more pessimistic picture of the likelihood of peaceful reunion; so does the detrimental influence of foreign powers, none of whom have any incentive to abet the process. The attitude of South Korean people also presents a drastic obstacle to any potential merger of states, despite official and popular assertions to the contrary. Apathy, prejudice and (increasingly) economic self-interest will serve to keep the process of unification inert for a long time yet.

Regarding the influence of regional powers.

I’ll leave this argument largely to those expert on matters of geopolitics and global strategy. Suffice to say that any potential merger between the north and south would have a major strategic impact in East Asia, and that the major powers of the region have vested interests in the outcome.

North Korea has been unswerving on at least one point – that it will not negotiate a new position until the United States has left the peninsular. But the U.S. is not likely to withdraw its forces, even if it did trust the word of the Kim regime, since they occupy a strategically important position, and have done so since the Korean War. Not a few people believe that to the U.S. State Department, North Korea is not a threat but an excuse to remain within striking distance of the second greatest super power in the world – China. The Chinese, equally, would gain no advantage from a unified (U.S.-friendly) Korea, since they stand to lose an important buffer and client state. A disorderly collapse of the DPRK would cause them even greater problems, given that they share a long and potentially porous border with their ally. Japan is the next local power with little to gain from a combined Korean state, traditionally hostile to them both north and south of the demarcation zone. A new, united and potentially unstable military on their doorstep would be an unwelcome development, particularly since the status quo presents them with few real problems.

On the South Koreans.

As recently as 2006, According to a Gallup poll, 67% of ROK citizens said they were in favor of a united Korea, while a majority (56%) also said they had more to gain than lose from reunification. As Cheoleon Lee of the Gallup Research Organization posits, “these seemingly inconsistent findings suggest that for many South Koreans, the desire for unification is driven less by expectations of short-term gain than by other factors such as a strong sense of common identity” (source).

By “common identity” Mr. Lee is eluding to Danil Minjok, a Korean expression which means “one ethnically homogenous nation”. According to the popular pure-blood mythos that saturates the Korean consciousness, all Hangukin are descended from the same genitor, and are therefore all brothers and sisters of the same blood-family, whether they live on the bitter shores of the Yalu River, or on the balmy slopes of Mount Halla. The importance of race to Koreans and the part it plays in forging a national identity cannot be understated. That’s one reason why, for example, another recent poll (April 2008) found that 34% of South Korean soldiers believed the U.S. was South Korea’s “main enemy” – as opposed to only 33% who fingered North Korea (source). In a country still technically at war with its northern neighbor, and having survived to date in its current form only on account of U.S. military intervention, that’s some result.

On the surface, this race-based nostalgia would seem like a powerful motivator to bring the Korean people together. After all, according to popular Korean lore, the blame for division rests with foreign powers in the first place, since it was a Soviet and an American who drew up the first line of demarcation. Doesn’t it naturally follow then that left to their own devices the Korean people must eventually re-unite?

History (the real stuff, not the Korean nationalist, revisionist stuff) is perhaps the only credible gauge on whether this popular Korean belief has any merit. Unfortunately the results are in, and they’re not good. It might come as a surprise to many Koreans to learn that the peninsular has traditionally been a divided place. If they claim to feel the wound of that division, then they have known it since their people first emerged from a scattering of primitive Manchurian tribes half a millennium ago in northern China. The unified Joseon dynasty was an exceptional interlude of (forced) unity in an otherwise long history of partition.

The local ROK political process also raises questions about the theoretical ability of Koreans to come together peacefully. The national assembly is a cesspit of infighting and naked hostility. National partisanship takes a back seat to regional loyalties and ideological disputes. Provincial bickering and political rifts override all notions of ethnic unity and accord. Democracy itself in the South is strained to breaking point by lawmakers who after a quarter of a century still cannot find common voice or cause. This is the reality of Korea: not a nation of peace-loving patriots who hold the welfare of their people above all else, but a country perpetually divided along every conceivable political and ideological line, forever unwilling to cooperate or concede on even the most basic of principles, the most petty of disputes.

In a unified state, South Koreans would need to embrace their northern cousins politically, culturally, economically and even ideologically, to a degree. They would need to put aside their natural tendencies to conflict and find common cause. It would require an enormous amount of tolerance, compassion and generosity. The German experience is often held up as an example of what can be achieved to unite a divided state, but history tells us that South Koreans may find their struggle more difficult, for the reasons outlined above, as well as a number of others.

First, the Germans are a socially liberal people, willing to support very generous welfare programs. By contrast, South Koreans are a low-tax, low-welfare country, more in line with the U.S. than any European nation. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Korea has the highest rate of elderly poverty in the OECD bloc, and by a comfortable margin (source). To anyone who has lived in South Korea, this should come as no surprise; the number of old people who are forced to forage in garbage heaps every day to earn money to eat is a national shame, particularly given the GDP of the country, and given South Korea’s supposedly Confucian code of morals which presumes to respect and revere the aged. Add to this the fact that Korea will be the “most aged” country in the world in a few years (source), and we begin to paint a dire picture of their ability to field the huge resources necessary to accommodate a North Korean influx.

Second, the theoretical absorption of North Korea by South Korea would a far greater challenge for the ROK, culturally, psychologically and economically, than the West German experience. East Germany was only two or three times poorer than the west, whereas the North Koreans are, by at least one estimate, about fifteen times less well off than their southern counterparts (who are not rich, by OECD standards, themselves).

The North Koreans are also damaged, physically and emotionally. One of my most vivid memories of my time in the DPRK was a visit to Kim Il Sung’s mausoleum (pictured above). At least a thousand young North Korean soldiers were paying their respects at the same time we were there; they filed past our group on a bizarre escalator system, one at a time. None of them stood taller than my shoulder; many were outright dwarfs. Elsewhere in the countryside, thin and bedraggled people herded geese and drove oxen-plows, their clothes little better than rags. The North Korean apartments, built during the height of the failed Soviet Socialist bloc experiment, stand like diseased relics on the hillsides. The roads are vast, potholed and empty. The entire country is destitute. And that’s just what foreign visitors are permitted to see; the worst regions, including the infamous prison camps of the north, where hundreds of thousands of people toil in conditions that can hardly be imagined, are entirely off-limits.

History has also given us a prelude of what to expect in the event of an inter-Korean tide of refugees, which South Korea must expect if the unification process advances. According to the South Korean Ministry of Unification, there are already more than 10,000 North Korean refugees (called saeteomin, or new settlers) in the South. By all accounts, the experience of these North Koreans has generally been an unhappy one.

Prejudice was the main problem cited by North Koreans trying to adapt to a new life in the ROK. A 2005 report by the National Committee for Human Rights (NCHR) found that South Koreans discriminated against North Korean defectors when hiring employees. The report found that 70-80% of saeteomin estimate the possibility of them gaining employment is lower than that of their South Koreans counterparts. Even after they get jobs, many North Koreans claim they face “unfair treatment and prejudice” from their South Korean co-workers and employers. The 2005 NCHR report found that 50.5% of saeteomin felt their salaries were unduly low; 52.7% felt they suffered prejudice regarding promotion; and 38.6% thought their colleagues isolated them; for example, by refusing to eat with them. Interestingly, while the saeteomin were found to be 1.6 times more likely to commit crimes than South Koreans (cited by many locals as a prime motivator of prejudice towards them), they were forty-three times more likely to be criminally victimized by their southern brethren. (Aliens Among Brothers)

Meanwhile, the plight of North Koreans in the DPRK is a matter of staggering unimportance to the South Korean people. Case in point: In 2008 a massive wave of protests swept South Korea over the import of American beef, which many regarded as unsafe (more here). During the protests, human rights activists set out to raise awareness of the plight of North Koreans suffering in the DPRK’s archipelago of gulags (details of the camps here). While the anti-beef demonstrations attracted an estimated 100,000 people, the North Korean human rights rally drew a paltry handful. As Liberty in North Korea (LINK), wrote:

…the average South Korean knows more about the uninhabited island of Dokdo or members of the latest Korean pop group than about their brothers and sisters to the North. And in past weeks, reports of a resurgent famine and painful stories of North Korean suffering have been drowned out by public protests against American beef…

…25 million North Koreans today live in a nation that is, essentially, a prison-state. And despite over 13,000 North Koreans walking the streets among the citizens of the South, Free Korea has yet to use its voice on behalf of these voiceless. In a most succinct, perhaps insensitive summary – while South Koreans bicker over what they don’t wish to eat, North Koreans are dying for want of any food at all.

Shin Dong Hyuk (source)

Shin Dong Hyuk is the only the only person known to have made a successful escape from one of North Korea’s prison camps. His story is one of almost unfathomable suffering, and despite attracting intense media interest around the world (as well as a meeting with former U.S. president G.W. Bush), remains virtually unknown in South Korea, where a mere 500 copies of his book have sold. As Dong-Hyuk said himself, “I don’t want to be critical of this country, but I would say that out of the total population of South Korea, only .001 percent has any real understanding of or interest in North Korea.”

Worse, many South Koreans view a potential merger with the north not as a way to mend a broken country, but as an opportunity for personal gain. Cheap labor is cited as one potential positive, affordable real-estate another. A third is the chance of a quick fix to the current gender-imbalance issue (who doesn’t want a bona-fide pure-blood low-maintenance Korean wife?). The problem with all these ideas is that while they serve to benefit one group (South Korean men) they completely disregard the wants and needs of their northern counterparts, who are unlikely to settle for scraps on the unification table, at least not without a fight.

So much for Danil Minjok.

In sum: the unification of Korea is unlikely, at least anytime soon, for several reasons. First, a marriage of states would require the support of several key regional powers, which is improbable. Second, there would need to be fundamental alterations in both political and economic systems (the DPRK has posited a federal structure retaining each side’s leadership and basic structure) or the entire reformation of the North – equally unlikely scenarios. Third, and not least importantly, serious sociological problems would need to be addressed if the two peoples were to be meaningfully reconciled in the long term, without the danger of a deferred insurrection. South Koreans will need to conquer their apathy, overcome their prejudice and curb their predatory instincts if there is to be any hope of a combined Korean state, at least in our lifetime.

Tilt-shift time-lapse photography.

Posted on October 24, 2008
Filed Under Photos, Video | 1 Comment

I thought these videos looked pretty cool. They’re made by a guy called Keith Loutit, who says his aim is to “present Sydney as the Model City, and help people take a second look at places that are very familiar to them.”

Quite tricky to recreate, by the sounds of things. Still, I might just give this a go sometime, if I ever find time.

Beached from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.