Brothers at war
July 25, 2013
The last scene of the war took place along the 38th parallel on the Korean peninsula. At the border crossing Panmunjom, uniformed North Korean soldiers stand behind the windows of a three-story building, looking through binoculars. A few dozen meters away on the opposite side, you find their South Korean counterparts wearing sunglasses and bullet-proof vests.
They are guarding four white and three blue Nissen huts. A white slab of concrete on the ground marks the border. "60 years ago, at this table, the ceasefire was negotiated. We sat here and the Americans sat there," explains a North Korean lieutenant in the middle barracks, which both sides are allowed to enter alternately. "There was cursing and talking. The demarcation line goes right through the table."
Korean paranoia
The border, which has the air of a ghost town, symbolizes the fraught relations between the Korean states. The four-kilometer demilitarized zone (DMZ) can only be entered with permission from the UN Command Military Armistice Commission. Now it is home to seldom plant and animal life as well. On the other hand, hundreds of thousands of soldiers wait on either side of the DMZ behind their anti-tank fortifications, mine fields and in their watchtowers.
If fired, the North's canon and multiple rocket launcher could easily reach the South Korean capital, Seoul, which is located only 50 kilometers away and level it to the ground. 20 million people live there - two-fifths of all South Koreans. Nonetheless, a good part of the country's youth has forgotten how extreme the hostility between the two Koreas was some decades ago.
Military regime against party dictatorship
In the 1950s, North Korean leader Kim Il Sung tried to consolidate his party dictatorship using Stalinist means. When the 1960 April Revolution brought down South Korea's corrupt regime led by President Rhee Syng-man, Pyongyang - inspired by Vietnam, where through guerilla tactics, the socialist north conquered the capitalist south - became hopeful of a socialist uprising in South Korea. In the latter half of the 1960s, North Korea attacked its southern neighbor to such an extent that some historians refer to it as a "Second Korean War."
Pyongyang set up an underground Communist Party. There were attacks on border troops along the DMZ. At the beginning of 1968, a 31-man-strong North Korean commando attacked the presidential palace in Seoul in an attempt to assassinate military leader Park Chung-hee and his government. Almost simultaneously, the US warship "Pueblo" was seized. A few months later, 120 North Koreans went to the east coast to recruit guerilla fighters in South Korean villages.
Peaceful coexistence
To the dismay of the North, the masses in the South did not move to call out a revolution. Average South Koreans continued to be anti-Communist and distrusted the North's promise of a worker's paradise. Kim Il Sung had a change a of heart at the beginning of the 1970s. In unison with the East and West German rapprochement, both Koreas communicated their willingness to peacefully unite in July 1972 in a joint communiqué. It was only rhetorical, but created a framework for bilateral relations.
Today, both sides still hold on to their policy of not holding diplomatic relations with each another. But at least they are in contact with each other on multiple levels. However, this hasn't prevented the North from embarking on a number of military adventures.
In 1983 North Korean agents carried out a bomb attack in Yangon, Myanmar, during a visit by President Chun Doo-hwan. The explosion killed 19 people, among them, four South Korean cabinet members. Ahead of the Olympic Games in Seoul, a commando blew up a South Korean passenger airplane carrying 115 people in 1987. More recently, it is thought that a North Korean torpedo was responsible for sinking the South Korean corvette Cheonan in 2010.
Winner: South Korea
The race of the systems between the North and the South was decided by the end of the 1980s, when the Eastern Bloc collapsed. Without the support of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, and help from the Soviet Union, North Korea's planned economy started to falter.
Poor farming policies and flooding in the mid 1990s caused a disastrous famine. In contrast, capitalism in the South transformed the former rice bowl of Korea into an industrial country with large, powerful companies such as Hyundai, LG and Samsung. And South Korea even managed the transition to a democracy.
The South's economic superiority and the North's propensity to military saber-rattling have since determined relations on the Korean Peninsula. The so-called "sunshine policy" of South Korean President Kim Dae-jung created hope for rapprochement on the one hand. But that euphoria of the first bilateral presidential meeting in June 2000 came and went quickly.
North Korea's leadership is focused on its own survival. Its nuclear and rocket armament is meant to be used as leverage with but also to scare the South. President Lee Myung-bak thus chose to freeze relations with the North. His successor Park Geun-hye, on the other hand, wants to try and mend ties 60 years after the armistice ended the bloodshed.