By Oh Young-jin
Just before the Arab terrorists’ gruesome murder of Kim Sun-il, a Korean taken hostage in Iraq, in June 2004, I, as a political editor, was invited by then-Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon for a briefing.
I still recall how Ban, now U.N. secretary general, talked about the price Korea had to pay for its globalization and stated that the Kim case could be the first hard lesson we had to learn in the process. Ban elaborated further, saying that Korea was a big economic power with Koreans being all over the world so it was inevitable for some of them to get targeted by one terrorist group or another.
I agreed with other editors on Ban’s deadpan assessment. However, when the footage of Kim being hacked by the knife of a hooded Arab terrorist, was shown on the Internet, I felt my blood boiling, seething with anger. I am sure that I was not alone in thinking about a biblical way of retribution.
Three years later, in July 2007, 23 Koreans belonging to a church went on a “conversion” mission to Afghanistan and were abducted by a band of Taliban thugs.
During the following 43-day ordeal, it was not just the captured missionaries but also the entire nation that were held hostage. Two of the 23 kidnapped were killed with their bodies thrown on a roadside. The remaining 21 were set free after prolonged negotiations.
On one side, I felt unbridled anger at those killers but on the other I couldn’t entirely erase impressions that an individual, not the nation, should hold the primary responsibility for his or her own safety, a price Ban said we, Koreans, have to learn to pay for becoming denizens of the global village where diverse interests often clash with each other, sometimes violently.
In May last year, North Korea torpedoed a South Korean patrol boat in the West Sea, killing 46 sailors. Pyongyang has denied its involvement but a multinational inspection team found its fingerprints were all over the case.
I was angry at the mass murderer, the anger amplified exponentially by each count of our dead young sailors. I was even angrier at a collective sense of defenselessness, watching my government being unable to do anything.
In November, the same sense of helplessness overwhelmed me when North Korea shelled Yeongpyeong Island in the West Sea, killing two civilians and two marines. The live footage of the island on fire with big black plumes of smoke covering the skies above it made me even more indignant about myself and the government not being capable of doing something about the evil next-door neighbor.
Of course, the Cheonan sinking and the Yeongpyeong attack are acts of state-sponsored terrorism with North Korea being the undeniable perpetrator. The Kim Sun-il slaying and the Afghanistan kidnapping were terrorist acts by asymmetric forces, which were harder to define, and were motivated by personal gain and complicated tribal interests.
Still, the effect, in hindsight, was quite the same in that all four cases, despite differences in their degree, resulted in a weakened sense of self-esteem as an individual Korean and a national of the nation, something that the terrorists aimed at, whether consciously or not.
Last week, the successful rescue operation by our Navy commandos that saved the crewmembers on board the chemical carrier Samho Jewelry in the Gulf of Aden in the Indian Ocean is taken as my personal catharsis and the redemption of our self-esteem as a nation.
The account given by the military was nothing less than a movie. Our Navy SEALs and UDT members in high-speed boats, dispatched from our destroyer, approached the seized ship in a predawn attack and overpowered the Somali pirates, who were rendered blind with their radar jammed and distracted by machine gun strafing from a helicopter. In the end, the privates were overpowered and made ineffective. Justice has finally prevailed.
At a personal level, it has healed our wounded pride as I felt like a neighborhood patsy, who has finally stood up to a bully and beat the daylights out of him. Momentarily, it appears to be okay to forget that it was a ragtag group of sea robbers who we won a fight over. Perhaps, the distance between the scene of the fight and Seoul may have exaggerated our triumph rather than diminished it. Or I may have been overly willing to allow the Aden victory to get exaggerated all for the purpose of gaining back my peace of mind.
Days after the Aden victory, I still feel proud of our military for executing the raid with surgical precision and I also thank the U.S., Oman and other countries for rendering their help in making the operation a success.
But in the back of my mind, I fear that the Aden victory may trigger a vicious cycle of retaliation and counter-retaliation. In today’s world with a crazy quilt of differing interests, one’s victory often means the other party’s defeat; a terrorist to one sometimes proves to be a freedom fighter to the other and a victim can turn into a perpetrator. In a nutshell, we are living in a world of sour losers.
To cope with this capricious world, I want to remind myself and others of the price we pay as mentioned by Ban so as to keep ourselves in perspective and prevent us from turning myopic. At the end of the zero-sum game we are all playing, we win some and lose some.