July 27, 2003|By Richard Halloran | Richard Halloran,SPECIAL TO THE SUN
FIFTY YEARS ago tonight, at 10 o'clock, the crash of artillery and the mutter of machine guns ceased along the 151-mile front that stretched across the Korean peninsula between the armies of South Korea, the United States and the United Nations and those of North Korea and the People's Republic of China.
Precisely 12 hours earlier, Lt. Gen. William K. Harrison of the U.S. Army and Gen. Nam Il of the North Korean People's Army had signed a truce in the village of Panmunjom to bring a halt to three years of fighting. That armistice, however, was not a peace treaty and did not end the conflict.
Today, two of the world's largest armed forces, the North Koreans with 1.1 million troops and South Koreans with 650,000 confront each other across a 4,000-yard-wide demilitarized zone (DMZ) that divides the peninsula. What has become a cold Korean civil war could turn hot at any time.
Why has peace not come to a people with 4,300 years of legendary and recorded history, of more than a thousand years of unified history, a nation of one culture and one language, a people who long nurtured the same Buddhist religion and the same Confucian philosophy?
The division of Korea was the consequence of Japanese occupation and World War II. Immediately after that, the Koreans got caught up in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Within Korea itself there developed two markedly different political orders and vastly different economies.
And emotionally, as an American student of Korea once observed: "Nobody hates the way brothers hate."
Internationally, none of the powerful countries engaged in Northeast Asia has been eager to see Korea reunified even after the end of the Cold War. China, still an ally of North Korea, prefers a divided Korea as a buffer between itself and Japan and the United States. Russia, once an ally of the North, has little influence there today because it has deep problems of its own.
Of South Korea's allies, the United States is mainly concerned with preventing a renewal of hostilities. The United States still has 37,000 troops in South Korea under a security treaty to deter a North Korean attack or to help defend South Korea.
The 2nd Infantry Division is being shifted from its current position between the capital in Seoul and the DMZ to a new post south of Seoul. It will be given a new mission: to be rapidly deployable to protect U.S. interests elsewhere in Asia and will be more flexible in defending South Korea.
The U.S. position in South Korea has been complicated by rising anti-Americanism, especially among younger Koreans with no memory of Americans fighting and dying to help stave off the North Koreans a half-century ago. Many Koreans want U.S. forces to go home.
On the other side, North Korea is acquiring nuclear arms and has hinted it would sell them to terrorists or other enemies of the United States. The United States is seeking to dissuade Pyongyang with promises of economic aid and diplomatic recognition -- and the threat of a pre-emptive strike if negotiations fail.
Like the United States, Japan has supported Korean reconciliation. But secretly, many Japanese would be happy to see Korea remain divided so that it does not once again become what Japanese feared long ago, "a dagger pointed at the heart of Japan."
In 1910, Japan, then the rising power in Asia, occupied Korea and ruled there until defeated in August 1945. The Allied powers agreed that the Soviet Union, which had entered the war nine days before Japan surrendered, would take the Japanese surrender north of the 38th Parallel and the United States would do so south of that arbitrary line.
Supposedly, that was temporary, but it quickly hardened in the emerging competition between Moscow and Washington.
The Russians installed Kim Il Sung, who had been an officer in the Red Army, as leader of North Korea, while the United States sponsored Yi Sung-man, better known as Syngman Rhee, who had been in exile in the United States.
After North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950, the war raged up and down the peninsula for a year, then settled into two years of trench warfare and two years of negotiations.
The casualties were horrendous: 415,000 South Koreans killed and 429,000 wounded; 520,000 North Koreans killed and wounded; 54,200 Americans killed and 103,000 wounded; other U.N. troops suffered 15,500 dead and wounded; China lost 900,000 killed and wounded.
The devastation matched the casualties. More than a year after the cease-fire, electric power failed almost every night. Koreans lacked warm clothes in the frigid winter, and their homes had barely enough fuel to ward off the chill. Children were scantily clad, and many had runny noses and infected ears.
