The 70th anniversary of the truce that ended the Korean War provided a great opportunity for impassioned advocates of a “peace treaty” or “end-of-war declaration” to press their argument, with congressmen proposing a “Peace on the Korean Peninsula Act” leading to what its proponents believe would be a formal end to the Korean War.
Just because the shooting stopped July 27, 1953, they argue, the war, in the absence of a peace treaty, goes on. No, no, they maintain, don’t be fooled by silence along the Demilitarized Zone that’s divided the two Koreas since the signing of the armistice. That was just a temporary stopgap deal. They love to say the Korean War, which began with North Korea’s invasion of South Korea in June 1950, is still being fought even if you don’t hear the sound of gunfire.
It’s difficult to imagine a more specious argument. It’s as if these advocates of a peace treaty yearn for hostile forces to resume firing at each other. Then no one could argue that the Korean War, often described as America’s “forgotten war,” was really and truly “America’s longest war,” as peace treaty zealots never tire of saying.
How could more than 30 members of Congress, led by Rep. Brad Sherman (D) of California, have signed on as sponsors of the bill? The North Koreans have a long record of never abiding by any deal they’ve made, ranging from promises to give up their nuclear program to vows of regular reunions of members of millions of families divided by the Korean War.
A conference at George Washington University, the day after the anniversary of the truce, showed the degree to which supporters of the bill will go in twisting or ignoring the long history of disappointment and disillusionment in the quest for a lasting, viable deal with North Korea.
The conference capped a three-day program called Korea Peace Action: National Mobilization to End the Korean War, organized by Women Cross DMZ, which was named for a group of more than 30 women who crossed the Demilitarized Zone from North to South Korea eight years ago. Led by Christine Ahn, a fiery Korean American based in Hawaii, they have claimed ever since that they had the chance for truly frank, heart-to-heart talks with North Korean women in Pyongyang before bidding tearful farewells and departing for Seoul.
The message at the conference? America is the blame for pretty much all that had gone wrong in Korea from the start of the war onward.
In the view of University of Chicago historian Bruce Cumings, who led the keynote address, North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs were an almost inevitable response to U.S. “intimidation,” of late in the form of flights by large American bombers near North Korea and by the visit of a U.S. nuclear submarine to a South Korean port for the first time in four decades. He preferred not to dwell on the scores of missile tests ordered by North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, much less on the long history of bloody incidents perpetrated by the North Koreans going back to Kim’s grandfather, Kim Il Sung. The elder Kim ordered his troops to invade the South with the approval of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and China’s newly victorious Mao Zedong, whose Red Army had completed its conquest of the Chinese mainland the previous October.
Siegfried Hecker, with his background as a nuclear scientist, at the conference blamed the U.S. almost entirely for the impasse with North Korea. The Americans, he said, had missed one opportunity after another “to constrain North Korea’s nuclear program.” He agreed completely on the need for a peace treaty, noting that North Korea was “going back to aligning itself with China and Russia,” whom he didn’t mention had saved the Kim dynasty from annihilation in the Korean War.
Much of the criticism focused on the breakdown of the 1994 “agreed framework,” reached in October 1994 under which North Korea was to freeze its nuclear weapons program. South Korea and Japan were to spend several billion dollars on light water nuclear energy reactors for the North while the U.S. poured in half a million tons of heavy oil annually to meet its energy needs.
Peace treaty advocates blame former President George W. Bush, inaugurated in January 2001, for the breakdown of the framework. They don’t like to say that North Korea, in violation of the framework, was revealed in 2002 to be developing nukes with highly enriched uranium. North Korea steadfastly denied anything to do with highly enriched uranium — until Hecker, on a visit to the North, was shown its nuclear facility.
While castigating Bush for reversing moves at reconciliation, proponents of a peace treaty would rather not go into the North’s uranium program. For all of them, the answer lies in dialogue, in which they say the U.S. is not interested. Never mind that North Korea has spurned all requests for talks since the breakdown of the summit in Hanoi between Kim and then-President Trump in February 2019.
The pro-treaty crowd is not asking North Korea to give up anything. The assumption is, if we declare peace at last, the war will be over. They overlook not only the long history of failed deals but other, more immediate, signs of Kim’s thirst for vengeance, such as the massive parade through Kim Il Sung Square featuring the North’s latest long-range missiles along with drones and other fearsome weaponry.
In their campaigning for a peace treaty, there are topics that are taboo. One is the North’s gruesome record of human rights violations, including public executions, torture and life imprisonment in a vast gulag system. The other is the South’s rise as a global economic powerhouse and center of culture and artistic creativity, which obviously could not have happened under a harsh dictatorship that jails and kills its critics. Peace treaty advocates speak tearfully of the suffering of families divided by the Korean War, but they do not speak of the daily suffering of North Koreans living in hunger and poverty while their government wastes resources on nukes and missiles.
One of the central demands of the pro-treaty crowd is that the U.S. remove the ban on Americans traveling to North Korea, imposed after the arrest, imprisonment and torture of a student, Otto Warmbier, who died shortly after his return home to Cincinnati in a coma in June 2017. They do not mention, though, that North Korea has agreed to only 21 meetings of a few thousand members of divided families under terms of a deal reached by the late South Korean President Kim Dae-jung and Kim Jong Un’s father, the late Kim Jong-il, at their summit in Pyongyang in June 2000. The last family reunion was nearly five years ago.
For peace treaty advocates, any reminder of facts that do not fit their agenda is best forgotten. What’s most incredible is that some members of Congress, as well as the likes of Hecker and Cumings, have signed on to these distortions of history.
Donald Kirk has been a journalist for more than 60 years, focusing much of his career on conflict in Asia and the Middle East, including as a correspondent for the Washington Star and Chicago Tribune. He is currently a freelance correspondent covering North and South Korea, and is the author of several books about Asian affairs.