The Longest Truce: A View From the South
The South Korea I grew up in was much different from the Korea we know today. It did not have the confidence of being the 12th largest trading nation in the world, nor did it have the glow of success from peacefully transforming to an open democracy following a military dictatorship.
Likewise, North Korea was not the impoverished pariah state it is today. It hovered in our backyard as a real military threat, and by all accounts its economy was neck and neck with South Korea’s.
In days when I was a child, Seoul measured its success in the international community by how many embassies it had in various capitals of the world versus how many Pyongyang had.
Red was not a popular color in South Korea at the time because it was the color favored by the communists.
There is one incident from my childhood that in retrospect is rather comical but is also emblematic of the mood of the country at the time.
One afternoon in the early 1970s, when I was a third grader, a friend and I spotted a man in a trench coat wearing dark glasses on the streets of Seoul. Both of us were convinced he was a North Korean spy because we had never seen anyone in a trench coat before. But our effort to save the country from evil communist agents was quickly thwarted. We couldn’t find a policeman nearby and the man soon disappeared down the street.
Our spurt of patriotism was inspired by our teacher, who earlier that day had urged us to report anyone looking suspicious, because if we didn’t, she said, North Koreans were going to take over our country.
It came as an utter shock when, several years later in another country, I caught my first glimpse of a real North Korean and found out that they did not have horns on their heads. The encounter was courtesy of Life magazine, which had a cover story on the communist country. I don’t remember much what the story said but I remember page after page of smiling North Koreans who looked exceedingly “normal.” The irony was that if I saw any of them on the streets of Seoul, they would not have set off any alarm bells. They looked essentially like us, the good guys.
When I was growing up, North Koreans lurked in the netherworld of my consciousness, made more sinister and evil by the propaganda churned out by a government that was a standard bearer for the Cold War. The sense that North Korea was a threat to my life was perhaps intensified by the fact that my father was an ROK diplomat and my mother had taught at a conservative state-run university.
By contrast, my children grew up in an environment that was decidedly less North Korea-phobic. In the decades since I was first told to report suspicious characters, the government’s policy toward North Korea has shifted from confrontation to engagement in the hope that detente will encourage Pyongyang to open up and bring about better relations between the two countries.
Statistics clearly show a trend toward greater economic cooperation. Inter-Korea trade has grown from $19 million in 1989, when the first official bilateral trade was recorded, to $690 million in 2004, according to data from the Ministry of Unification. In 2004 alone, South Korea provided $349 million in assistance to North Korea, most of it humanitarian aid.
In school, my children are being taught that North Koreans are our “brothers” and that they deserve our compassion and sympathy. Every year, my daughter is told to bring a bag of rice to school so that it can be repackaged and sent to feed the starving North Korean children. One day, when she expressed her misgivings about North Koreans in an essay, the teacher returned it with an admonishing note, clearly demonstrating that it was no longer politically correct to view North Korea in a negative light.
Today, South Korean television regularly features stories about life in North Korea, and there is a weekly ferry service to a special tourist zone in a land that was once off-limits to South Korean passport holders. And although it is still a no-no to show too much affection for the communist regime, talking about North Korea openly is no longer taboo. In another subtle transformation, red is also a “good” color now, widely worn during the 2002 World Cup in a show of support for the South Korean national soccer team, who had dubbed themselves the “Red Devils.”
Times have changed, no doubt. But I find myself puzzled by South Korea’s ardent courtship of North Korea, which has not appeared to reciprocate, at least not yet. And whether we like it or not, we cannot ignore the fact that South Korea and North Korea are still technically at war. The armistice that ended the armed conflict in the Korean War, fought more than half a century ago, is officially only a temporary truce.