Korea's reunification: pipe dream

By Deauwand Myers

The Olympics are over. And as per usual, Trump’s chaotic administration caused a bit of controversy. Yet, honestly, I understood the reasoning behind the said administration’s behavior.

American Vice President Pence did not stand for the reunification flag of North and South Korea’s Winter Olympics contingent. Pseudo-Christian, venal, and mendacious as he is, on this, Vice President Pence, neo-conservatives and I agree: reunification of the Korean Peninsula is an impossibility.

Or rather, a peaceful reunification is an impossibility. Comparisons between East and West Germany aren’t analogous. East Germany did not have nuclear weapons, nor did it have a quasi-fascist cult of personality wrapped around a bloody, dynastic rule of one family.

Further, North Korea has existed far longer than East Germany. Even so, it took trillions of dollars and decades of work to reintegrate East and West Germany, and the differences between the two sides are still evident in a unified Germany.

Reunification is a dream unmoored from reality. If one visits the reunification ministry in Korea, you’ll see a complex with few employees and even less activity. As far as a government job goes, it’s nice work if you can get it. But the lack of activity and personnel is a stark reminder of how seriously the Korean government really takes reunification.

How, exactly, would reunification occur? The Kim dynasty and the highest echelons of that evil regime luxuriate in plenty, while the vast majority of the country is mired in abject poverty and constant malnutrition.

Casual brutality, mass murder, starvation, summary executions, sexual assaults and Gestapo-style political prisons are par for the course. These prison camps are as bad, or worse, than Nazi concentration camps.

Thomas Buergenthal, who served on the International Court of Justice, concurs. He has the perspective to substantiate his assertions. He was a child in Nazi Germany, and he survived Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, as well as the predominantly Jewish ghetto of Kielce, Poland.

In Australia’s No. 1 news site, news.com.au, a fairly recent article titled, “North Korea’s camps ‘worse than Auschwitz,’” quotes Buergenthal as saying, “I believe that the conditions in the [North] Korean prison camps are as terrible, or even worse, than those I saw and experienced in my youth in these Nazi camps and in my long professional career in the human rights field.”

Further, Buergenthal was one of the judges in the ICJ’s tribunal who concluded that Kim Jong-un and company are guilty of crimes against humanity.

What, save violence, would compel such a corrupt, amoral regime into capitulation? Unlike Russia or China, the DPRK could not care less about the wellbeing of its population.

Decades of economic sanctions, along with pouring a large portion of its minimal resources into nuclear armament, have left North Koreans somewhat inoculated from the depravity of the material conditions in which they live, the thousands of North Koreans who have successfully or unsuccessfully fled the country notwithstanding.

The goal of South Korea and the international community is to see the denuclearization of the peninsula. Succinctly, everyone wants the DPRK to give up its nuclear ambitions in an irreversible, verifiable fashion.

The North has said more than once it refuses to do such a thing; further, it rightly sees its progress in developing reliable and deliverable nuclear weapons as integral to its very survival.

South Korea should take some of the blame for this. Past liberal administrations have sought to appease the North with little more than bribes: money, food and medical supplies for the promise of talks and denuclearization. The North sometimes complies; usually, it simply delays its weapons programs and then reneges on its past commitments at its convenience.

What’s more, in the unrealistic pursuit of reunification, both conservative and liberal South Korean administrations haven’t done the necessary work in preparing for a war with the North.

Decades ago, America warned South Korea to move the capital, or at the very least, important government and population centers, farther from the Demilitarized Zone. The South never complied. Sejong City is a sort of afterthought in this regard.

America requested the South to create well-stocked, bombproof bunkers in Seoul and Gyeonggi Province. The South has these bunkers, but they aren’t well-positioned or well-stocked with food rations and medical supplies for the population.

In short, South Korea doesn’t seriously believe in the pipe dream of reunification; but believes in it just enough not to prepare for the worst-case scenario (and increasingly, the most likely one) ― all-out war with the DPRK.

I say what I have said before: war, most probably a hot, fast, bloody one, will be the only way to end North Korea in a decisive, immutable fashion. Peaceful reunification, or even a serious rapprochement with the North, requires two serious, responsible partners. We don’t have that now, and we never have.

Deauwand Myers (deauwand@hotmail.com) holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside Seoul. The views expressed in the above article are the author’s own and do not reflect the editorial direction of The Korea Times.