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2 Olympic clock ticks for unified
Korean team By Brian Bridges
The Olympic Games, to be held in Beijing
in August, are already omnipresent. As nations
from around the world finish preparing and
selecting athletes for Beijing, one focus of
attention will be the representation from China's
neighbors, the two Koreas.
With the
support and encouragement of the International
Olympic Committee (IOC), the two Koreas' National
Olympic Committees (NOCs) have raised the
possibility of fielding a joint team for the first
time ever at an Olympics Games. However, despite
several rounds of discussions both bilaterally and
with IOC involvement, there has been no definitive
agreement on this unified team and time has all
but run out.
This article examines the
prospects for the creation of a joint team against
the background of six decades of sporting and
political competition,
cooperation, and recrimination between the
Republic of Korea (South Korea) and the Democratic
People's Republic of Korea (North Korea).
Despite the ideal that "sport has nothing
to do with politics", there is little doubt that
the two are closely linked for divided nations,
which by their very rationale are involved in a
highly-charged competition for legitimacy with
their other "part-nation". Under these
circumstances, the Olympics inevitably become an
arena for political maneuvering.
Two
Koreas and the Olympics Since their formal
foundation in 1948, the North and South Korean
states had been involved in a competitive
struggle, which has found expression not just
through the military clashes of the Korean War but
also through diplomatic, economic and cultural
means. Both governments initially adopted a "one
Korea" policy, which in the Cold War environment
meant that the South was recognized and supported
by the United States and the West Europeans, while
the North was similarly endorsed by the Soviet
Union, China and the East Europeans. Neither Korea
was admitted to the United Nations, but both
worked hard to achieve support and recognition
amongst the emerging "Third World" countries.
Sport was no exception to this struggle for
advantage, prestige and legitimacy.
Western sports, introduced into Korea in
the late 19th century, were seen by some Korean
modernizers as a useful means to promote national
solidarity. Later, Japanese colonizers introduced
some sports such as judo and table tennis as part
of their attempt to "Japanize" Korean society.
After liberation from Japanese rule, Koreans on
both sides of the border sought international
sporting recognition as avidly as they campaigned
for diplomatic recognition.
Ha Nam-Gil and
J A Mangan have commented that post-1945 South
Korean sport was "closely linked to political
priorities, purposes and personnel" and was
"politically-driven, resourced and endorsed and it
was the direct product of ... ideological purpose"
[1]. This assessment could equally be applied to
North Korean priorities. Sport represented a
tangible means to showcase the proclaimed
superiority of each political system in this
intense bilateral rivalry for national and
international legitimacy.
The South Korean
National Olympic Committee (NOC) quickly applied
for IOC recognition and even sent athletes to the
1948 London Olympics. The North made repeated
attempts to gain IOC recognition for its own NOC,
but was rebuffed on the grounds that there could
not be more than one recognized NOC in any one
country. In the late 1950s, as pressure began to
build up from the Soviet bloc, the IOC began to
shift towards favoring a joint Korean team on the
German model [2]. But not until the 1964 Tokyo
Olympics did both South Korea and, for the first
time ever in the summer Olympics, North Korea send
athletes. Yet, the latter actually withdrew after
its athletes arrived in Japan, when some of them
were disqualified, providing a last minute twist
to what had been a series of complicated and
contentious efforts over the previous three years
to try to secure a joint Korean team for the Tokyo
Olympics [3].
Intensifying
competition Subsequently, despite
intermittent discussions over the following
decades, the two Koreas have never fielded a joint
Olympic teams. The North gained more from these
failed talks in the early 1960s than did the
South, since from the 1968 Olympics it was able to
compete for the first time on an equal footing
with the South. But in the 1970s the South became
more adept diplomatically, waging a campaign which
was to culminate in the 1981 IOC decision to award
the 1988 Olympic Games to Seoul.
1988
Olympic poster In fact, during the 1960s
and 1970s the South Korean government of president
Park Chung-hee used sports promotion as one of
several means to create a national revival in the
wake of the traumas of colonization and war.
Labelled by some as the "father of modern sport",
Park introduced a number of innovative sports
policies at both the elite and mass level and the
idea of hosting the Olympics originated during his
years in office.
In North Korea, too,
sporting activity became an important part of
societal mobilization and development. Mass sports
involving gymnastics became a regular feature of
North Korean society. Nonetheless, throughout the
1960s and 1970s both Koreas remained relatively
low key in terms of participating in international
sporting events, with the notable example of the
North Korean soccer team's almost legendary
exploits in the 1966 World Cup in England (beating
Italy 1-0).
Periods of relative
rapprochement between the two Koreas frequently
led to discussions of joint teams, but as the
political atmosphere soured again, so too did the
sporting talks splutter and fail. Even after the
political breakthrough of the 1972 North-South
Joint Declaration, efforts to develop sporting
exchanges and even form joint teams failed. Sports
organizations and facilities in the South had
developed to the stage that it could host some
international competitions, but, under pressure
from the North, athletes from socialist countries
did not participate.
Agreement failed to
field a joint team for the 35th World Table Tennis
Championships, held in Pyongyang in 1979, the
first major international sporting event hosted by
the North, and South Korean table tennis players
were not admitted. This failure, and what was
perceived internationally as North Korean
intransigence, had two results: firstly,
international sporting federations became wary of
the North, which has not since hosted a major
international sporting event, and, secondly,
during the 1980s, socialist states became more
willing to compete in international sporting
events in the South.
The partial boycotts
of the 1980 and 1984 Olympics and the IOC's
determination to assure a boycott-free Olympics in
Seoul made the 1988 Olympics a particular focus of
controversy. The North Koreans, with particularly
vocal support from Cuba, criticized the choice of
Seoul on safety grounds. When the IOC refused to
change venue, the North asked for a co-hosting
arrangement. Both the South and the IOC rejected
this proposal (not least because the Olympics are
awarded to only one city), but the IOC showed some
willingness to discuss the possibilities of some
events being held in the North.
There
followed during 1985-88 a series of convoluted
discussions, which are described in impressive
detail in Richard Pound's insider account [4]. At
one stage the two Korean NOCs and the IOC came
close to agreement over some preliminary rounds of
sports being held in the North. But the offers
were insufficient to satisfy the North and,
although the IOC kept the door open until the very
last minute, North Korean athletes did not
participate in the Seoul Olympics. With the
exception of Cuba, all other socialist countries
sent athletes to Seoul and in the process helped
to lay one of the foundations for what would
become their diplomatic recognitions of the South
during the course of the following four years.
The road to Beijing The dream of
a joint Korean Olympic team continued to remain
just that, a dream. In fact, only twice, in the
same year of 1991 at the World Table Tennis
Championships held in Japan and the Junior World
Football Championships in Portugal has a joint
Korean team been fielded in a major international
sporting event.
This achievement, which
came at a time of renewed North-South political
dialogue at the prime ministerial level, may have
had a Chinese dimension, since joint cheering of
each others' athletes by South and North Korean
supporters attending the Beijing Asian Games in
1990 was an important impetus. Nevertheless, the
joint teams were the result of "government
contacts rather than purely civilian exchanges"
and little in the way of sporting exchanges
followed [5]. It is against this background that
we consider the more recent Olympics.
The
historic June 2000 summit between Kim Dae-jung and
Kim Jong-il, in Pyongyang, opened the way for
greater cooperation and collaboration in
North-South Korean relations. Consequently, at the
2000 Sydney Olympics the two Koreas entered the
Olympic stadiums under a joint flag (the so-called
"unification flag", consisting of a blue outline
of the undivided Korean Peninsula on a white
background) and wearing identical uniforms at the
opening ceremonies. It was an emotional moment for
Koreans. However, the athletes competed as two
separate national teams.
Subsequently, the
North participated in the September 2002 Asian
Games in Busan, the first ever such occasion for
North Korean athletes to participate in an
international sporting event in the South. That
success seems in part to be due to the South's
strategy of avoiding the complicated questions of
a joint team and instead focusing on a joint
parade at the opening and the participation of
North and South Korean athletes in separate teams
[6].
The newly-established "tradition" of
a joint team entry was carried on to the 2003
Asian Winter Games in Aomori and the 2004 Athens
Olympics Games. Although international tensions
had been raised because of the crisis over the
North's suspected nuclear-weapons development,
from October 2002, both sides came together for
these sporting events. For both countries, a
desire to pass a political message to the United
States may have contributed to this cooperation.
Both North and South wished to show the United
States that they could coordinate at a time of
worsening US-North Korean tensions [7].
This, in turn, led to the revival of ideas
to form a joint team for the 2006 Asian Games in
Doha and the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Representatives of the two Korean NOCs met in
Guangzhou in September 2005, where they agreed in
principle on a unified team, in Macau in November
2005, and in December 2005 when they began a
series of bilateral meetings in Kaesong, on the
North-South Korean border. As in earlier talks,
the IOC has actively encouraged bilateral dialogue
and occasionally hosted trilateral talks. In June
2006 IOC president Jacques Rogge wrote to both Kim
Jong-il and South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun
urging them to cooperate in forming a unified
team.
The missile tests by the North
brought a halt to exchanges, but Rogge, in
September, hosted the heads of the two NOCs at a
meeting in Lausanne and included an offer to
increase the number of athletic spots open to
Koreans if there were to field a unified team.
Once again, after the October nuclear test by the
North, the two Koreas' athletes marched in
together at the opening ceremony but competed
separately at the Doha Asian Games. Nonetheless,
at this time North Korea did openly convey to the
IOC its support for South Korea's bid to host the
2014 Winter Olympics [8].
During 2007
formal inter-Korean talks on a joint Olympic team
took place in Kaesong in February, with more
informal contacts in Kuwait in April and in Hong
Kong in June 2007, but no solution
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