The 38th parallel
.jpg?w=728)
By Ranjit Kumar Dhawan
The Korean Peninsula was divided along the 38th parallel or 38 degrees latitude North by the Allied Powers after the surrender of the Japanese colonial regime in 1945.
The Soviet troops occupied the area north of this line and the United States occupied the area south of it. This division was supposedly for a limited period of time in order to keep the Korean peninsula under the trusteeship of the Allied Powers after which it would have been reunified. But to this day, the Korean peninsula remains divided.
A culturally and racially homogenous country such as Korea became the victim of a Cold War rivalry between the superpowers. By the year 1948, the division of the Korean peninsula along the 38th parallel became institutionalized with the establishment of the Republic of Korea in the South and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the North.
The urge to reunify the peninsula was strong in both North and South Korea. On June 25, 1950, North Korea directed armed aggression at South Korea. Bruce Cummings (2010) in his book “The Korean War: A History’ wrote that the Korea War (1950-53)” was basically a civil war. However, a conflict which started as a civil war turned into a Cold War rivalry.
The war caused immense destruction in both North and South Korea and threatened to start another World War. The amount of bombs dropped by the U.S. forces on the North flattened almost every town and city there. It is often remarked that the U.S. forces ran out of targets in North Korea. Hundreds of thousands died in the war and thousands more were wounded or maimed.
The hostilities ended with an armistice on July 27, 1953 but no peace agreement was signed. As a result the two Koreas remain technically at war with each other to this day. While the Cold War ended in other parts of the world, the Korean peninsula has remained a Cold War zone. The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) which has kept the Korean peninsula divided since the end of the Korean War runs approximately along the same 38th parallel to this day.
Recently, the city of Ferguson in Missouri in the United States turned into a conflict zone between the state police and those demanding justice in the case of a fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white policeman. But the interesting thing is that this conflict zone also lies on the 38th parallel. Conflicts related to racial division in the U.S. are not unusual, what is significant is that the Ferguson incident happened at a time when the U.S. and its allies have been putting all their efforts into bringing the North Korean human rights issue before the International Criminal Court.
The present situation in Ferguson reminds us of the American Civil War (1861-65) in the U.S., which was fought on the issue of the abolition of the slavery and racial discrimination. Slavery was abolished in several states in the North but it continued in the Southern states. Soon after the election of the Republican Party presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln in 1860, several Southern states seceded from the country. This led to a horrific Civil War. It is also argued that the Civil War was not fought for the abolition of the slavery per se but as a means to reunifying the country.
While the 38th parallel in the Korean peninsula divides people on ideological grounds, in the case of the U.S. it divides people according to racial divisions. But it is indeed tragic that conflict in one country is called the Civil War but in another country a civil war became an international conflict and is referred to as part of the Cold War, and has kept it divided for the last six decades.
The author is a Ph. D. candidate at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. His email address is rkdhawan13@hotmail.com.