The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Read online

  —FROM MY DIARY, August 11, 1953

  This was my introduction to Korea as a US Army lieutenant weeks after the armistice that ended the bloody three-year war on the peninsula and the beginning of a lifelong interest in an embattled and amazing country. In my field artillery unit just south of the cease-fire line, we were dug in and ready to renew the battle against heavily armed North Korean units stationed across the hills only a mile or two away. We did not know how fragile or hardy the armistice would be or how long the truce would hold, but none of us would have believed that the state of no-war, no-peace would persist into the twenty-first century.

  The massively fortified strip bisecting the Korean peninsula was one of the world’s most dangerous potential flash points throughout the Cold War. Although the barriers have come down nearly everywhere else, at this writing Korea remains—as President Bill Clinton said in his 1997 State of the Union address—“the Cold War’s last divide.” The misnamed “demilitarized zone” (DMZ), a verdant but heavily mined sanctuary for wild birds and animals, continues to be the focal point of the most powerful concentrations of opposing military forces of the post–Cold War world despite both secret and open attempts at reconciliation. Close to 2 million troops, including 37,000 from the United States who would be instantly involved in new hostilities, are on duty in North or South Korea, with many on hair-trigger alert wielding powerful weapons of war. Today, despite dramatic and hopeful recent developments, American overseas commitments and military forces are at greater risk at the Korean DMZ than anywhere else on earth.

  While the confrontation across the DMZ continues, almost everything else has changed dramatically. South of the dividing line, the Republic of Korea (ROK) has developed since the 1970s into an economic powerhouse. By 1997 it was the world’s eleventh largest economy and one of the foremost producers of ships, automobiles, electronics, steel, and a host of other goods, with a per capita income of more than ten thousand dollars per year. By that time, its feisty democracy had thrown off all vestiges of military rule and imprisoned the two generals who had led the country in the 1980s. Late in 1997, it was suddenly beset by a massive financial crisis that began in Southeast Asia. In this atmosphere, it elected longtime opposition leader Kim Dae Jung as its president for the next five years. He immediately set about to stabilize and reform the economy and undertake new and positive engagement toward the North. Although economic reform is still incomplete, his determined and persistent policy toward the North paid off in an unprecedented summit meeting in June 2000 and the promise of extensive North-South interaction in economic, political, and even military fields.

  North of the dividing line, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), which developed its own unique brand of communist Confucianism, remains militarily powerful but has lost the race in every other way. Early in the 1990s, North Korea was abandoned by its former sponsor and ally, the Soviet Union, which established close relations with South Korea and then collapsed, and was devalued by its other major sponsor and ally, China, which became more interested in markets than in Marxism. Following the death of its founding leader in 1994, North Korea suffered a sharp economic decline, which was a central factor in a famine in outlying areas that led to massive loss of life.

  Under the successor leadership of the enigmatic Kim Jong Il, the eldest son of the founder, Pyongyang was forced to turn to the outside world for humanitarian assistance in the mid-1990s. Late in the decade, North Korea undertook new policies of engagement with South Korea, the United States, and a variety of other Asian and European countries. At this writing, it is yet uncertain whether Kim Jong Il’s limited opening and cautious domestic reforms will continue and, if so, whether these actions will bring about a revival of the North Korean economy and secure the survival of the regime. In the preface to the first edition of this book, I wrote that it seemed unlikely that the DPRK could survive in its existing form without such major changes. As risky as they may be, the North’s new policies, I believe, have improved its odds.

  I have sought to record here the ways in which the two halves of this ancient and homogeneous people, thoughtlessly divided at the end of World War II by the great powers, have grappled with each other for advantage and supremacy in the past three decades and how they have dealt with the powerful forces all around them. The course of their struggle, like those that enveloped the Korean peninsula for many centuries past, has been deeply affected by the actions of the surrounding powers—China, Japan, and Russia. Since World War II and especially since the Korean War, in which nearly 1.5 million Americans served and 36,000 Americans were killed, the United States has played a major role. Korea is the only country in the world where the interests and security concerns of these four powers directly intersect. Although the major powers have had a large impact on Korea’s fate, the hardy, gutsy, independent-minded Koreans on both sides of the DMZ have demanded and won for themselves important roles. Beginning with the North-South summit meeting of June 2000, they have begun to take their future into their own hands as never before.

  Because of its turbulent history, its strategic location, and its enduring state of tension, Korea has often flitted across the world’s newspaper headlines and television screens in the past thirty years, only to disappear from view when the immediate dangers seemed to pass. The episodic nature of the world’s attention means that most people in most countries have little idea how the recurrent Korea crises developed or what their significance has been. Whether acts of war, terrorism or heroism, showdowns over nuclear weapons, the sudden deaths of Korean leaders, the starvation of the people of the North, or the turn toward peaceful engagement, the news from and about Korea has been marked by a remarkable absence of historical context, background, or basis for understanding.

  Upon retiring from daily journalism in 1993, I set out to remedy this omission by producing a history of the North-South conflict and conciliation in contemporary Korea, with special attention to the roles of the outside powers. It seemed presumptuous for an American to undertake this task, but I realized I had advantages not available to most others. I was a witness to some of the events described here during my 1972–1975 tenure as Northeast Asia correspondent for the Washington Post and lived through other major events in Washington or in nearly yearly trips to Korea as the newspaper’s diplomatic correspondent in the seventeen years thereafter. I have met all of South Korea’s presidents, except its founding president, Syngman Rhee, and most of the other senior political leaders of that country. Starting in the mid-1980s, I met North Korea’s foreign minister or his senior deputy almost every year during their annual trips to the United Nations General Assembly in New York. These and other contacts led to my visits to North Korea in 1991 and 1995. I have been fortunate to have had many associations with present and former officials of the governments in Washington, Beijing, Moscow, and Tokyo, who provided unusual access to international aspects of the story.

  The original edition of this book was four years in the making, nearly equally divided between research and writing, during which I examined the past while keeping up with fast-paced current events. The sponsorship of Johns Hopkins University’s Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, which appointed me journalist-in-residence upon my retirement from the Washington Post, and grants from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Korea Foundation made it possible for me to concentrate almost full-time on this effort in 1993–1997 and to travel extensively to interview hundreds of participants in the events described here. After the dramatic events of 1998–2000, I decided to add a new chapter to bring the story up to date.

  Despite all efforts, I continue to be impressed with what I do not know, especially about North Korea. Despite the limited opening, the decision-making and moving forces behind the scenes in Pyongyang remain obscured in a secrecy that is unique in the world for its thoroughness and pervasiveness. Unlike the former Soviet Union and even China, North Korea has revealed virtually none of the documentation of discussion
s and decisions, even from its earliest era. Using sources available to me elsewhere, including archival materials from the Soviet Union and the (East) German Democratic Republic (GDR) as well as former diplomats and experts from those countries, I have done my best to discover and understand what underlay thought and action in North Korea in earlier times.

  This is my third book of what has been called “contemporary history,” which seeks to transcend journalism but is written only a few years after the events it describes. Like my first book, Tet!, on the crucial battle of the Vietnam War, and The Turn (more recently republished as From the Cold War to a New Era), on the diplomacy of the United States and the Soviet Union between 1983 and 1991, this volume goes to press while the outcome of the drama on the Korean peninsula is still beyond our reach. As in my earlier works, I was inspired by a quotation from British historian Dame C. Veronica Wedgwood: “History is written backward but lived forward. Those who know the end of the story can never know what it was like at the time.” What follows is intended to convey what it was like at the time, before the end of the story is known.1

  —Don Oberdorfer, Washington, March 2001

  A NOTE ON KOREAN NAMES

  The remarkable thing about Korean names is that so many of them are almost the same. The three most common surnames, Kim, Lee, and Park, account for more than 40 percent of the entire population of South Korea, according to a recent census. The surname Kim is associated with the mythical founder of the Silla dynasty. Lee (or Yi, in Korean) is the name of the dynasty that ruled Korea from 1392 to the annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910. Park also has an ancient origin. Only about 250 different surnames are known to exist among South Korea’s 44 million people.

  As is the case with most other East Asian names, the surname is usually written first, as in Kim Il Sung or Kim Young Sam. I have followed this practice throughout the book, except for a few figures whose names are widely known in reverse order, such as South Korea’s first president, Syngman Rhee.

  A list and brief identification of the principal characters whose activities are described in this book can be found starting on page 465.

  1

  WHERE THE WILD BIRDS SING

  A LOFT ON DAZZLING white wings, the great cranes wheel in the sky and float down for a landing in a richly forested, unspoiled two-and-a-half-mile strip of land that stretches like a ribbon for 150 miles across the waist of the Korean peninsula. Here several hundred rare white-naped cranes stop over each spring and autumn in migration between their breeding grounds in northeastern China and Russia and their winter home in Japan. Amid a profusion of wildflowers, the birds join even rarer endangered red-crowned Manchurian cranes, the most elegant and highly prized member of the crane family and a symbol of good luck, fidelity, and long life in Asia for more than a thousand years. Ornithologists have recorded 150 species of cranes, buntings, shrikes, swans, geese, kittiwakes, goosanders, eagles, and other birds passing through or living in the verdant strip each year, joining other year-round residents such as pheasant, wild pigs, black bears, and small Korean deer.

  Under the terms of the armistice that ended the Korean War in 1953, all civilian activity is banned in the zone except for one tightly controlled farming village on each side. Due to a densely planted underground garden of deadly land mines, which the birds and animals somehow use a sixth sense to avoid, military patrols stick closely to well-worn paths. For the most part, it is a unique and leafy sanctuary in the midst of a crowded, increasingly urbanized peninsula.

  The serenity is deceptive. The demilitarized zone, or DMZ, between North and South Korea is bordered by high fences of barbed and razor wire on the north and south and guarded on the two sides by more than a thousand guard posts, watch towers, and reinforced bunkers across the width of the peninsula. On hair-trigger alert behind the fortifications are two of the world’s largest aggregations of military force—1.1 million North Koreans facing 660,000 South Koreans and 28,000 Americans, the latter backed by the full military power of the world’s most powerful nation. All sides are heavily armed and ready at a moment’s notice to fight another bloody and devastating war. This pristine nature preserve marks the most dangerous and heavily fortified border in the world.

  Across these fortified lines have flowed the passion and invective of an ancient nation that was suddenly and cruelly divided in the twentieth century by the great powers. The DMZ has been violated by tunnels, defiled by infiltrators, and scarred by armed skirmishes. The melodic call of its birds has been marred by harsh propaganda from giant loudspeakers erected on both sides to harass or entice the troops on the opposite lines. At the Joint Security Area (JSA) in the clearing at Panmunjom, the only place along the course of the buffer zone where the barbed wire and mines are absent, low-slung conference buildings have been placed squarely atop the line of demarcation, and the negotiating tables within them are so arranged that the dividing line extends precisely down the middle. Here for decades the hostility was palpable and open. Northern and southern troops would scowl, spit, and shout obscenities at each other outside the conference buildings, and there were shoving matches, injuries, and even deaths.

  Panmunjom has also seen hopeful moments: meetings of special emissaries and political leaders, both publicized and secret; the transit of official delegations from one side to the other; the passage of relief supplies to ameliorate the effects of floods and famines; the return of prisoners and detainees from both sides; and the arrival and departure of would-be peacemakers and political leaders from the United States and other countries. If the hostility and tension on the Korean peninsula are ever to be alleviated through negotiation, the clearing at Panmunjom is likely to play a major role.

  THE EMERGENCE OF TWO KOREAS

  Korea is a peninsula of approximately eighty-five thousand square miles, roughly the size of New York and Pennsylvania combined, that juts down from the northeastern part of the vast mainland of Asia. It is well defined, with seas on the east, west, and south and two large rivers, the Yalu and the Tumen, providing a natural boundary with the landmass on the north. Archaeological exploration has confirmed that it was inhabited at least twenty thousand years ago, and some sites suggest that its human habitation began much earlier. By the fourth century BC the antecedents of the Korean state, a tribal kingdom called Choson, had emerged near the Chinese border in northern Korea. By AD 300 the Koreans had thrown off Chinese rule and developed three separate kingdoms in the north, southeast, and southwest of the peninsula. In AD 668 the Silla kingdom, with Chinese help, overwhelmed the other two and unified nearly all of Korea.

  From that early time on, for nearly thirteen hundred years until the mid-twentieth century, Korea developed as a unified country under a single administration with a distinctive language and strong traditions. It invented its own ingenious writing system and the first known movable metal type a century before Gutenberg’s invention in Europe.

  Geography dealt Korea a particularly difficult role. Located in a strategic but dangerous neighborhood between the greater powers of China, Japan, and Russia, Korea has suffered nine hundred invasions, great and small, in its two thousand years of recorded history. It has experienced five major periods of foreign occupation—by China, the Mongols, Japan, and, after World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union.

  Of the major powers, China had by far the greatest influence and was the most acceptable to Koreans. Like many others on the rim of the Middle Kingdom, the Korean kings embraced Chinese culture, paid tribute to the Chinese emperor, and received recognition and a degree of protection in return. When unified Japan began its major expansion in the sixteenth century, its leader, Hideyoshi Toyotomi, attacked Korea as the first phase of an invasion of the Chinese mainland. The Korean navy under Admiral Yi Sun Sin fought back with an early class of ironclad warships, known as turtle ships, which inflicted severe losses on the Japanese. Eventually, the Japanese were driven out, but only after laying waste to the land, thus setting a lasting pattern of enmity.


  In the wake of the Japanese invasion and a subsequent invasion by the Manchus, who were soon to take power in China, Korea established a rigid policy of excluding foreigners, except for the Chinese and a small Japanese enclave that had been established at the southern port of Pusan. The imperial rulers of the Hermit Kingdom, as it was often called, created a governmental and social system modeled on Chinese Confucianism, with strictly regulated relations between ruler and subject, father and son, and husband and wife.

  Korea’s isolation ended in the mid-nineteenth-century age of imperialism, when major powers, including the United States, European countries, and Japan, sent warships forcibly to open the country to trade. In 1882, as a defensive measure against its neighbors, Korea signed a “Treaty of Amity and Commerce” with the United States, its first with a Western power, in which the United States promised to provide “good offices” in the event of external threat. It was reported that the Korean king danced with joy when the first American minister to Korea arrived. Among the treaties that followed shortly was one with czarist Russia, which had recognized the importance of the strategic peninsula and would soon begin building the Trans-Siberian Railway. The Russian foreign minister Count Vladimir Lamsdorff would later write, “Korea’s destiny as a component part of the Russian empire, on geographical and political grounds, had been foreordained for us to fulfill.”