COMMENT Time to end the Korean
War By Dorothy Ogle
Thirty-eight years ago, just before
Christmas, our lives as missionaries came to a
sudden end when South Korea's military dictator,
Park Chung-hee, deported my husband, George Ogle,
because he prayed in public for eight innocent men
who had been falsely accused of having communist
ties, tortured to confess, and sentenced to death
by a secret military court.
Although
George had been a missionary in Korea for 20 years
and all four of our children had been born there,
George's deportation served as an object lesson to
Park's detractors that no criticism would be
tolerated. As the historical record bears out,
deportation was among the lighter penalties for
challenging his martial rule over the South Korean
people.
We were nonetheless crushed. We
had intended to spend the
rest of our working years in
Korea, a place we had come to regard as home. The
course of our lives may have been altered, but the
lives of the families of the eight men were
changed forever. On April 9, 1975, these men were
hanged without being allowed to make the appeal
granted them by law, and their families were
ostracized for decades. After these men were
executed, it would take 32 more years of
suffering, borne by their families, before a
retrial cleared their names.
Fortunately,
in 1987, South Koreans rose up all over the
country and won a historic, hard-fought victory
for democracy. We have been able to return to
South Korea many times and have received
hospitality and honors beyond anything we could
ever imagine. But George and I have also had the
opportunity to visit North Korea. We have friends
who are among the few of the 10 million separated
family members who have been reunited with
relatives on the other side. We feel that the
Koreans in the North and South are one people. The
tragedy of the divided Korea weighs heavy on our
hearts, and we pray daily that the there will be a
peace agreement ending the Korean War so that the
Korean people can be reconciled.
Over the
holiday season, we received the news that Park
Geun-hye, the military dictator's daughter, has
been elected as the first woman president of South
Korea in a close race against a human-rights
lawyer. Without question, she carries the baggage
of being Park Chung-hee's daughter. Yet there is
reason to hope. The recent North Korean rocket
launch played no part in the South Korean
election, and Park Geun-hye has sought to distance
herself from the unpopular "Get tough on North
Korea" policy of the current conservative
president. Moreover, Park has publicly apologized
for the violence of her father's rule, and her
presidency represents an opportunity for her to
reckon with his legacy.
The longest
war Next year is the 60th anniversary of
the armistice that ended the hot war but left the
Korean peninsula technically and legally still at
war. The armistice regime established an
unresolved war as the basis of relations not only
between North and South Korea, but also between
North Korea and the United States. US leaders have
focused their efforts on causing economic collapse
in the North, which has caused terrible suffering
for the people there.
If Park, by
contrast, makes good on her promise to heal
relations with North Korea, will she likewise be
able to help US policymakers understand that we
must change our approach to North Korea if we wish
to make any progress on issues that concern us?
President George W Bush developed a hostile policy
toward North Korea at odds with that of his
liberal South Korean counterparts during the
"Sunshine" era. President Obama has toed the line
of Park's predecessor, the hardline South Korean
president Lee Myung-bak. In neither instance have
our leaders displayed any vision for peace,
engagement, or reconciliation.
Why should
we be surprised, then, that North Korea has
launched a satellite or that it may test nuclear
weapons? Why should we think that more sanctions
might deter them from moving in that direction,
when we have already tried sanctions for 60 years?
Does anyone think that we have a military option
in one of the most militarized places in the
world? Why should North Koreans trust us when we
openly talk about regime change and regularly
carry out military exercises right off the North
Korean coast? Serious, sober discussion - and a
willingness to engage across differences - is an
essential first step toward peace.
Are we
aware that the defense spending of South Korea
equals the entire Gross National Product of North
Korea? Do we remember that we have rejected North
Korea's many calls for negotiations for a peace
treaty?
In our condemnation of North
Korea's military priorities, do we remember that
North Korea's nuclear program began when we had
nuclear weapons pointed at them and threatened to
use them? Do we remember that Kim Il-sung called
for a nuclear-free zone in Korea, a request we
disregarded? Do we remember that we violated the
terms of the 1953 Armistice Agreement by deploying
nuclear weapons to South Korea? Do we remember
that there were international inspectors in North
Korea from the time of the 1994 accords until
President George W Bush declared North Korea part
of the "Axis of Evil"?
When we negotiated,
North Korea worked with us. International
inspectors returned to North Korea and the nuclear
reactor was dismantled, but these proceedings
faltered when outgoing president Lee, in his
inaugural address, announced his "Get tough on
North Korea" policy.
A December 13
editorial in South Korea's Hankyoreh newspaper
makes the obvious point that the most urgent order
of business for the international community is to
prevent North Korea from combining its nuclear
weapons with its long-range rocket technology,
adding that North Korea will continue to step up
its efforts to achieve this. "By Pyongyang's
logic," it read, "combining its nuclear weapons
with its long-range rocket technology is the only
way to guard its regime against external threats
and increase its negotiating power, using the
abandonment of its weapons of mass destruction as
a bargaining chip."
Yet the Hankyoreh
editorial envisions, unlike our policy-makers, a
way forward, recognizing in North Korea's actions
a rationale: "a solution needs to be sought
through negotiation rather than sanctions and
hard-line policy alone, and that the fundamental
reason North Korea tests nuclear weapons and
rockets is to guarantee the stability and survival
of its regime."
North Korean leaders do
not want to destroy themselves by using a nuclear
weapon. They want a peace treaty that takes into
consideration the security and economic concerns
of both Koreas. We have not yet given peace a
chance, but there is still hope that the North
Koreans may be willing to stop their expensive
nuclear experiments if there is a genuine
opportunity to negotiate a peace agreement ending
the Korean War. Let us not repeat the mistakes of
the past by calling their launch "bad behavior,"
an infantilizing assessment that gets us nowhere.
The burden of history is on Park Geun-hye,
who may be the first woman president in South
Korea but who remains the daughter of the
dictator. The burden of history is likewise upon
us. We, whose government divided Korea, who fought
a bloody war on Korean soil, who propped up a
series of dictators in South Korea, and who have
spent untold billions of dollars on military bases
and war games on the peninsula, have our own
second chance - a chance at peace and
co-existence. The alternative is unthinkable. We
must therefore negotiate a peace agreement to end
the longest war in US history. We owe this not
only to the Korean people but also to ourselves.
Dorothy Ogle was a United
Methodist missionary in South Korea, a member of
American Friend Service Committee 1984 peace
delegation to North Korea, and an activist for
human rights and democracy and peace and
reconciliation in Korea. She is the co-author of
Our Lives in Korea and Korea in Our Lives.
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