The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [3]
Despite all efforts, I continue to be impressed with what I do not know, especially about North Korea. Despite the limited opening, the decision-making and moving forces behind the scenes in Pyongyang remain obscured in a secrecy that is unique in the world for its thoroughness and pervasiveness. Unlike the former Soviet Union and even China, North Korea has revealed virtually none of the documentation of discussions and decisions, even from its earliest era. Using sources available to me elsewhere, including archival materials from the Soviet Union and the [East] German Democratic Republic as well as former diplomats and experts from those countries, I have done my best to discover and understand what underlay thought and action in North Korea in earlier times.
This is my third book of what has been called "contemporary history," which seeks to transcend journalism but is written only a few years after the events it describes. Like my first book, Tet!, on the crucial battle of the Vietnam War, and The Turn (more recently republished as From the Cold War to a New Era), on the diplomacy of the United States and the Soviet Union between 1983 and 1991, this volume goes to press while the outcome of the drama on the Korean peninsula is still beyond our reach. As in my earlier works, I was inspired by a quotation from British historian Dame C. Veronica Wedgwood: "History is written backward but lived forward. Those who know the end of the story can never know what it was like at the time." What follows is intended to convey what it was like at the time, before the end of the story is known.
- WASHINGTON, March 2001
A NOTE ON KOREAN NAMES
The remarkable thing about Korean names is that so many of them are almost the same. The three most common surnames, Kim, Lee, and Park, account for more than 40 percent of the entire population of South Korea, according to a recent census. The surname Kim is associated with the mythical founder of the Silla dynasty. Lee (or Yi, in Korean) is the name of the dynasty that ruled Korea from 1392 to the annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910. Park also has an ancient origin. Only about 250 different surnames are known to exist among South Korea's 44 million people.
As is the case with most other East Asian names, the surname is usually written first, as in Kim Il Sung or Kim Young Sam. I have followed this practice throughout the book, except for a few figures whose names are widely known in reverse order, such as South Korea's first president, Syngman Rhee.
A list and brief identification of the principal characters whose activities are described in this book can be found starting on page 447.
1
WHERE THE WILD BIRDS SING
loft on dazzling white wings, the great cranes wheel in the sky and float down for a landing in a richly forested, unspoiled twoand-a-half-mile strip of land that stretches like a ribbon for 150 miles across the waist of the Korean peninsula. Here several hundred rare white-naped cranes stop over each spring and autumn in migration between their breeding grounds in northeastern China and Russia and their winter home in Japan. Amid a profusion of wildflowers, the birds join even rarer endangered red-crowned Manchurian cranes, the most elegant and highly prized member of the crane family and a symbol of good luck, fidelity, and long life in the Orient for more than a thousand years. Ornithologists have recorded 150 species of cranes, buntings, shrikes, swans, geese, kittiwakes, goosanders, eagles, and other birds passing through or living in the verdant strip each year, joining other year-round residents such as pheasant, wild pigs, black bears, and small Korean deer.
Under the terms of the armistice that ended the Korean War in 1953, all civilian activity is banned in the zone except for one tightly controlled farming village on each side. Due to a densely planted underground garden of deadly land mines, which the birds and animals somehow use a sixth sense to avoid, military patrols stick closely to well-worn