George Kerevan: Unravelling the mystery of two Korean nations

Published on Wednesday 27 May 2009 21:39

CHURCHILL once referred to Russia as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. That's also a pretty good description of the Peoples' Democratic Republic of Korea, aka the fiefdom of the ailing dictator, Kim Jong-il.

Mr Kim – there are only 270 Korean surnames – is portrayed in the West as a lunatic. Indeed, he does have a habit of kidnapping South Korean movie actresses to appear in his homemade films. But it takes more than a paranoid lunatic to organise a nuclear weapons industry.

Put aside Kim Jong-il for a moment. The Koreans (north and south) are a tough, peasant folk who have fought tenaciously to earn a living in a mountainous land with poor soil and a climate that swings between hideous extremes of hot and cold. Despite being sandwiched between China and Japan, the Koreans have maintained their independence (with occasional lapses) for over a thousand years. You get the point: above all else Koreans are Korean nationalists to the bone. Understand that, and at least we have the mystery unwrapped from the riddle.

For the past thousand years, the Koreans have defended their encircled land by staying united, and by organising their culture and civil society in a rigid, Confucian caste system. In the 19th century, as the western colonial powers carved up China, the Koreans desperately tried to avoid the same fate by staying diplomatically and economically isolated. It didn't work.

Their Japanese neighbours, also trying to avoid European dominance, chose a different strategy: industrialising and becoming an imperialist power on the western model. Japan defeated Russia in 1904 and seized its Chinese concessions. At the same time, the Japanese invaded Korea and annexed it to the Empire of the Rising Sun.

Japanese rule lasted till 1945. Every attempt was made to destroy the indigenous culture, Japanese became the official language. And, of course, many of the notorious "comfort women" who were forced to provide sexual services to Japanese soldiers came from Korea. But the Koreans are not a docile people. This experience merely intensified nationalist feelings. Some young Koreans turned to the Chinese Communists as a way of expelling the Japanese. They included the son of two Korean Christians who had moved to Chinese Manchuria to escape the Japanese. His name was Kim Il-sung, father of Kim Jong-il.

From 1931 onwards, Kim Il-sung led a savage guerrilla war against the Japanese. When they destroyed his base in Manchuria, he fled to the Soviet Union and operated from there. Two days after the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima, Stalin hurriedly declared war on Japan and the Red Army swept into the Korean peninsula. With them came Captain Kim Il-sung, the heroic resistance leader. By October 1945, he was dictator of North Korea. In the south, the Americans installed Syngman Rhee, who had been in exile for 40 years.

The mystery at this point is why all-powerful Korean nationalism did not lead quickly to a re-unified, independent state – as happened in Austria. Today, Koreans – north and south – blame the Americans and Russians for interfering. Certainly, the Cold War played a part in solidifying two separate Koreas.

But it is also the case that Kim Il-sung and Syngman Rhee each saw themselves as national saviours – Kim's "Marxism" was always cosmetic. Both had been in exile for most of their lives, which left them free to build a new Korea in their own image. Each would use nationalist rhetoric to mobilise popular support. The two Korean states that emerged – one pseudo-capitalist, one pseudo-communist – are rooted equally in Confucian doctrines of caste. It is the enduring competition between these two forms of "Korean-ism" that explains the current crisis.

Fast forward over 60 years and one fratricidal war. South Korea has twice the population of its northern sibling and is vastly richer. South Korea adopted Western trappings but the great industrial conglomerates that form its economy are deeply corrupt and its politics have always been deeply authoritarian.

The question arises: why didn't North Korea opt for at least a Chinese-style capitalism led by the Communist Party, when Kim Il-sung died in 1994. It remains the obvious interim solution. In fact, there were glimmerings of reform and an early deal with America to give up developing a plutonium bomb.

But things went wrong. Kim Jong-il and the military clique around him are very different from the Stanford-educated technocrats who run China. Their version of Korean nationalism depends on military prowess – that is all they have left to counter-pose to the affluence in the South. So they are constantly driven to sabre-rattling.

Unfortunately, the conservative South Korean establishment likes it this way. Only in 2003 did the South Korean electors manage to vote in a reforming government, under president Roh Moo-hyun, a human rights lawyer, committed to rooting out corruption and building genuine bridges with the North. Mr Roh did not prove up to the task and the conservative oligarchy was able to drive him from office, partly by playing up popular fears of the North. Last week, Mr Roh took his own life after further attempts to implicate him in a bribery scandal. That suicide is not unrelated to the latest paranoia in the North.

Kim Jong-il's nuclear delinquency aims to annoy the hated South Koreans, show he is the real Korean nationalist, buy him time to pass the leadership to his son; and maybe get President Obama to treat him with respect. Unfortunately, the guys in the South have responded by agreeing to help the Americans interdict North Korean ships, which often carry illegal exports of missile parts, drugs and counterfeit US dollars. Mr Kim has threatened war if this happens. He's probably bluffing but both Koreas are armed to the teeth.

The solution to North Korea lies through South Korea. The rest of us are merely by-standers. But then, family quarrels are always the most vicious.