I have been genuinely grieved and haunted by two suicides which took place in relation to the pro-impeachment and anti-impeachment movements.

The most recent occurred on Jan. 28. A member of the anti-impeachment movement identified by his surname Cho, 61, jumped to his death in Seoul. He was reportedly carrying two Korean flags and the message: “If the impeachment is confirmed, I will stop recognizing the Constitutional Court.”

On Jan. 7, a Buddhist monk identified by his surname Seo, 64, set himself on fire during a candlelight vigil. He passed away two days later of organ collapse due to severe burns. At the site of the self-immolation was the message, “May my death not be in vain. My death must mean victory for the people, not gains for any one group.”

Earlier, he wrote, “Korea is burning as a result of the greed of a handful of people. Yet they are trying to ensure they alone escape the flames” and of the necessity within his view to “purge the collaborationist sellout US-worshippers so we can reclaim sovereignty and fix this land’s tainted spirit.”

On Feb. 25, The Korea Herald reported that an anti-impeachment protestor in his 80s said he would self-immolate if the impeachment stands. The man reportedly remarked there would be “massive and violent conflicts” whatever the ruling.

Reprehensibly, as mentioned in a Feb. 23 editorial, political figures are shirking their basic duty to settle destructive conflicts and alternatively utilizing clashes for their own political gains. I concur they should cease trying to take advantage of the protests.

Perhaps a third movement is pressingly needed to reconcile the two and avert violence.

In a 1974 volume titled “Divided Nations in a Divided World,” the late Korea scholar Gregory Henderson asserted that the apparently intractable antagonism within modern Korean society was not the norm prior to the 1945 division. Political disagreement there was, but nothing that Koreans could not ultimately work through. He observed, “Without outside intervention ... the rifts would have been those normal to many governments; they would not have been likely to generate separatism.”

Notably in the north -- where, from its inception as a separate state, nothing approaching fair or free elections has ever happened over the selection of its leaders -- there is an unequivocal international responsibility for the “unparalleled” and “Nazi-like” (as described by UN investigators) disaster which has stolen the lives of many millions of innocents.

The concluding section of the UN Commission of Inquiry’s 2013 report underscores that North Korea has for “decades pursued policies involving crimes that shock the conscience of humanity” and that the seemingly unending horror “raises questions about the inadequacy of the response of the international community.”

Paragraph 1217 of the report further pronounces, “In particular, this responsibility must be accepted in the light of the role played by the international community (and by the great powers in particular) in the division of the Korean Peninsula and because of the unresolved legacy of the Korean War. These unfortunate legacies help not only to explain the intractability of the human rights situation but also why an effective response is now imperative.”

Historians have noted that Stalin had explicitly solicited for Soviet involvement in the post-World War II occupation of Japan. (He expressed comparatively little interest in Korea.) Yet the Truman administration rebuffed Soviet requests and Stalin acquiesced; thus, Japan was never divided. Scholars point out that Stalin desired to maintain the semblance of Allied cooperation to secure his objectives in Europe. Consequently, the devastating way Korean history unraveled after its sundering was by no means inevitable.

The late American historian Robert Oliver emphasized in a 1993 work, “Russian insistence on sharing the postwar rule of Japan was successfully resisted by the United States.” In 1952, Oliver was similarly critical, declaring, “what happened in Korea should be carefully studied. North Korea was surrendered (1945) to Communist control by Allied agreement, so that the Soviet rulers never had to bother to woo the people into willing acquiescence.”

In 1943, he urged the US to urgently recognize the Republic of Korea Provisional Government and to admit Korea into the United Nations, as there was no Russian veto at the time. He also advocated for Korean independence soldiers, eager to fight valiantly against Imperial Japan, to be given needed military supplies and aid. None of the crucial recommendations were hearkened to. How differently history would have unfolded had such suggestions -- analogous to counsel by other “Korea specialists” of the period -- been heeded! Millions of lives and families would have been preserved!

The severance of Korea flew in the face of multiple expert warnings; indeed, early post-division predictions of war -- from both Korean and non-Korean sources -- are pervasive.

Bertram Sarafan who was a Military Government officer in Seoul recounted in 1946:

“In the continuation of the closed border at the 38th parallel, they saw the strangulation of their country by its ‘liberators.’ ... Many Koreans seriously expected war in Korea between Russia and the United States.” (The quotation marks used for the word liberators are Sarafan’s, not mine.)

In a 1947 article authored shortly before his untimely passing, George McCune, a former adviser on Korean affairs in the US State Department, recollected “Almost no thought at all was given to Korea as a nation of more than 26 million persons,” and sharply reprimanded that the “arbitrary division of the country has not been qualified in the least,” calling the division “an indefensible abrogation of justice.”

Undivided Korea’s interrelated economy, characterized then as the “industrial north and the agricultural south,” signified that division would naturally make the northern area considerably more susceptible to famine while the southern zone became overdependent on imports. McCune, a scathing critic of the Allied decisions on Korea, wrote, “The economic stalemate engendered by the division of the country was as devastating as the political split. The effect of this artificial and abrupt break was especially serious since each half depended upon the other for its economic livelihood.”

North Korea has never been self-sufficient with respect to food, and observers have noted it might be impossible.

Had Koreans’ just aspiration for a united, democratic and independent leadership been respected from the outset -- most sublimely articulated in the Korean Declaration of Independence, heroically proclaimed before the world on March 1, 1919 -- not only the Korean War but human suffering on such an appalling, indeed “unparalleled” scale as the 1990s North Korean famine and a “Nazi-like” genocide within the North’s prison camps could certainly have been prevented.

Therefore, reparations for North Korean prison camp victims, their family members and all of the North’s savagely oppressed are in order -- at least in substantial part -- from governments who enacted Korea’s dismembering; they should also substantively contribute to the cost of reunification. Justice requires nothing less.

By what logical fallacy should Koreans alone be forced to rectify a wrong that was enacted without their consent and against their ubiquitous protestations?

Moreover, for how long will we exclusively render lip service to the essentiality of unification, when the solemn task is now a matter of survival for both northerners and southerners?


By Robert Park

Robert Park is a founding member of the nonpartisan Worldwide Coalition to Stop Genocide in North Korea, minister, musician and former prisoner of conscience. -- Ed.