Memories are short, and political memories are even shorter.
Let us look at the seemingly endless antagonism in the Korean Peninsula and try to
remember just how we got there.
In Seoul, Korea last week U.S. President Barack Obama scolded North Korea's new leader, Kim Jong Un, to "have the courage to pursue peace" and re-unite Korea as "one people." Of course, Koreans on both sides of the divided peninsula would like to reunite but political ideologies are powerful dividers, which have kept them apart for decades.
Many, including President Obama, blame the North Koreans for being the belligerents and provocateurs with hostile intent, but a closer look at the development of political events after the Second World War and the Japanese Instrument of Surrender shows that the Allies, and particularly the United States, must take their fair share of blame for the tangled mess that we see there today.
Prior to the end of the Second World War, the Allies at the Potsdam Conference unilaterally divided the Korean Peninsula along the 38th Parallel without any consultation with the Korean people, totally contravening the Cairo Declaration (Clause 8 of the Potsdam Declaration) which stated that after the war's end, "Korea shall be free and independent".
After being under the heel of Japanese occupiers from 1910 to eventual "freedom" in 1945, the last thing Koreans wanted was new occupiers. Using poor judgment, General John Hodge made the dastardly mistake of restoring Japanese colonial administrators and Korean police collaborators. The Korean people again had occupiers: the United States Army in the south, the Russian Army in the north and the ruthless
administrators of the past.
Although Koreans were quite capable of administrating their own country, the paternalistic attitude of the Allies deemed otherwise.
The brief-lived People's Republic of Korea (PRK) was forthwith dismissed simply because General Hodge believed that it had communist leanings and replaced it with the United States Army Military Government in Korea
(USAMGIK).
Protests throughout Korea against these policies by their new occupiers led to thousands of deaths. On the island of Jeju where protests turned to revolution, the government's brutal retaliation resulted in 30,000 deaths. Protests in other cities resulted in thousands more being killed.
The Moscow Conference of 1945, which set up the U.S.-U.S.S.R Joint Commission that was to administer post-war Korea for five years excluded Korean representatives from the talks. Koreans were treated as the invisible people without rights of self-determination. When Koreans in the south protested, their protests were met with brutality and executions - strikes were banned, the PRK was outlawed and martial law was implemented.
When the UN passed Resolution 112 for a nationwide election, the USSR refused since it would mean UN Commission access to North Korea. New UN elections were called but this meant that only areas in the south under US control would have their votes counted. This contentious issue - with no possible resolution - drew a line in the sand.
With three years of occupation by the Allies south of the 38th Parallel, the political preference was for Western-style government; in the north the political preference was strongly for a communist style of government. Ultimately, the Korean people were too strongly influenced by outsiders to make up their own minds in a proxy war between two ideologies.
