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Korea Portal |
The division of Korea into North Korea and South Korea stems from the 1945 Allied victory in World War II, ending Japan's 35-year colonial rule of Korea. In a proposal opposed by nearly all Koreans, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to temporarily occupy the country as a trusteeship with the zone of control demarcated along the 38th parallel. The purpose of this trusteeship was to establish a Korean provisional government which would become "free and independent in due course."[1] Though elections were scheduled, the Soviet Union refused to cooperate with United Nations plans to hold general and free elections in the two Koreas, and as a result, a Communist state was permanently established under Soviet auspices in the north and a pro-Western state was set up in the south.[2] The two superpowers backed different leaders and two states were effectively established, each of which claimed sovereignty over the whole Korean peninsula.
The Korean War (1950–53) left the two Koreas separated by the Korean Demilitarized Zone through the Cold War to the present day. North Korea is a communist state — though the last instances of the word Communism were removed from its constitution in 2009[3] — often described as Stalinist and isolationist. Its economy initially enjoyed substantial growth but collapsed in the 1990s, unlike that of its Communist neighbor People's Republic of China. South Korea emerged, after decades of authoritarian rule, as a capitalist liberal democracy.
Since the 1990s, with progressively liberal South Korean administrations, as well as the death of North Korean founder Kim Il-sung, the two sides have taken small, symbolic steps towards a possible Korean reunification.[4]
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As the Russo-Japanese War ended in 1905, Korea became a nominal protectorate, and was annexed in 1910 by Japan.
In November 1943, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek met at the Cairo Conference to discuss what should happen to Japan's colonies, and agreed that Japan should lose all the territories it had conquered by force. In the declaration after this conference, Korea was mentioned for the first time. The three powers declared that "mindful of the enslavement of the people of Korea [we] are determined that in due course Korea shall become free and independent.”
For Korean nationalists who wanted immediate independence, the phrase "in due course" was cause for dismay. Roosevelt may have proposed to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin that three or four years elapse before full Korean independence; Stalin demurred, saying that a shorter period of time would be desirable. In any case, discussion of Korea among the Allies would not resume until victory over Japan was imminent.
With the war's end in sight in August 1945, there was still no consensus on Korea's fate among Allied leaders. Many Koreans on the peninsula had made their own plans for the future of Korea, and few of these plans included the re-occupation of Korea by foreign forces. Following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, Soviet soldiers invaded Manchuria, as per Stalin's agreement with Harry Truman at the Potsdam conference.[5]
However, American leaders worried that the whole peninsula might be occupied by the Soviet Union, and feared this might lead to a Soviet occupation of Japan. Soviet forces arrived in Korea first, but occupied only the northern half, stopping at the 38th parallel, per the agreement with the United States.
On August 10, 1945 two young officers – Dean Rusk and Charles Bonesteel – were assigned to define an American occupation zone. Working at extremely short notice and completely unprepared, they used a National Geographic map to decide on the 38th parallel. They chose it because it divided the country approximately in half but would leave the capital Seoul under American control. No experts on Korea were consulted. The two men were unaware that forty years previous, Japan and Russia had discussed sharing Korea along the same parallel. Rusk later said that had he known, he "almost surely" would have chosen a different line.[6] Regardless, the decision was hastily written into General Order No. 1 for the administration of postwar Japan.
General Abe Nobuyuki, the last Japanese Governor-General of Korea, had been in contact with a number of influential Koreans since the beginning of August 1945 to prepare the hand-over of power. On August 15, 1945, Lyuh Woon-Hyung, a moderate left-wing politician, agreed to take over. He was in charge of preparing the creation of a new country and worked hard to build governmental structures. On September 6, 1945, a congress of representatives was convened in Seoul. The foundation of a modern Korean state took place just three weeks after Japan's capitulation. The government was predominantly left wing; many of those who had resisted Japanese rule identified with Communism's views on imperialism and colonialism.
On September 7, 1945, General MacArthur announced that Lieutenant General John R. Hodge was to administer Korean affairs, and Hodge landed in Incheon with his troops the next day. The Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea sent a delegation with three interpreters, but he refused to meet with them. Thus, they refused to recognize the People's Republic of Korea or the Korean Provisional Government.[7] However, an anti-communist named Syngman Rhee, who moved back to Korea after decades of exile in the US, was considered an acceptable candidate to provisionally lead the country since he was considered friendly to the US. Under Rhee, the southern government conducted a number of military campaigns against left-wing insurgents who took up arms against the government and persecuted other political opponents. Over the course of the next few years, between 30,000[8] and 100,000 people would lose their lives during the war against the left-wing insurgents.[9]
In August 1948, Syngman Rhee became the first president of South Korea, and U.S. forces left the Korean peninsula.
Throughout August Koreans organized the country into people committees branches for the "Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence" (CPKI, 조선건국준비위원회). The Soviet Army allowed for these committees to continue to function since they were friendly to the Soviet Union, but still established the Soviet Civil Authority to begin to centralize the independent committees. Further provisional committees were set up across the country putting Communists into key positions. In March 1946 land reform was instituted as the land from Japanese and collaborator land owners was divided and handed over to poor farmers. Kim Il-sung initiated a sweeping land reform program in 1946. Organizing the many poor civilians and agricultural laborers under the people's committees a nationwide mass campaign broke the control of the old landed classes. Landlords were allowed to keep only the same amount of land as poor civilians who had once rented their land, thereby making for a far more equal distribution of land. The North Korean land reform was achieved in a less violent way than that of the People's Republic of China or Vietnam. Official American sources stated, "From all accounts, the former village leaders were eliminated as a political force without resort to bloodshed, but extreme care was taken to preclude their return to power."[10] This was very popular with the farmers, but caused many collaborators and former landowners to flee 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.[11]
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 in the south and heavy industry in the north.
In February 1946 a provisional government called the North Korean 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 rose up at the top levels of government in Pyongyang as different aspirants maneuvered to gain positions of power in the new government. At the local levels, people's committees openly attacked collaborators and some landlords, confiscating much of their land and possessions. As a consequence many collaborators and others disappeared or were assassinated. It was out in the provinces and by working with these same people's committees that the eventual leader of North Korea, Kim Il-sung, was able to build a grassroots support system that would lift him to power over his political rivals who had stayed in Pyongyang. Soviet forces departed in 1948.
With mistrust growing rapidly between the formerly allied United States and Soviet Union, no agreement was reached on how to reconcile the competing provisional governments. The U.S. brought the problem before the United Nations in the fall of 1947. The Soviet Union opposed UN involvement.
The UN passed a resolution on November 14, 1947, declaring that free elections should be held, foreign troops should be withdrawn, and an UN commission for Korea, the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea, should be created. The Soviet Union, although a member with veto powers, boycotted the voting and did not consider the resolution to be binding. In April 1948, a conference of organizations from the north and the south met in Pyongyang. This conference produced no results, and the Soviets boycotted the UN-supervised elections in the south. There was no UN supervision of elections in the north.
On May 10 the south held a general election. Syngman Rhee, who had called for partial elections in the south to consolidate his power as early as 1947, was elected, though left-wing parties boycotted the election. On August 15, the "Republic of Korea" formally took over power from the U.S. military. In the North, the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" was declared on September 9, with Kim Il-sung as prime minister.
This division of Korea, after more than a millennium of being unified, was seen as unacceptable and temporary by both regimes. From 1948 until the start of the civil war on June 25, 1950, the armed forces of each side engaged in a series of bloody conflicts along the border. In 1950, these conflicts escalated dramatically when North Korean forces invaded South Korea, triggering the Korean War. An armistice[12] was signed three years later ending hostilities and effectively making the division permanent. The two sides agreed to create a four-kilometer wide buffer zone between the states, where nobody would enter. This area came to be known as the Demilitarized Zone or DMZ.
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.
The Armistice established a Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission (NNSC) which was tasked to monitor the Armistice. Since 1953, members of the Swiss[13] and Swedish[14] Armed Forces have been members of the NNSC stationed near the DMZ.
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Since the division of Korea, there have been numerous instances of infiltration and incursions across the border largely by North Korean agents, although the North Korean government never acknowledges direct responsibility for any of these incidents. A total of 3,693 armed North Korean agents have infiltrated into South Korea between 1954 to 1992, with 20% of these occurring between 1967 and 1968.[15] According to the 5 January 2011 Korea Herald, since July 1953 North Korea has violated the armistice 221 times, including 26 military attacks.[16] Some instances include:
Between 1966 and 1969, a series of land border and DMZ incidents occurred. Other incidents after 1969 include the following: