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PYONGYANG
WATCH
Sow corn in your enemy's field
By Aidan Foster-Carter
"I
went out and sowed corn in my enemy's field, that God
might exist." A startling sentence, not soon forgotten.
I came upon it long ago, in some Quaker text. A very
Quaker sentiment, which for years I had misattributed to
Jakob Boehme, the remarkable 17th-century German mystic.
Not so. It is much more modern, and - alas -
fiction. In his 1916 novel The Great Hunger, the
Norwegian writer Johan Bojer creates a man who has
suffered much - and yet nothing, until his child is
killed by a neighbor's hound. Famine stalks their remote
valley. Numb with grief, the father finally sees what he
must do. One night, he takes the last of his own barley,
and sows it in the field of that same neighbor, now
ostracized by all. He affirms life, God and humankind.
Fiction indeed. In the real world, Jewish
settlers cut down Arab olive groves - and Arabs. In
revenge, young Palestinians sow a vile harvest: blowing
themselves and their foes to kingdom come. Blasphemers
both, each kills in God's name. The spiral of violence
seems endless.
Meanwhile, the born-again George
Bush has unleashed fire and brimstone on Iraq. Leaders
and experts openly mull even using nuclear weapons. To
out-evil evil: such is the wisdom of our age. In his
first Christmas message, the new Archbishop of
Canterbury, Rowan Williams, mocked these latter-day wise
men, who know it all but "create yet more havoc and
suffering".
There has to be a better way - and
there is. Little noticed, Johan Bojer's redemptive
gesture is being played out, in real life, in a troubled
peninsula at the opposite end of the Eurasian land mass
from Norway. Korea is in the headlines again, and as
usual the news is not good. North Korea, desperately
defiant, has restarted its nuclear program; tensions
with the United States are rising.
But that will
not stop Kim Soon-kwon sowing corn in his enemy's field
- literally, and in the full light of day. A South
Korean crop scientist and a devout Christian, Kim became
known as "Dr Corn" for his pioneering work breeding
special disease-resistant corn (maize) seeds for Africa.
These days Dr Corn works closer to home. Since
1998 he has been a regular visitor to famine-stricken
North Korea, where hundreds of farms are growing new
strains of corn he has bred. Not long ago, he would have
risked arrest. Now, under the Sunshine Policy begun by
South Korean ex-president Kim Dae-jung, and shared by
his recently installed successor Roh Moo-hyun, such
contacts are no longer forbidden but positively
encouraged.
While the world worries, quite
rightly, about North Korean nukes, we miss the bigger
picture. Officially, the two Koreas are still foes. But
they are no longer strangers, and at the grassroots
level many South Koreans such as Dr Corn are, as he puts
it, "helping to start the healing process".
Last
December alone, according to the Ministry of Unification
in Seoul, 14 different Southern groups sent aid worth
US$9 million to North Korea. The Red Cross gave winter
underwear and medicines. Kangwon province, bisected by
the border, sent materials for a salmon hatchery. One
Buddhist gave 5,400 rolls of cloth, for diapers. Korean
Sharing Movement, a Christian group, sent vaccines,
clothes, and 140 goats. The list goes on: milk, sugar,
poultry, noodles ...
Human encounters are
another gift, and less one-way. An automated Southern
rice harvester provoked amazement; yet the donors
equally admired Northern skills in endlessly patching up
their own clapped-out machines. There are also new
challenges. A planeload of South Korean Christians,
denied a promised visit to a Pyongyang church, held
their own impromptu worship in a hotel dining room.
Nobody stopped them, and it worked: the church trip was
reinstated.
The nuclear crisis notwithstanding,
such exchanges persist. On February 8, a 106-strong team
of medics and farm workers flew directly to Pyongyang,
to visit hospitals and chicken farms and plan further
aid. Official-level economic and other talks continue.
Seoul has just pledged a further 100,000 tons of rice.
The new agriculture minister proposes to send far more -
1.2 million tons - over the next three years, to reduce
stocks that are depressing prices at home.
Above
all, on February 5 the North-South border, sealed for
half a century, opened to a Southern tourist group.
Another cross-border route will create a new industrial
zone at Kaesong near Seoul, which is hoped can become as
Shenzhen is to Hong Kong. These are momentous
developments.
Last December, 12 million South
Korean voters chose - albeit narrowly - the
pro-engagement Roh Moo-hyun over a hawkish candidate,
Lee Hoi-chang. Young Koreans, above all, support
Sunshine. That puts them and their president on a
collision course with George W Bush, who insists "all
options" are possible for North Korea - meaning force is
not ruled out. When Roh visits Washington for the first
time in a month or so, minds will not meet; sparks may
fly.
If wise men's folly leads to the cataclysm
many of us fear in Iraq, maybe the warmongers will think
again. In Korea, it is Koreans' prerogative to decide
how to heal the hostility that began in 1945, when the
US casually drew a "temporary" line across their land.
One horrific Korean war was enough. If today's young
Koreans choose now to sow corn in their brother enemy's
field, are they simply naive and foolish? Or is theirs
the true, profound, long-run wisdom?
Aidan
Foster-Carter is honorary senior research fellow in
sociology and modern Korea at Leeds university, England.
An earlier, shorter version of this article appeared in
the International Herald Tribune in February.
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