Arab News
Neither North Nor South Is Closer to Reunification
by Manuel L. Quezon III
About a decade ago I went on one of those splendid American government junkets that give writers a lifetime’s worth of curious stories with which to regale their readers. The trip was jointly sponsored by the Pentagon and the State Department, whose representatives spent the trip bickering with each other as they jointly fended off the questions of a demanding press contingent.
Asian and regional journalists all of us, we included a Hong Kong journalist who admitted to us he was a colonel in the People’s Liberation Army (this was prior to the Hong Kong handover), a gloomy Russian who only brightened when somehow, roses came up in conversation, a cryptic Malaysian, an argumentative Sri Lankan, a demanding Bangladeshi, an apologetic Japanese (“So sorry for war!” he told the Southeast Asian contingent), a bulky, rebellious Australian, a refined New Zealander, and an irreverent Indonesian.
There was an elegant, attractive Indian editor whose feminine charms guaranteed that her Pakistani counterpart, a courtly, retired colonel set aside nationalism in favor of an old-fashioned gallantry (but not toward the old colonial order: “Ah, the British”, he fondly reminisced).
There was also a Thai avidly flattered by our American minders (apparently American priorities at the time included basing war material in his country) and a South Korean editor who imparted fatherly advice (“Never trust the Americans,” he told me). And myself, on average two decades younger than all my companions.
Our grand tour began in South Korea and then to Washington, D.C. before concluding in Honolulu, Hawaii. In South Korea we were taken around Seoul and paraded from one formal audience with local officials to another, including one particularly elaborate meeting with a think tank devoted to North-South reunification issues.
The most remarkable part was a day trip to the demilitarized zone — the DMZ — complete with the obligatory large, tourist bus, and chatty minders who made a grand production of the escalating security measures required as we approached the dreaded zone.
The Cold War had recently come to an end, and so there was a kind of other-worldly feeling to the whole thing as we hummed along on the bus, with the minders reminding us that “within 15 minutes” of the commencement of hostilities, jets could be screaming over Seoul and the capital imperiled by rocketry and artillery barrages. It seemed so improbable.
But as the bus droned on, the countryside gave way to reminders that South Korea was a country that had to constantly live under the specter of conflict.
There was Deaseong Dong (“Peace Village”), a tightly-regulated village with its 98.4 meter South Korean flagpole and Gijeong Dong, which our minders told us was a ghost town with its competing — and record-breaking — North Korean 98.4 meters flagpole and loudspeakers perpetually belting out eerie propaganda music. At night, our minders said, lights would be switched on to simulate human habitation of the “Propaganda Village.”
Once at Panmunjeom, with its Joint Security Area, we were brought to oohs and ahs at gigantic invasion tunnels constructed by the North Koreans: the menace of fanatical, Communist hordes made tangible; and then to gawk at the North Korean soldiers in their World War II Soviet-style uniforms, and the South Koreans in American-style MP uniforms glaring at each other while conducting a kind of martial choreography as they paced and peered and did the changing of the guard. The South Koreans were better equipped: they had Ray-ban sunglasses to make them look more resolved.
If I recall correctly we then toured part of the heavily-mined, electrified frontier fence patrolled by South Korean troops. An orgy of grim statistics, of course: millions of mines, hundreds of watts of power, periodic attempts at infiltration and other kinds of border incursions, all the while punctuated by American heavy metal music blasting from South Korean outposts.
The end of the tour, of course, being the unintended punchline. After a few hours of being in the front lines of the impending Korean apocalypse, we were shepherded to a kind of glorified shack in which we were encouraged to buy “I was at the DMZ” keychains, T-shirts, jackets and baseball caps.
The Australian was particularly amused: “It all ends in Disneyland, eh?” From grim thoughts of the life-and-death struggle between the Free World and North Korea, matters quickly degenerated into complaints over the reduced rates of American per diems (they were, apparently, more generous just a few years earlier).
In a moment of frankness (to which all Americans are so charmingly susceptible, sooner or later) one of our American minders later said that in his opinion, the old American alliance with South Korea was coming to an end; that it would only be a matter of time before they would be asked to leave South Korea.
The youth, he said, were on the whole anti-American and once the ruling generation passed it would be, as they say, an entirely different ballgame.
Though as the middle-aged South Korean editor with us told me, as we shared a cigarette after a particularly good Korean meal (without any Americans hovering around us), “do not trust the Americans.”
So I don’t know if our American minder was right in assuming only younger Koreans were skeptical about the United States. It was clear, though, that the South Koreans were sick of perpetually preparing for a new North Korean invasion, and eager to explore other ways to defuse tensions — including Korean-to-Korean negotiations.
But in the decade since we were brought to gawk at the legacy of the Korean War, neither North nor South has come closer to reunification or even a more peaceful and predictable status quo.
