DMZ Forum Examines Road Ahead for Two Koreas
By Michael Ha
Staff Reporter
Some 200 Korea analysts from around the world gathered at the COEX conference hall in Seoul last week for the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) Peace Forum, an annual international conference. The occasion brought together some of the leading Korea scholars and historians who shared their perspectives on the region's past and what may lie in store for the two divided nations.
A prominent Korea specialist, Robert Scalapino, professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, offered in his keynote speech last Thursday a grim forecast for the reclusive North.
In a speech titled ``Peace and Stability in Northeast Asia-Future Prospects," Scalapino observed, ``All indications are that North Korea is again headed toward a serious food crisis due to a combination of flawed policies, bad weather, and reduced external assistance."
The professor remarked that while the crisis this time is not likely to be as serious as that of the late 1990s, when an estimated 1.7 million people perished, ``it could accentuate that nation's poverty and its need for external aid."
It is believed that the North can only produce two-thirds of its needed food even under favorable conditions, and must depend upon assistance from the outside for the remaining portion, Scalapino said.
``China, Russia and the United States are providing some aid, but in reduced quantity thus far in comparison with the past," he said.
Nuclear Stalemate
Scalapino observed that from the early 1990s onward, positive advances with respect to the North's nuclear activities were followed by stalemates or retreats, and the rise of tension.
``The missile launchings and the nuclear test in 2006 illustrated the North's willingness to risk international isolation in order to maintain its nuclear program, whether out of fear, as a bargaining chip, or both."
Recently, he noted, U.S. President George W. Bush indicated that Washington was delaying the removal of North Korea from the list of states supporting terrorism because Pyongyang has not been cooperative in establishing a verification procedure to account for its nuclear programs.
An equally serious aspect of the North Korean problem, Scalapino added, lay in the deterioration of North-South relations after the advent of the Lee Myung-bak administration earlier this year.
He observed, ``After a brief period of silence, Pyongyang launched vigorous attacks on Lee, labeling him `an American puppet' and using other derogatory language.
``Moreover, certain negative actions ensued, such as Pyongyang's demand for withdrawal of South Korean officials from the Gaeseong Economic Zone, and the death of a South Korean tourist at the Mount Geumgang resort. As of mid-2008, the two Koreas were not talking to each other at the official level, even informally," Scalapino noted.
``The challenge at present is to use diverse approaches to bring North Korea into greater peaceful and constructive contact with the world around it, with North-South Korean relations being of critical importance in this respect."
Toward Working Peace System
Samuel S. Kim, professor at Columbia University and senior researcher at the school's Weatherhead East Asian Institute, advised that the Lee administration, in conjunction with interested parties, work on establishing what he described as a ``working peace system" with the Stalinist North.
In a speech titled ``Peace and stability in Northeast Asia and the Role of the DMZ," Kim said that ``the challenge for the uncertain years ahead is to find greater synergy among the many types of state and non-state actors in order to create a working peace system."
Kim observed that the DMZ is now 55 years old, ``exceeding the 35-year Japanese colonial rule by two decades."
``The Korean Peninsula conflict seems like one of the most protracted and unmediated of its kind since the end of World War II. Indeed, the restructuring impact of the Korean War upon the national, regional, and global systemic levels cannot be overemphasized," the Columbia University professor said.
``More than any other postwar international event, the Korean War had great catalytic effect in enacting the rules of the Cold War game, deeply congealing patterns of East-West conflict across Northeast Asia and beyond," he said. ``The region was more involved in Cold-War zero-sum politics than any other region in the world."
Even today, he said, almost half a century after the Korean War ended with an armistice accord, the DMZ ``easily stands out as the most heavily fortified conflict zone in the post-Cold War world," where more than 1.8 million military personnel ― including some 27,000 U.S. troops ― confront each other, armed to the teeth with the latest weapons systems.
Korean Division Exception Rather Than Rule
Yet no divided country, including China, Germany, and Vietnam, had been previously united as an independent political entity so continuously or so long as had Korea, Professor Kim said.
``Unlike almost all of the 192 member states of the United Nations that include two or more ethnic communities of significant size, throughout two millennia of history Korea has been united ethnically and linguistically.
``There is thus a substantial disparity between the primordial unity of the nation and people of Korea and its more recent divided status as two incomplete states," Kim said.
This has given rise to ``continuing asymmetries between the rising expectations for Korean reunification and the limited integrative capabilities and compatibilities on the ground."
Over the post-Cold War years, he observed, especially since the Kim Dae-jung administration in 1998, each side has also developed informal mechanisms that allow it to function as a normal state in the international community. ``Like conjoined twins attached at the hip, each half of Korea has operated with the knowledge that both its every move and its national identity are reflected in its ideologically opposed doppelganger."
What May Lie Ahead
On the peninsula's future prospects, Kim said that ``predicting the future of inter-Korean relations, always hazardous, has never been more so than today, when the global system itself is undergoing profound and long-term transformation.
``Indeed it seems more unpredictable now than it did in the early to mid-1990s when a broad swath of academics and policy pundits were predicting the imminent collapse of North Korea and German-style reunification by absorption," he said.
``As a result of the uneasy juxtaposition of continuities and changes, a new Northeast Asian regional order of indeterminate shape is emerging, with multiple pathways, complexities, and uncertainties," according to the professor.
``It is worth noting here Marx's famous warning about our history-making power: Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past.
``Indeed, there is a very large range of factors directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past that are impacting and will continue to influence inter-Korean relations and the peace strategies connected with them."
Kim also observed that North Korea has "gained a new pair of life-supporting geo-economic patrons in Beijing and Seoul", at least until the coming of the conservative Lee administration in February.
``Contrary to the received wisdom that the Korean peninsula still remains the last Cold War stronghold, the peace process on the divided Korean Peninsula ― a functional peace-by-pieces process ― has continued to widen and deepen largely unabated and unaffected by the on-again, off-again nuclear tensions."