The Aquariums of Pyongyang_ Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag - Chol-hwan Kang [4]
All this time the United Nations was growing impatient. Meetings gave birth to conferences, accusatory communiqués to bittersweet responses—but 1945 ended without action, then 1946, too. A wave of refugees flowed from the northern to the southern zones. By 1947, it had became harder to flee. The Soviet-American military fraternity that had so recently battled fascism was now a distant memory. The cold war had begun.
The boundary between the two zones gradually became something akin to a border. To its north, “people’s committees” were formed and began drawing the outlines of a new state. In the south, the less enterprising Americans, who had chosen to build up a huge police force rather than a powerful army—as their Soviet rivals had done—were making little effort to create a government in their image, opting instead to leave power in the hands of the same bourgeoisie that had been compromised during occupation by its relations with the Japanese. Although Americans hadn’t any great reforms to trumpet, they did have the backing of the UN, and in the face of Soviet opposition to holding countrywide elections, they organized their own vote in the South. The elections, which were anything but general, left half the National Assembly seats unfilled. The Republic of Korea nevertheless was born. It elected Rhee Syng-man, an upright man who had fought against Japanese occupation, as president of the assembly. This was in August 1948. The response from the North came quickly. The following month, in Pyongyang, the northern zone’s largest city, the Democratic People’s Republic was proclaimed, with Kim Il-sung, a former local guerilla leader who had fought against the Japanese in Manchuria, at its head. Kim Il-sung was presiding over what was already a fullfledged state, rebuilt from roof to baseboard and equipped with a police force and army hefty enough to allow the Soviet army to pull out in the autumn of 1948, thereby depriving the American military presence in the South of its legitimacy. By the end of the following winter, the Americans were out, too.
What follows did not come fully to light until 1994, when Boris Yeltsin opened up the related Soviet archives. Kim Il-sung, it appears, was stamping his feet in impatience. He wanted immediately to throw his army into an assault on the South, which was poorly armed, poorly organized, and suffering under the harshest economic difficulties—not to mention harassed by a northernbacked guerilla movement. Prudent as always, Stalin waited another few months before giving the green light. On June 25, 1950, despite assurances from observers that an attack from the North was almost unthinkable, North Korean tanks broke through the line of demarcation along the thirty-eighth parallel. Seoul fell in three days, as the North Korean army stormed its way down the peninsula, making short work of Rhee Syng-man’s small South Korean army and its several hundred American advisors. North Korea soon controlled 90 percent of the peninsula.
This was the start of the Korean War, a conflict of incredible reversals. The American president, Harry Truman, reacted quickly. Standing before the UN Security Council, he denounced North Korea’s premeditated aggression and pleaded for the young international organization to respond with “all its means.” The UN’s decision was made all the easier by the Soviet Union’s sulky protest to the organization’s admittance of Chiang Kai-shek’s China into the Security Council. On June 27, the UN called on