After Trump-Kim summit, some Koreans hopeful peace can break out
Block News Alliance
Tae Wan Kim is cautiously optimistic about the changing relationship between North Korea and the United States, for a reason. As with any negotiation with even a chance of success, in this case each side has something the other one covets.
North Korea wants economic development, including foreign investment, said the professor of business ethics at Carnegie Mellon University. America is looking for peace in the Korean Peninsula, and a cooperative joint relationship that balances China’s power.
“Commerce can contribute to peace,” Mr. Kim said. “Typical diplomatic approaches wouldn’t work. Perhaps two atypical leaders know[the] answers.”
After decades of sanctions and months of bellicose rhetoric from President Donald Trump, the June 12 Singapore summit between Mr. Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has raised the possibility of a new era of diplomacy.
In recent weeks, anti-U.S. souvenirs began disappearing from shop shelves in North Korea, White House staffers took down pictures of Mr. Trump with France’s Emmanuel Macron and hung up pictures of the Singapore meeting, and North Korea prepared to repatriate the remains of upward of 200 American soldiers killed in the Korean War, according to reports by Reuters, the London Evening Standard and NK News, an American subscription-based website that provides news and analysis about North Korea.
As both nations make overtures, people with ties to North and South Korea are trying to comprehend the sudden efforts to suture a political divide they never thought would heal. Though the 1953 Korean Armistice Agreement established a cessation of hostilities, a formal peace treaty has never been signed.
“If [borders are] open, I don’t know how they’re going to handle it,” said Chong S. Boswell, who grew up in South Korea and has lived in Toledo, Ohio, for the last 38 years. “That’s a small country. People living in communism, people living in freedom, it’s going to be too much of a problem. They won’t know how to act.”
In school, Ms. Boswell recalled, she was taught to loathe communists.
“South Korea is totally different,” she said, remembering lessons she learned as a child. “It’s a beautiful country. Surrounding is mountain. Surrounding is ocean. North Korea, when we were young, it’s like, ‘They’re communist; we don’t have nothing to do with them.’”
Longtime Toledo resident Kim J. Chung wants to visit her hometown before she dies. Until this year, she never dared to dream of a return.
Ms. Chung hails from Yongbyon, the city where North Korea, with help from the Soviet Union, launched its nuclear program in 1962 under the rule of Kim Il-sung. Her parents were gold miners. They fled south after World War II, fearing that the government would place them in a concentration camp.
“I was 11 [when we left],” she said. “I don’t want any more war for no reason. As long as Kim Jong Un is willing, it will be like heaven.”
Bowling Green State University digital arts professor Heejoo Kim, who moved to the U.S. from South Korea over two decades ago, said many younger South Koreans are optimistic, but older generations that have lived through years of tensions and failed negotiations are skeptical. “Honestly, we don’t trust them, we don’t believe them, what Kim Jong Un does,” she said. “My parents are trying to get out of Korea right now because of what the government’s doing, because they’re trying to do something with North Korea. They think it’s very dangerous.”
Older South Koreans tend to be more conservative, Miss Kim said, and are largely opposed to South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s diplomacy with the North and economic liberalism.
Mr. Kim’s North Korean government was condemned in 2014 by a United Nations Commission of Inquiry for violations including deliberate starvation, the operation of forced labor camps, arbitrary detention, repression of free speech, sexual violence and public executions.
Yun Hoon Chung, Ms. Chung’s husband, said he believes the promise of economic opportunity will motivate Mr. Kim to follow through on his diplomaticpromises.
“He wants North Korea to be prosperous right now,” Mr. Chung said. “The nuclear bomb is the only thing he can negotiate with. To get rid of that for an economic boom, I believe he’s sincere.”
Mr. Chung was born to Korean parents in Manchuria and spent 16-hour days studying English before attending technical college in North Korea. He said he fled across the border with a single coin to his name and was detained by South Korean police, who interrogated him about potential communist ties and sent him to a concentration camp.
Eventually, through a series of fortuitous connections in Seoul, he immigrated to the U.S., attended the University of Michigan, and started a sugar packaging business in Rossford, Ohio, in the 1970s. Still an entrepreneur, Mr. Chung is turning his gaze eastward.
“I want to build a plant in North Korea,” he said.
In the past, said CMU’s Tae Wan Kim, talks between the U.S. and North Korea broke down because neither side had incentives to cooperate. Now, things are different. Mr. Trump, he said, wants accolades for his role in the peacemaking, and North Korea is using this as an “instrument to peace.”
And a breakthough would mean a lot to the citizens of North Korea. The benefits of international cooperation would be immense for citizens of that country: safety, fewer military drills, a more market-driven economy and, most importantly, food.
Reunification of the Korean Peninsula has been an important topic in the recent negotiations, but Mr. Kim doesn’t think it is the only answer to North Korea’s international problems. “Canada speaks English like [America], but the two countries have peaceful mutually beneficent relationship. Something similar can happen between South and North Korea in a longterm perspective.”