If you are looking through recent news regarding to Korea, you will find something interesting yet rather depressing regarding to North Korea and South Korea.
To summarize, after long time, politicians had two different perspectives toward ruling the land of Korean Peninsula. One was communism and other is Democracy. Due to their different perspectives toward how to rule the peninsula, they decided to divide the peninsula into two half in order to rule as they believe what is good. This happened in 1945.
In 1950, North Korea’s government wanted to take over the whole peninsula so on June 25th, at 4am, invaded suddenly. This caused the whole peninsula to be in panic. All the males were taken to military to be trained to fight in war. According to the families that were separated, they mentioned how they will be separated only for 10 days but it ended up being 65 years.
Some people were separated due to male members being away for military and ending up not meeting them every again. Some people were separated while they were trying to evacuate as far as possible. Most of them were separated due to great amount of crowd trying to go toward south or north.
After the war paused and had treaty signed to have temporary peace, North Korea’s and South Korea’s government came together to let the separated families to meet together after a long time. There were times when this event paused due to continuous troubles and conflicts that happened between the countries. But in 2015, they actually made up to let dispersed families to meet after 65 years.
https://www.facebook.com/businessinsider/posts/10153155009284071 (from Facebook page, Business Insider)
This is the video where it has the English subtitles and what I found interesting was the comment that was left under the video. They mostly commented on how it is cruel to separate the family and letting them meet for only 12 hours instead of helping them to live together.
From here, I was able to see how it was relevant to one of GRSJ 230 classes that we had talking about law oppression toward minorities. It was not “minorities” but the main reason that they can’t live together was one of the laws of North and South Korea. Causing the war itself it painful to the race but suppressing them so they can’t meet showed deeper feelings for people who can’t see each other even though they breathe same air, stand on same peninsula.
From Tuesday to Thursday, some fortunate people were able to meet their separated family. However, there were another issues that government couldn’t afford to let all the people to meet their separated family, that they had to draw certain people out.
Looking at this ongoing sadness and conflict, I hope peace to come fast.
Reading this reminds me of Andrea’s blog post on the current refugee crisis and the issue of citizenship and borders. It’s remarkable how invisible divides between countries can serve to unify people and arbitrarily divide them at the same time.
Interestingly, my blog on borders talk about a similar issue where the government separate people into groups by giving them different citizenships. To me, the meaning of a citizenship bounded by border is quit limiting. Borders and nationalities are often “imagined” rather than natural. Just like people are born equal, countries are equal before they were divided by borders and nations.