by Paris Kaye

Created on: November 27, 2010

Mark Twain once wrote, “It is not worth while to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man's character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible"(1).  We do find this axiomatic logic to hold true in the case of North and South Korean relations. 

As tensions continue to mount in this troubled region, the international community watches this conflict with great uneasiness.  So what has changed in the 57 odd years since the Korean War ended?

Over the past one hundred years, Korea became a nation in search of an identity.  The 1910 Japanese-Korea Annexation Treaty established Korea as a Japanese colony, and a ban instituted on Korean culture rendered such acts as usage of Korean language, reading of Korean literature as illegal.  When the Second World War loomed heavily over the Pacific region, the Japanese implemented conscriptions wherein participation in the war industry and soldiering became mandated.   

By the end of the Second World War, the United States officially established a partition of Korea along the 38th parallel creating North and South Korea in the absence of any Korean delegates.  Therefore, the destiny of the beleaguered peninsular nation fell into the hands of men 10,000 miles away.

Consequently, the partitioned areas of North and South Korea became client and/or puppet states of the USSR and US, respectively.  Each of these larger nations worked diligently to ensure its ideological sympathies, communistic or democratic, were firmly established.  Korea would become the stage and living, breathing manifestation of the Cold War.

On Sunday, June 25, 1950, North Korea’s Korean People’s Army (KPA) crossed the 38th parallel as a counter measure for what they cited as military provocation.  They stated that South Korea’s Republic of Korea Army (ROK) had first breached the 38th parallel and they were merely responding to that threat.  War ensued. 

In July 1953, the Korean Armistice ended hostilities and firmly established the 38th parallel as the Korean Demilitarized Zone or DMZ.  After three years of warfare and an estimated 1.5 million war casualties, North and South Korean relations resumed as they were in the pre-Korean War era.

As we fast-forward some forty years later, the ideological super powers adjusted their post Cold War grip on these client or puppet states.  Consequently, both regions seek an identity. 

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