Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe. Today: It’s been dubbed the forgotten war, but the Korean War — which started on June 25, 1950 — still divides the peninsula and could re-erupt at any moment.
A peace treaty was never signed between the U.S. and North Korea, only an armistice was agreed in 1953. Sixty years on, the conflict still smoulders as North and South Korea face each other across the Demilitarized Zone.
This week, the North demanded the United States pay almost US$65-trillion in compensation for six decades of hostility, including $26.1-trillion for what it labelled U.S. war “atrocities.” Students and farm workers held meetings to mark the anniversary and to vow revenge on “the Yankees as a herd of wolves in human skin,” its official news agency reported.
Pyongyang has also moved from rhetoric to action. Its recent torpedoing of the South Korean warship Cheonan, with the loss of 46 sailors, is a bitter reminder the war never really ended, notes Bill Powell in Time magazine.
“Korea has come to be regarded as a forgotten conflict — tucked in between World War II, which united a nation in a just cause, and Vietnam, which tore the same nation asunder. In China, which lost, according to some estimates, over one million soldiers during the war, there is barely a nod of remembrance. But right now, along the southern side of the DMZ, South Korean troops are assembling loudspeakers and large video screens, tools they again intend to use to wage psychological warfare against the soldiers on the other side. The South will remind them just how awful their government is and just how good life on the southern side is … The only way the situation can improve is with the demise of the Kim dynasty in Pyongyang. And the only conceivable way that can happen, barring a coup, uprising or cataclysmic scaling up of what the U.S. military calls ‘kinetic contact,’ is if the North’s lone patron, China, decides it’s had enough.”
For The Associated Press’s Charles E. Hanley,
“This ‘forgotten’ chapter of 20th-century history still casts a long shadow over today’s world, as the root of unending crises on the peninsula and beyond, and as the war that turned America permanently into a dominant global military power … Why has this state of no war, no peace dragged on for 60 years?
South Korean scholar Hong [Seukryule] believes four great powers — the U.S. and Japan on one side, China and Russia on the other — like it this way.
A unified Korea would align with one power or the other, upsetting the regional balance, said the former Korea University president, a prominent conservative commentator.
‘By keeping Korea divided, they’re in fact maintaining their own security,’ Hong said.”
This week, there was an indication things might change for the better. As Malcolm Moore reports for The Daily Telegraph,
“China has finally rewritten its history of how the conflict began to point the finger of responsibility at North Korea.
Until now, the Chinese have staunchly supported their North Korean allies, along whose side they fought in the war. China previously insisted that the war was waged out of American aggression. The official title of the conflict on the mainland is ‘The War to Resist America and Aid Korea.’
Chinese history textbooks state that the Korean War began when ‘the United States assembled a United Nations army of 15 countries and defiantly marched across the border and invaded North Korea, spreading the flames of war to our Yalu river.’
The official Chinese media stated for the first time that it was North Korea that dealt the first blow. In a special report, Xinhua’s International Affairs journal said: ‘On June 25, 1950, the North Korean army marched over 38th Parallel and started the attack. Three days later, Seoul fell.’ ”
Unfortunately, this moment of candour was all too-brief. The Seoul-based Joong An Daily notes,
“[T]he article was soon removed from the weekly’s Web site as well as the sites of Xinhua and other portals. It is suspected that the Beijing government had a hand in removing the pieces, fearing the repercussions from North Korea. But the fiasco leaves us feeling bitter, as our two states could form a constructive and mature partnership based on an accurate acknowledgement of historical events.
The Korean War is a sensitive issue for China. It played a major role in a war that still has the two Koreas locked in conflict. But the fact that the North invaded the South is an established fact based on solid evidence.
Confidential documents from the Soviet Union provide vivid accounts of Kim Il Sung’s ambitious plans for unification through military aggression. Some Chinese historians support the invasion theory … However uncomfortable they may be, historical facts must be recorded truthfully and should not be covered up or distorted by political or ideological interests.”
compiled by Araminta Wordsworth