The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Read online

  In 1902 Japan carved out a strong position for itself by entering into an alliance with Britain, the most important European power in the area. Japan recognized British interests in China in return for British recognition of Japanese special interests in Korea. Sensing the weakness along the rim of the Chinese mainland, Russia began moving forces into Korea and immediately came into conflict with Japan. In an attempt to head off a clash, Japan proposed that the two countries carve up Korea into spheres of influence, with the dividing line at the thirty-eighth parallel—the same line chosen by the United States for the division of Korea after World War II. Russia’s refusal to accept this and other proposed compromises led eventually to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. Japan’s surprise victory, its first over a Western power, put the Japanese in a powerful position to dominate Korea.

  In 1905, in what many Koreans consider their first betrayal by the United States, Secretary of War (later president) William Howard Taft approved Japan’s domination of Korea in a secret agreement with the Japanese foreign minister, in return for assurances that Tokyo would not challenge US colonial domination of the Philippines. Later the same year, Japan’s paramount political, military, and economic interests in Korea were codified in the Treaty of Portsmouth (New Hampshire), in which President Theodore Roosevelt played peacemaker and deal maker between Japan and Russia, and for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. With no opposition in sight, Japan occupied Korea in 1905 and annexed it outright as a Japanese possession in 1910. Japan then ruled as the harsh colonial master of the peninsula until its defeat in World War II.

  What many Koreans consider the second American betrayal—the division of Korea—occurred in the final days of World War II. The United States, Britain, and China had declared in the Cairo Declaration in 1943 that “in due course, Korea shall become free and independent,” and at the 1945 Yalta Conference President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed a US-Soviet-Chinese trusteeship over Korea. Beyond these few words, there was no agreement among the wartime allies and no practical planning in Washington about the postwar future of the peninsula. It was reported that in 1945, Secretary of State Edward Stettinius asked a subordinate in a State Department meeting to please tell him where Korea was.

  Only in the last week of the war, when the Soviet Union finally declared war on Japan and sent its troops into Manchuria and northern Korea, did the United States give serious consideration to its postwar policy in the peninsula. Suddenly, Washington realized that Russian occupation of Korea would have important military implications for the future of Japan and East Asia.

  At this point, according to Yale University historian Richard Whelan, “the U.S. government would probably have been happiest if Korea simply had not existed.” About two thousand civil affairs officers had been trained for military government duty in Japan, and elaborate plans had been drawn up for that country, but no one had been trained and no plans had been made for Korea. Despite Korea’s well-known antipathy to its Japanese overlords, Washington had rebuffed efforts by Korean exile groups for recognition during the war. Thus, as World War II drew to a close, there had been no consultation with Koreans about the future of their country.

  On the evening of August 10, 1945, with Tokyo suing for peace and Soviet troops on the move, an all-night meeting was convened in the Executive Office Building next to the White House to decide what to do about accepting the impending Japanese surrender in Korea and elsewhere in Asia. Around midnight two young officers were sent into an adjoining room to carve out a US occupation zone in Korea, lest the Soviets occupy the entire peninsula and move quickly toward Japan. Lieutenant Colonels Dean Rusk, who was later to be secretary of state under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and Charles Bonesteel, later US military commander in Korea, had little preparation for the task. Working in haste and under great pressure, and using a National Geographic map for reference, they proposed that US troops occupy the area south of the thirty-eighth parallel, which was approximately halfway up the peninsula and north of the capital city of Seoul, and that Soviet troops occupy the area north of the parallel.

  No Korea experts were involved in the decision. Rusk later confessed that neither he nor any of the others involved were aware that at the turn of the century, the Russians and Japanese had discussed dividing Korea into spheres of influence at the thirty-eighth parallel, a historical fact that might have suggested to Moscow that Washington had finally recognized this old claim. “Had we known that, we almost surely would have chosen another line of demarcation,” Rusk wrote many years later.

  The thirty-eighth-parallel line was hastily incorporated into General Order Number One for the occupation of Japanese-held territory. Despite the fact that US forces were far away and would not arrive on the scene for several weeks, the Soviets carefully stopped their southward advance at the parallel. Thus, Korea came to be divided into two “temporary” zones of occupation that, as the Cold War deepened, became the sites of two antagonistic Korean regimes based on diametrically opposed principles and sponsors.

  US forces were eventually sent from Japan for occupation duty, an assignment that was not popular with the troops. Colonel Harry Summers, who later became a prominent military strategist, recalls arriving for duty as a US Army private and being lectured by the occupation commander, General John R. Hodge, that “there are three things American troops in Japan are afraid of: diarrhea, gonorrhea, and Ko-rea.” Under Hodge’s guidance, the US-backed Republic of Korea was officially proclaimed on August 15, 1948. The Soviet-backed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the North, was proclaimed on September 9, 1948. The South inherited a larger population and more of the agriculture and light industry, while the North obtained most of the heavy industry, electric power, and mineral resources. Each regime claimed sway over the entire peninsula; these claims persist today.

  Summing up, Gregory Henderson, a former US Foreign Service officer and noted Korea scholar, wrote in 1974, “No division of a nation in the present world is so astonishing in its origin as the division of Korea; none is so unrelated to conditions or sentiment within the nation itself at the time the division was effected; none is to this day so unexplained; in none does blunder and planning oversight appear to have played so large a role. Finally, there is no division for which the U.S. government bears so heavy a share of the responsibility as it bears for the division of Korea.”

  As these events and those of its more distant past illustrate, Korea has been a country of the wrong size in the wrong place: large and well located enough to be of substantial value to those around it and thus worth fighting and scheming over, yet too small to merit priority attention by more powerful nations on all but a few occasions. Korea’s fate was often to be an afterthought, subordinated to more immediate or compelling requirements of larger powers, rather than a subject of full consideration in its own right.

  Yet Koreans are neither meek nor passive, but a tough, combative, and independent-minded people with a tradition of strong centralized authority. They are characteristically about as subtle as kimchi, the fiery pepper-and-garlic concoction that is their national dish, and as timid as a tae kwon do (Korean karate) chop. Confronted with the reality of their bitter division, North and South Korea have grappled unceasingly for advantage and supremacy over each other—and with the greater powers outside. How they have done so in the past forty years, and with what risks and results, is recounted in these pages.

  WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH

  To head its regime in the North, the Soviet Union chose a thirty-three-year-old Korean guerrilla commander who had initially fought the Japanese in China but had spent the last years of World War II in Manchurian training camps commanded by the Soviet army. Kim Il Sung, as he called himself (his birth name was Kim Song Ju), had a burning ambition to reunite his country. In the South the United States gave the nod to seventy-year-old Syngman Rhee, who had degrees from George Washington University, Harvard, and Princeton and had lived in exile throughout most of the Japanese occupati
on. Rhee had a messianic belief that he was destined to reunite Korea under an anticommunist banner.

  Late in 1948 the Soviet army went home, turning North Korea over to the regime it had created. The following June, US troops followed suit. Before the summer was over, civil war broke out in clashes of battalion size along the thirty-eighth parallel. Each side was building its forces with an eye to gaining military supremacy.

  On June 25, 1950, North Korea, with Soviet and Chinese backing, invaded the South in an effort to reunify the country by force of arms. The invasion was contested and ultimately repulsed by the forces of the United States, South Korea, and fifteen other nations under the flag of the United Nations (UN). The Chinese intervened massively on the other side to save North Koreans from defeat. Internationally, the bloody three-year Korean War was a historic turning point. It led the United States to shift decisively from post-World War II disarmament to rearmament to stop Soviet expansionism, tripling US military outlays and doubling its troop presence in Europe to bolster the newly formed North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The war cemented the alliance between the Soviet Union and China for most of a decade and made the United States and China bitter enemies for more than twenty years. The battle for Korea firmly established the Cold War and brought the Korean peninsula to the center of global attention.

  Until recently, the origins of the war have been a matter of intense dispute. As late as 1993, North Korea republished its version in a paperback volume titled The US Imperialists Started the Korean War. However, documents from the Soviet archives show clearly that in March, August, and September 1949 and January 1950, Kim implored Stalin and his diplomats repeatedly to authorize an invasion of the South, at one point telling Soviet Embassy officers, “Lately I do not sleep at night, thinking about how to resolve the question of the unification of the whole country. If the matter of the liberation of the people of the southern portion of Korea and the unification of the country is drawn out, then I can lose the trust of the people of Korea.”

  On at least two occasions in 1949, Stalin turned down Kim’s requests, but the documents establish that in early 1950, he approved the war plan due to the “changed international situation.” At this writing, scholars are still unsure what led to Stalin’s reversal. Was it the victory of Mao’s Communist Party in China, the development of the Soviet Union’s atomic bomb, the withdrawal of US forces from South Korea, or Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s famous statement excluding South Korea from the US defense perimeter—all of which took place in 1949 or early 1950—or a combination of these and other causes? We still do not know.

  The Korean conflict was considered the prototype of a limited war in that neither of the big powers used the nuclear weapons available to them, and the United States refrained from attacking Soviet or Chinese territory. On the peninsula, however, the war was savage in its destructiveness. Although the figures are uncertain, a widely accepted estimate is that 900,000 Chinese and 520,000 North Korean soldiers were killed or wounded, as were about 400,000 UN Command troops, nearly two-thirds of them South Koreans. US casualties were 36,000 dead.

  In Korea the war devastated both halves of a country that had only just begun to recover from four decades of Japanese occupation and the sudden shock of division. Around 3 million people, roughly a tenth of the entire population of both sides at the time, were killed, wounded, or missing as a result of the war. Another 5 million became refugees. South Korea’s property losses were put at $2 billion, the equivalent of its gross national product (GNP) for 1949; North Korean losses were estimated at only slightly less.

  When the fighting finally stopped in July 1953, the front line was an irregular tangent slanting across the thirty-eighth parallel very close to where it had all begun. In keeping with the Armistice Agreement, the forces on each side pulled back two thousand meters from the cease-fire lines to create the demilitarized zone. Although both sides were exhausted by three years of combat, there were fears—which have never died—that the battle might be resumed at any moment.

  One of the most important consequences of the war was the hardening of ideological and political lines between North and South. The antipathy that had developed between the opposing regimes was deepened into a blood feud among family members, extending from political leaders to the bulk of the ordinary people who had suffered at the hands of the other side. The thirteen-hundred-year-old unity of the Korean people was shattered.

  In the aftermath of the war, the Rhee regime in the South became increasingly dictatorial and corrupt until it was forced out of office in 1960 by a student-led revolt. After a year the moderate successor government was ousted by a military junta headed by Major General Park Chung Hee, a Japanese-trained officer who had flirted with communism immediately after the Japanese surrender. Park’s background created concern in Washington and initial hope in Pyongyang. Early on, Kim Il Sung dispatched a trusted aide to the South to make secret contact with Park. But instead of exploring a deal, Park had the emissary arrested and executed.

  In the North, Kim Il Sung systematically purged his political opponents, creating a highly centralized system that accorded him unlimited power and generated a formidable cult of personality. As the great communist divide between the Soviet Union and China emerged in the mid-1950s, Kim, though profoundly disturbed by it, learned to play off his communist sponsors against each other to his own advantage. In July 1961 he went to Moscow and finally persuaded Nikita Khrushchev to sign a treaty of “friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance,” pledging to come to Pyongyang’s aid in case of a new war on the divided peninsula. Moscow had been resisting the North’s requests for such a formal alliance since 1958, but now Khrushchev wanted to recruit Kim as an ally against China. With the new agreement in hand, Kim proceeded to Beijing and asked Chinese leaders to match the Moscow treaty, which they did by signing their own nearly identical accord.

  While both North and South Korea gave lip service to eventual reunification, there was little but hostility between them in the 1950s and 1960s. In the most notable incident, in January 1968, a thirty-one-man North Korean commando team attempted to assassinate the South Korean president. The team penetrated to within a thousand yards of the Blue House, the South Korean equivalent of the White House, before being repulsed by police and security forces. The prospects for any sort of reconciliation on the divided peninsula appeared slim indeed.

  THE ORIGINS OF NEGOTIATION

  On July 9, 1971, Henry Kissinger landed secretly in Beijing on a Pakistani airliner to begin the historic Sino-American rapprochement that openly split the communist world and changed global politics. Access to documents from the time and new scholarship are advancing, and to some extent altering, understanding of Pyongyang’s response to this geostrategic earthquake, but the full story undoubtedly remains to be told. Some earlier accounts had suggested that Kim Il Sung was secretly in Beijing during the Kissinger visit, but that does not seem to have been the case. Nevertheless, within days of Kissinger’s departure, Zhou Enlai was in Pyongyang for two long meetings with Kim. Two weeks later, Kim sent a senior official–Kim Il—to Beijing for more discussions. In the summer of 1971, it had been only a year since Sino–North Korean relations had emerged from a serious downturn during China’s Cultural Revolution. Kim was probably not inclined to see ties fray again so soon, his relations at that point with Moscow were not very good, and, in any case, Zhou was apparently persuasive that Sino-US rapprochement represented an opportunity rather than a threat to North Korea. Kim would have perked up his ears if Zhou recited to him what Kissinger had said during the discussions in Beijing—that under certain circumstances it was “conceivable” that by the end of President Nixon’s second term, “most, if not all,” American troops would be withdrawn from Korea. Given Pyongyang’s enduring suspicions of the Chinese, Kim may not have completely bought Zhou’s arguments. The sudden shift in Beijing’s approach effectively left Pyongyang exposed in its confrontation with the United States. But the N
orth Korean leader was very much a pragmatist, and if anyone could make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, he could. After a few weeks’ reflection, he decided to try.

  So far as can be determined, it was Vietnam rather than Korea that figured in Nixon’s desire to end the decades of hostility with China, which had begun with Chinese intervention in the Korean War. By simultaneously improving ties with both Moscow and Beijing, Nixon hoped to demonstrate that North Vietnam was vulnerable in a larger game being played by major powers. Though probably unintended, the vulnerability was felt by North Korea and, to Washington’s dismay, by South Korea as well. Both Korean regimes felt more insecure than ever before. Both, for the first time, decided to try to take the settlement of their conflict into their own hands.

  Later in the year, the Chinese approved new economic aid and signed the first agreement on military aid to North Korea in fifteen years. The results began to appear the following April, when newly arrived Chinese tanks clanked through Pyongyang’s Kim Il Sung Square in the parade for the North Korean leader’s birthday. At the same time, China began supplying North Korea with its models of Russia’s MiG-19 supersonic fighter planes.

  Kim broke his public silence on Sino-American developments on August 6, 1971, at a mass rally in Pyongyang honoring his closest foreign friend, Cambodian head of state Prince Norodom Sihanouk. In a surprise move, Kim announced that “we are ready to establish contact at any time with all political parties, including the [ruling] Democratic Republican Party, and all social organizations and individual personages in South Korea.” This was an abrupt reversal of the long-standing position, reiterated by North Korea’s foreign minister only four months earlier, that the ouster of the ruling party was an essential condition for negotiations with the South.