A
legal minefield for Korean
reunification By Andrei Lankov
A few days ago, the South Korean media
reported an interesting and peculiar legal case:
for the first time since the division of Korea,
North Koreans have applied for their legal share
of their father's inheritance - and won the case.
Born in 1933, the father escaped North
Korea during the Korean War in the early 1950s,
taking his older daughter but leaving behind his
wife and five other children. In South Korea he
eventually remarried, had four more children with
a new wife and established a successful private
clinic. He died in 1987, leaving the equivalent of
US$10 million.
With the help of their
sister, his children from his first marriage
demanded their share of his estate - even though
they reside in North Korea. Genetic tests
confirmed that they were indeed
children of the deceased
businessman and finally their property rights were
officially recognized by Seoul Municipal Court.
It is remarkable that the claimants still
remain in North Korea, even though they
established communication with their biological
sister, thus breaking the North Korean regulations
which ban any unofficial interaction with the
South (it is not clear to which extent their
interaction with the South is controlled and
approved by the North Korean authorities).
This case is but the first drops of rain
that precede a possibly devastating thunderstorm.
The division of Korea has created the potential
for a great number of highly complex legal cases
related to property rights. This is essentially a
minefield and it's sad that nobody seems to take
this issue seriously enough.
Nobody knows
when unification will happen. Right now, the
probability of unification seems remote, but
appearances can be misleading. Who, after all,
would have predicted in 1986 the coming
unification of Germany? In the current climate
there is little doubt that unification can only be
achieved under the auspices of Seoul (talk of
negotiated unification through the gradual fusion
of two states seems to be another exercise in
wishful thinking).
If the North is ever to
be absorbed into the South, the most politically
explosive of all property issues will be that of
the land property rights.
In the spring of
1946, the nascent North Korean regime conducted a
land reform. According to the 1946 Land Reform
Law, the maximum amount of land that could be
privately held was limited to 5 hectares. Anything
above this was confiscated without compensation
and then redistributed amongst less wealthy
farmers. Eventually, in the late 1950s, the state
took all land from the farmers, making them join
the agricultural cooperatives which were
state-owned and state-managed farms in all but
name. Nonetheless, the 1946 land reform created
the legal basis for all subsequent
reconstructions.
People whose landholdings
were taken over by the state in 1946 were
officially branded "landlords". In North Korea
this meant that not only these people but also
their descendents were subjected to many kinds of
discrimination. For example, people of such
suspicious family backgrounds cannot be accepted
to prestigious colleges or reside in major cities,
they are not eligible for any managerial
positions.
However, only a minority of
these landlords suffered this fate. The majority
made a different choice and fled. Back in the
years 1946-1951 such an escape to the South was
not as difficult as it is today - the border was
poorly controlled and during the initial stages of
the Korean War, dramatic changes in the military
situation and the absence of fixed front lines
favored escapees.
Nobody knows for sure
how many people moved South in the years 1946-51,
since nobody bothered to count. Most estimates
vary between 1.2 million to 1.6 million. This
number includes a significant majority of former
landlords and their family members.
When
these people were running away they could not take
anything of value but they usually took their land
titles. They assumed that the communist regime
would eventually collapse and they wanted to get
their land back.
As we know, the regime
did not collapse. Most of the former landlords
eventually adjusted to life in the South and often
became rich and successful people. Nearly all of
them are dead by now, but their descendents are
still in possession of the faded land titles,
usually issued by the Japanese colonial
administration many decades ago.
It would
be a minor exaggeration to say that any piece of
well located flat land in North Korea has a
potential claimant lying in wait, somewhere in
Seoul. The number of such claimants is estimated
at some 1.2 million - even though the actual
number of claims must be significantly smaller,
since there is a large number of multiple claims
when few descendants of the same person claims the
rights to the same parcel of land.
The
author personally knows a number of families in
which such land titles are preserved with the
utmost care. These people believe that they have
good reason to be careful - every Korean knows the
story of Kangnam real estate. Once upon a time,
until the early 1960s, Kangnam was an undeveloped
agricultural area south of the Han river, then in
1963 it was incorporated into Seoul. In a
couple of decades, the paddy fields were covered
with high-rise buildings, and the area became the
most posh part of present-day Seoul. Predictably,
Kangnam real estate prices sky rocketed. In many
parts of the Kangnam area, land prices increased
one thousand-fold within 20 years - and this is
the real price, adjusted for inflation.
It
is widely assumed that similar things will happen
in North Korea after unification. Descendents of
North Korean landlords believe that after
unification the old yellowed papers might make
them rich - very rich, indeed.
The South
Korean government has never recognized North
Korea's land reform - or for that matter, any laws
or regulations introduced by the North Korean
regime since 1945. In the late 1940s, the South
conducted its own version of land reform, somewhat
less radical than that of North Korea, but under
current South Korean laws, the claims of the
descendents of North Korean landowners are
technically valid.
This constitutes an
extremely worrying and potentially explosive
political problem. One can easy imagine how
landlords' descendents will swarm on North Korea
immediately after unification in order to demand
what they see as their rightful property. Needless
to say, they will not be welcomed by the locals.
For decades North Korean propaganda has
made it clear to North Koreans that the collapse
of the Kim family regime will herald the return of
greedy, brutal landlords who are always ready to
make North Korean farmers into their powerless
tenants. It is remarkable that even in the stories
of the post-communist East Europe, presented by
the North Korean propaganda, there is a recurrent
topic of greedy landlords who are allegedly ready
to grab their estates, depriving the Russian or
East German farmers of their livelihood.
The North Korean media often hints that
the same things will happen in North Korea, if the
North Korean populace will listen to the sweet
lies about foreign "democracy and prosperity".
Needless to say, hardly any descendant of the
Russian landlords has shown up in his or her
great-grandfather's village. However, in case of
North Korea such statements might become one of
few cases where the Pyongyang propaganda isn't
complete lies.
If unification comes, it
will be important to explicitly acknowledge the
1946 land reform, declaring the property claims
null and void. To placate former owners, some
partial compensation might be considered, even
though one doubts whether grandchildren of former
landlords, usually rich and successful men and
women, are in such dire need of compensation
(especially when one takes into account that many
of these families got their land by being
remarkable deferential to the Japanese overlords
in the colonial era).
Now the land in
North Korea is owned by the state, which quietly
appropriated the private landholdings in the late
1950s (within the usual communist scheme aimed at
the introduction of the state-managed
agriculture). So, the re-distribution of the land,
somewhat akin to the Chinese ''second land
reform'' of the late 1970s, will have to became a
part of any plan for North Korea's transformation.
Speaking cynically, such land reform will
even benefit the majority of the South Koreans,
since it will discourage North Korean farmers from
abandoning their poor villages and rushing to the
shining lights of the South. It will also
contribute to the revival of North Korean
agriculture.
Right now, the land issue
does not appear to be politically important. This
is understandable: unification is not on the
immediate horizon and nobody knows when and how it
is going to happen (or whether it will happen at
all). However this relative lack of interest is
what makes a solution possible.
It is
still politically acceptable to denounce all
pre-1945 land rights in what is now North Korea.
Alas, there is little chance that just a
course of action would be taken by the South
Korean government. Partially, South Korean
politicians don't want to annoy the North, and
partially they don't want to alienate their
constituencies where exiled landlord families tend
to be quite successful. And, last but not least,
they think that it is too early to worry about
such matters. They might be right, but it is
possible that they will do nothing until it will
be too late.
Andrei Lankov is an
associate professor at Kookmin University in
Seoul, and adjunct research fellow at the Research
School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian
National University. He graduated from Leningrad
State University with a PhD in Far Eastern history
and China, with emphasis on Korea. He has
published books and articles on Korea and North
Asia.
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