Is the Korean War over? To give a brief background, the Korean war started on the 25th of june when North Korea invaded South Korean and the South Koreans asked the UN for help. The war went for another 3 years before they signed an armistice on July 27th 1953, which gave South Korea an extra 1,500 square miles of territory; and created a 2-mile-wide “demilitarized zone” (DMZ) that still exists today.
Did you think that the Korean War ended in 1953?! Bless your heart! I know that it seems like the Panmunjom agreement which was concluded on June 27, 1953 was the end to the war, but it provided for a cease-fire, and created a demarcation line between North and South Korea.The basic definition of a cease-fire is really just a temporary truce between warring parties. It is a “total cessation of armed hostilities” between groups that are too far apart to even begin discussing a peace treaty. A peace treaty is an agreement bounded by international law. According to these two definitions, North and South Korea are technically still at war with each other.
Wars do not necessarily end when the warring factions stop firing shots at each other. It lives on in the psychological scars of the people. Some Korean people still have so much hatred, and are caught up in the mindset of deep conflict with a sense of antagonism for their counterparts who live across the border. A Korean girl in my security studies class said even when she was in the DMZ she could feel the tension between the two sides.With this much tension between the two countries, you really believe the war is over ?
Openness about a war is one of the ways to end a war. With open talks about the Korean war, North and South Korea can learn each other motives for the war, and possibly forgive each other. Open talks will be a difficult thing to achieve though especially since some cultures do not like talking about certain things upfront. Such cultural sensitivities might attribute to the proliferation of the Korean War. Talking about the war might ease the tension associated with the Korean War, and possibly lead to peace talks. However, if the memories of war continue to be bottled up, it becomes continually difficult for North and South Korea to forgive each other. Lack of forgiveness prolongs the lifespan of the Korean War.
The sad but honest truth is that the Korean War will continue to prevail as long as both countries don’t want to be reunited. Even though it is in the world’s collective interest to end the War, do these countries want the war to end? One of the biggest questions many Koreans ask about reunification is who will preside over this new and unified Korea?North Korean leaderships will not want to surrender to democracy, likewise, South Korean leadership as well as people will not want to give up democracy for communism. As long as these two countries cannot agree on a government for a unified Korea, no party will sign a peace treaty that reunifies both countries and consequently ends the war. The Korean war doesn’t involve only North and South Korea, but other international actors like the United States, China, and Canada. Some of these international actors may want this war to end, but we forget that the Koreans may not want the war to end. Like Oscar Wilde said “ we are all in the gutters, but some of us are looking at the stars.” We want the Korean war to end , but will the Koreans do what it takes to end the war ?
references :
http://opiniojuris.org/2007/10/04/is-it-time-to-end-the-korean-war/
http://www.history.com/topics/korean-war