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OPINION:
The family of one of the two 15-year-old girls who were run over and killed by an American armored vehicle in South Korea in June 2002 refused to show up for a recent memorial marking the 23rd anniversary of the tragedy, which endangered Korean-American relations. The father of the other girl, on hand for the ceremony, wept as he addressed the crowd of villagers and anti-American leftists from Seoul, 20 miles south. “The pain remains as if it happened yesterday,” he said.
The responses of both fathers and their families epitomize the right-left gap that divides Koreans as their newly elected left-leaning president, Lee Jae-myung, looks for ways to restore dialogue with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and improve relations with China. In Yangju village, 30 miles south and east of the uneven line dividing North from South Korea, conservatives outnumber the leftists who would like a deal with the North.
Right or left, everyone fears what lies ahead.
“We want to overcome the reactionary forces, the North-South Korea division,” said the father of Hye-soon, addressing the gathering I attended in a pavilion memorializing the girls, on a slight rise overlooking the road where they died. The father of the other girl, Mi-sun, conspicuously absent, “does not want the accident in the political sphere,” said a woman from Seoul attending the ceremony.
The mayor of Yangju carefully straddled the political gap. “Remember that day,” he said. “We want progress toward reunification,” or the dream of reuniting North and South Korea.
That dream is more distant than it has ever been since the signing of the armistice that ended the Korean War 72 years ago, on July 27, 1953, at the “truce village” of Panmunjom, in the Demilitarized Zone that divides the two Koreas northwest of Yangju. North Korea has repeatedly rebuffed Mr. Lee’s attempts to renew the dialogue that leftist President Moon Jae-in inspired in 2018 and 2019.
Prospects for reconciliation never seemed higher than in those days when Mr. Moon met the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, at Panmunjom in April 2018 and President Trump and Mr. Kim embraced in Singapore two months later in a display of such warmth that Mr. Trump said they “fell in love.”
The dream vanished, however, when Mr. Kim refused to agree to give up his nuclear program at his second summit with Mr. Trump in Hanoi in February 2019. There was no way that Mr. Kim would yield to Washington’s goal of “denuclearization.”
Washington still pays lip service to “denuclearization,” but everyone who has followed the long and winding road of American and South Korean dealings with North Korea is well aware that’s an impossible dream. The shibboleth of “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization” is more than just diplomatic hot air. It excludes any chance of a real deal between Washington and Pyongyang, and it also no longer expresses the desire of most South Koreans. Mr. Lee is reversing the hard-line policies of his predecessor, the conservative Yoon Suk Yeol, who was impeached, ousted, jailed and put on trial for trying to impose martial law in December.
South Korea under Mr. Lee is making a series of gestures designed to convince Mr. Kim that he is undoing the hard-line policies of Mr. Yoon. No longer are South Koreans blasting propaganda messages into the North via loudspeakers. North Korean defectors to the South have to stop sending balloons over the North, dropping leaflets disparaging the regime.
The South Koreans are scaling down annual joint military exercises this month, postponing some of them for fear of upsetting North Korea. The Americans loved Mr. Yoon for enthusiastically endorsing the war games after Mr. Moon had agreed to go along only with those played largely on computers, not the same as ground forces, planes and ships on real-life maneuvers.
In the village of Yangju, the question of what’s next is on everyone’s mind. Kim Jong-un, often through statements issued by his sister, Kim Yo-jong, is now tougher than ever. He can afford to refuse anything to do with Mr. Lee, so confident is he that Russian ruler Vladimir Putin is totally on his side. Buttressed by a new treaty with Moscow, North Korea is shipping thousands more troops to Russia along with a steady stream of hundreds of thousands of artillery shells and missiles, all of which Mr. Putin badly needs for the war in Ukraine. Sensing Mr. Kim has never been stronger, Mr. Lee believes appeasement is the way to deal with the North’s dynastic regime.
The insecurity is worsened by doubts about what Mr. Trump will do when he receives Mr. Lee in Washington for their first summit, tentatively set for Aug. 25. It’s altogether possible that he will demand that South Korea pay more for the cost of American bases and troops in South Korea than the $1.1 billion per annum agreed on by President Biden. It is also possible that Mr. Trump will order the withdrawal of several thousand of America’s 28,500 troops from the South. (At this stage, most of them are stationed at Camp Humphreys, America’s largest overseas base, about 40 miles south of Seoul, and at nearby Osan Air Base, headquarters of the U.S. 7th Air Force.)
Looking Northward, South Koreans are by no means confident that Mr. Trump would defend the South as did President Truman after the North Korean invasion in June 1950.
A monument established by the U.S. 2nd Infantry Division mourns what happened to the two girls. They “passed away in a tragic accident at the sweet age of 15,” it reads. “We grieve that you are no longer with us. You have reminded us all of the value of human dignity. We promise that you will not be forgotten. We dedicate this memorial as a lasting symbol of our respect.”
Fine words, but most of “2ID,” as it’s known, is long gone, leaving Yangju and the approaches to Seoul, defended by South Korean forces, perilously exposed to the will and whims of the grandson of Kim Il-sung, the tyrant who ignited the Korean War in 1950.
• Donald Kirk is a former Far East correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and the old Washington Star.
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