We are quite familiar with the two halves of the Korean Peninsula that are two different nations – North and South Korea. One is a democratic republic and the other is a dictatorship ruled by a tyrant, Kim Jong-Un. However, this was not always the case. The entire Peninsula used to be one nation, the nation of Korea. The split happened just after WWII with the rise of the USSR and the USA as the dominant world powers – communism and capitalism.
THE KOREAN SPLIT
Korea has been a battleground for competing nations and ideas for centuries, but the last century – possibly the darkest in the peninsula’s history – has seen it divided as never before.
Japan used its victory over Russia to annex Korea in the year 1910, having already installed a puppet leader who served Japanese interests. Emperor Sunjong was the last Korean emperor in a dynasty stretching back nearly 500 years. When he died in 1926, the Japanese were completely in control of Korea – both the people and the culture. The Korean language and customs were suppressed and at one point Tokyo even tried to enforce a law stating that all second names should be Japanese. This left anti-Japanese sentiments among the Korean population that lasts to this day.
When the Japanese empire was dismantled at the end of World War Two, Korea fell victim to the Cold War. It was divided into two spheres of influence (the Eastern and the Western Blocs) along the 38th parallel. The 38th parallel north is a circle of latitude that is 38 degrees north of the Earth’s equatorial plane. It crosses Europe, the Mediterranean Sea, Asia, the Pacific Ocean, North America, and the Atlantic Ocean. It is the line that roughly divides the Peninsula into North and South Korea.
A BRIEF TIMELINE OF THE HISTORY OF PRE-WWII KOREA
Relations between the North and South weren’t always as strained as they are today. Before WWII, the Korean Peninsula was united in their language, culture, and politics for more than a millennium.
The Silla was a kingdom located on the southern and central parts of the Korean Peninsula. Silla was one of the Three Kingdoms that made up Korea during that era. In 668 AD, the Silla united the Three Kingdoms of Korea – Goguryeo, Paekche, and Silla – establishing the Silla Dynasty and beginning a decade of fighting to expel the forces of China’s T’ang Dynasty. Almost 300 years later, General Wang Kon overthrew the Silla and established the Koryo Dynasty. Then in 1392, General Yi Song-gye, a Confucian scholar, overthrew the Koryo dynasty and founded the Yi Dynasty. The kingdom was then renamed Choson.
After a period of 200 years, in 1592, Japan invaded Korea but were defeated with help from China. During the next 300 years, there was an attack by Manchuria, a treaty with Japan and the Donghak Peasant Revolution, in 1894, a series of anti-feudal attacks on government officers. This revolution prompted Korean officials to seek help from China, who sent 2700 soldiers to Korea for aid. This violated the Treaty of Tientsin, triggering the Sino-Japanese war over control of the Korean Peninsula. This war began in 1894, and then ended a year later in 1895, with the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki.
After this, the Russo-Japanese War was fought during 1904 and 1905 between the Russian Empire and the Japanese Empires over rival imperial ambitions in the regions of Manchuria and Korea. This war ended with Russia’s defeat, and Korea became a protectorate of Japan in 1905.
The next major milestone in Korean history came in the year 1945, with the end of WWII and the division of the Korean Peninsula into North and South Korea, with allegiances to the Eastern and Western Blocs respectively.
WHY DID THE PENINSULA SPLIT AND WHAT HAPPENED AFTER?
The roots behind the reason why the split happened, can ultimately be traced back to the beginning Cold War and the split in world power into two blocs, two ideologies and spheres of control. The Cold War was responsible for a number of major events that happened in the latter half of the 20th century.
At the Cairo Conference in November 1943, in the middle of WWII, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek agreed that Japan should lose all the territories it had conquered by force. Roosevelt floated the idea of a trusteeship over Korea to his peers of that time, but did not get a nod from the other world powers. Roosevelt raised the idea once again with Joseph Stalin at the Tehran Conference in November 1943 and the Yalta Conference in February 1945. Stalin agreed with Roosevelt, but advocated that the period of trusteeship should be a brief one. On 10 August 1945, two American officers were tasked with setting up the geographical definition and boundaries of the American occupation zone. Unprepared and on short notice, they used a National Geographic map and used the 38th parallel to demarcate the proposed region for American occupation, ensuring that the capital Seoul remained in the American sphere of control. They chose it because it divided the country approximately in half. The Soviet Union accepted this division. The Americans controlled south of the line – the Russians installed a communist regime in the north, later ceding influence to China.
When Soviet troops entered Pyongyang, they found a local branch of the Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence operating under the leadership of veteran nationalist Cho Man-sik. In September 1945, the Soviet administration issued its own currency. In 1946, Colonel-General Terentii Shtykov took charge of the administration and began to lobby the Soviet government for funds to support the ailing economy.
In February 1946 a provisional government called the Provisional People’s Committee was formed under Kim Il-sung, who had spent the last years of the war training with Soviet troops in Manchuria. Conflicts and power struggles ensued at the top levels of government in Pyongyang as different aspirants manoeuvred to gain positions of power in the new government. In March 1946 the provisional government instituted a sweeping land-reform program: land belonging to Japanese and collaborator landowners was divided and redistributed to poor farmers. The farmers responded positively; many collaborators, former landowners and Christians fled to the south, where some of them obtained positions in the new South Korean government. According to the U.S. military government, 400,000 northern Koreans went south as refugees. Key industries were nationalized. The economic situation was nearly as difficult in the north as it was in the south, as the Japanese had concentrated agriculture and service industries in the south and heavy industry in the north.
Tensions kept rising, leading to political assassinations, government sanctioned purges and the rise of right-wing nationalist militia. A Soviet-US Joint Commission met in 1946 and 1947 to work towards a unified administration, but failed to make progress due to increasing Cold War antagonism and to Korean opposition to the trusteeship. At the final meeting of the Joint Commission in September 1947, Soviet delegate Terentii Shtykov proposed that both Soviet and US troops withdraw and give the Korean people the opportunity to form their own government. This was rejected by the US. With the failure of the Joint Commission to make progress, the US brought the problem before the United Nations, who proposed the immediate withdrawal of foreign troops and the conduction of national free and fair elections. The USSR did not agree to this, claiming that the UN could not guarantee fair elections. Their reticence made it impossible to hold elections in the north, with elections being held in only South Korea.
On 10 May 1948 the south held a general election. It took place amid widespread violence and intimidation. On 15 August, the “Republic of Korea” formally took over power from the U.S. military, with Syngman Rhee as the first president. In the North, the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” was declared on 9 September, with Kim Il-sung as prime minister. On 12 December 1948, the United Nations General Assembly declared the Republic of Korea to be the “only lawful government in Korea”.
Unrest continued in the South. In 1949, the Syngman Rhee government established the Bodo League in order to keep an eye on its political opponents. The majority of the Bodo League’s members were innocent farmers and civilians who were forced into membership. The registered members or their families were executed at the beginning of the Korean War. On 24 December 1949, South Korean Army massacred Mungyeong citizens who were suspected communist sympathizers or their family and affixed blame to communists. Tensions finally came to a head and a civil war broke out in 1950.
THE KOREAN CIVIL WAR
This division of Korea, after more than a millennium of being unified, was seen as controversial and temporary by both regimes. In 1950 the North launched a surprise attack across the 38th parallel and quickly took most of the South. The United Nations intervened to protect the South, sending a US-led force. As it occupied the south, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea attempted to unify Korea under its regime, initiating the nationalization of industry, land reform, and the restoration of the People’s Committees.
Most troops on the UN side were American, but around 90,000 British soldiers were involved in fighting the Chinese Red Army and more than 1,000 were killed, many of them conscripts. The North overran 90% of the south until a counter-attack by US-led forces. As the North Korean forces were driven from the south, South Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel on 1 October, and American and other UN forces followed a week later. This was despite warnings from the People’s Republic of China that it would intervene if American troops crossed the parallel. As a result, with US-led forces pushing into the north, China unleashed a counter-attack which drove them back into the south.
The front line finally stabilized near the 38th parallel in 1951. The Communist side supported an armistice line being based on the 38th parallel, but the United Nations supported a line based on the territory held by each side, which was militarily defensible. All the disagreements led to a long drawn out process of drafting a final peace treaty and a border acceptable to both sides. The Korean Armistice Agreement was signed after three years of war. The two sides agreed to create a 4-kilometre-wide (2.5-mile) buffer zone between the states, known as the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). This new border, reflecting the territory held by each side at the end of the war, crossed the 38th parallel diagonally. As dictated by the terms of the Korean Armistice, a Geneva Conference was held in 1954 on the Korean question. Despite efforts by many of the nations involved, the conference ended without a declaration for a unified Korea. These series of events led to the changes in the Korean map that we know of today – forming the basis for North and South Korea.
IN CONCLUSION…
By the time an armistice was signed in July 1953, 2.5 million people had died. The line of division remained where it had started – at the 38th parallel. After the war South Korea’s economy prospered under a series of capitalist dictatorships and the country eventually became a democracy. North Korea remains a dystopia in the control of a despot, with a failing economy. A unified Korea would have been better for the Peninsula as a whole, but with circumstances being what they are, at least one half of the former united nation is enjoying peace and prosperity.
