Youngsters indifferent to division, war

Yoon Je-hyeon

By Jun Ji-hye

“I was born while my mother was escaping to the south following the breakout of the Korean War,” said 63-year-old housewife Jeon Jeong-hwa who lives in Gyeonggi Province.

“At the time, my father was in the army near the 38th parallel and was fighting on the frontiers.”

During the interview, she recalled the war, although she was too young at the time to have clear memories.

But she said the war years are an integral part of her family’s history and fortunately her father survived the conflict.

“My dad told me that the war broke out while he and his colleagues were sleeping. What shocked me most was when he told me about people’s severed arms and legs that he had seen as he wandered around the towns,” she said. “It was so horrific. This must never happen again.”

For teenagers, however, the war seems somehow unreal.

When asked about the significance of July 27, Yoon Je-hyeon, 17, a high school student in Gyeonggi Province, answered, “I guess it is the 100th day before the college entrance exam. Am I correct?”

The three-year Korean War which broke out on June 25, 1950 ended with the signing of an armistice on July 27, 1953, which marks its 60th anniversary on Saturday.

However, while six decades have elapsed since the armistice, territorial division remains on the peninsula. This made younger generations apathetic and indifferent to the whole idea of the war.

“Whenever North Korean threats and provocations come such as the artillery shelling of Yeonpyeong Island or the sinking of the Cheonan ship, it’s scary. However, fear soon disappears and I just go back to my daily life,” said Yoon.

The high school student said that her fears about the war are mostly rooted in movies or arise from watching TV dramas.

“I have never thought about war breaking out in my country,” Yoon said.

According to a survey of 1,000 teenagers and 1,000 adults that the Ministry of Security and Public Administration and pollster Research & Research jointly carried out, 53 percent of teenagers did not know when the Korean War began, while 36 percent of adults did not get the right answer.

The survey was conducted from May 25 to June 6 on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of Korean War Armistice Day.

Generational gap

Ahn Eun-ok

When asked whether they think it’s possible that Pyongyang could start a war as in 1950, 56 percent said “yes.” This number is comparative to 72 percent of adults who answered the same way.

A 20-year-old university student Ji Hyun-jin said he recently became concerned about war breaking out because he will soon be beginning his term of mandatory military service and confessed that before now he had no definite ideas regarding the divided peninsula and the possibilities of war.

All able Korean men above 18 must serve in the military for about two years. “Most friends of my age have to start thinking about joining the military, so we sometimes talk about the war,” he said, adding that, “I think we talk half jokingly.”

However, he said that he does not care about inter-Korean relations, commenting, “I think it is okay as it is. I have not thought about unification or something like that.”

A high school student Yoon expressed a similar view.

“Everything is okay now. Plus, I don’t think we can benefit from improved inter-Korean relations or unification because we are richer than the North,” she said.

A 67-year-old housewife Ahn Eun-ok who has more vivid memories about the Korean War than 63-year-old Jeon Jeong-hwa recalled, that at the time, many young men died or were taken to the communist state.

With such memories, she still has fears of war breaking out and stressed that the two Koreas must be unified.

“I don’t want my children and my grandchildren to live in this divided country where danger about war always exists,” she said.

Differences over unification between generations were also identified in survey results announced last year from Seoul National University’s Institute for Peace and Unification Studies.

Nearly 64 percent of those in their 50s, the oldest age group surveyed, said that unification is necessary, marking the largest group. Only 46.7 percent in their 20s supported unification.

However, experts say that no one can blame the youngsters because interest reduces as time passes.

“The young, especially adolescents, do not have definite concepts about the war, the armistice or peace. They just assess current situations from what they see now,” said Kim Heung-kwang, a former professor in the North and representative of the group North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity.

He said, however, that a lack of education in schools and universities could be blamed.

“Although people become less concerned about the war, they should not forget many war victims because, thanks to them, people in the present age can live happily in a free, democratic country,” said Kim.

Kim stressed that people should think about how the nation would have been if the Stalinist state had won the war.

The analyst called for an effective system to disseminate information and knowledge about the isolated state and the truth about conditions on the divided peninsula.

“The North still attempts to expand its forces to the south and wants to spread its system here. South Korean people with no interest in these matters could play a role as an opportunity for the North to achieve its desire,” said Kim.

Park Young-ho, an analyst at the Korea Institute for National Unification, echoed,

“Schools and authorities in education sectors should develop new information delivery systems, for example using smart phones, to suit the taste of young people, rather than conducting education that only focuses on the college entrance exams,” he said.