First Parish Unitarian UniversalistWhy Korea, Now?
A sermon preached by the Reverend Diane Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
April 6, 2003
This is a sermon unlike any I’ve ever given. With this sermon, I enter into a topic that lies far outside the areas one studies in theological school. Those areas are very diverse for those entering Unitarian Universalist ministry, whose studies are spread delightfully thin learning about many other religions in addition to our own, plus the practical skills of ministry. But, it's safe to say, my studies did not include contemporary American foreign policy or 20th century Korean history!
Yet, I have long been interested in these kinds of subjects. At my graduation from high school in 1970, I won an award entitled “Student Most Concerned about Problems of American Democracy.” presumably for the balanced examination of the Vietnam War in the school newspaper of which I was editor and for my leadership of the school’s Earth Day event— 1970 was the first Earth Day—the best part of which was a student-driven re-cycling truck whose success over the next couple years led the town to start a curbside recycling program, quite early as such things go.
I don’t trot these memories out very often, but doing so reminds me that my commitments today run deep and long, and have served me well through my years as a community and labor organizer, paid and unpaid. Those commitments led to the establishment of a South African dis-investment policy at my college, a neighborhood health center in Baltimore, two city-wide organizations of clerical workers each with strong bi-racial leadership, a youth empowerment program in Chelsea, the Mystic Valley Pledge of Resistance to US Involvement in Latin America, and a bi-racial community group promoting racial justice in the Medford public schools where we used to live.
When I do trot these memories out, I remember that these commitments are religious commitments. In large part, they arose from the teachings of Jesus I heard as a child. In a child’s simple way of understanding, it was very plain to see that God didn’t want people to be poor and that God loved everyone, “red and yellow, black and white they are precious in his sight.” As I matured, what people said about what God did or didn’t want--or did or didn’t love--became less important to me than what we human beings did or didn’t do, and I realized that how we live—how I live—is the most important, if not the only real, statement of faith we can make. So, when I first encountered the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Principles and Purposes, today printed on the back of your order of worship, I felt I’d come home, deeply moved to find a religious tradition focusing on how we live rather than what happens to us when we die.
I don’t trot these memories out very often, but doing so helps give me the courage to tackle something new, daunting, and, I feel, more risky than anything I have so far done, participating in a clergy peace delegation to North Korea next month. We have formed our interfaith group, Clergy Advocates for Peace in the Korean Peninsula, for two purposes. One purpose is to improve understanding between the American and North Korean people and begin to build relationships with people of faith there who share our concern for peace, through periodic visitations by American clergy to North Korea. The other purpose is to involve our respective faith communities at the local and national levels in advocacy with elected officials for a peaceful resolution to the present nuclear crisis through bi-lateral dialogue between the two governments.
And, so, I have attempted to learn a lot about Korea, North and South, and American involvement there, in recent weeks. As you are necessarily effected by this new interest of mine, and because I value the support and encouragement I have received from many of you, and because I don’t want any of you to think I am crazy or naïve for doing this even if you disagree with my views, I wanted to try to share what I have learned so far.
This is a work in progress; please understand. In fact, I found myself writing this sermon all day yesterday, because I spent my weekday “sermon writing day” doing more and more reading. I remember that difficulty with high school and college research papers, it was always easier to continue researching than it was to stop and write. With this topic, I had, and still have, so much to learn.
My crash course has been informed by speeches by prominent American players in our country’s relations with Korea, newspaper and newsmagazine articles (many of them clipped and sent to me by some of you avid readers, thank you!), Bush Administration policy statements, the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, the February 15th briefing at the United Nations by the North Korean Ambassador, Grolier’s Encyclopedia, writings by Korean history scholar Bruce Cumings of Northwestern University, and the personal views and stories of the people of Korean ancestry I have met in recent weeks.
In my high school history classes, we were lucky if we got to World War II by the end of the year! I don’t think I ever heard much about why Korea was in a position to be partitioned at war’s end.
Parenthetically, it’s interesting to me to observe that several of the world’s hot spots past and present— Vietnam, Israel/Palestine, Iraq, India/Pakistan, and the Koreas —are countries whose borders were established by foreign powers. Apparently, it’s not a good idea in the long run!
Korea became a Japanese colony in 1905. During the Japanese colonial period, the Koreans endured political suppression, economic exploitation, and social and educational discrimination, in addition to attempts to Japanize their culture. The so-called March 1st movement of 1919 mounted massive demonstrations against colonial rule and was brutally suppressed, as were subsequent independence movements. Meanwhile, Korea had become an important economic and military base for Japan.
During World War II, Korea was promised independence when the Japanese surrendered. But, when that time came in August 1945, despite local populist preparations for self-governance, the Americans arbitrarily established a line at the 38th parallel in Korea, creating the American-influenced south and the Soviet-influenced north. This presaged the Cold War and set the stage for the horribly destructive Korean War.
When the latter ended in 1953, casualties were estimated at two million civilians, and two million Chinese, North Korean, South Korean and American combatants, including 23,300 Americans killed. The war resolved nothing, there were still two Koreas, still divided at the 38th parallel; but the North was completely devastated and 40 percent of the South’s industry and 1/3 of its homes were destroyed.
So, the Cold War began in Korea. It might be over everywhere else, but it’s not over there yet! There still is a heavily-guarded demilitarized zone at the 38th parallel. North Korea has over a million troops on active duty, South Korea just under 700,000; in addition, 37,000 U.S. troops are stationed there (Newsweek, March 17, 2003, p. 39) with another 60,000-plus nearby in the region (Foreign Affairs, March/April 2003). Nevertheless, there has been a slow but definite warming on the Korean peninsula in recent years, despite continuing antagonisms between North Korea and the U.S.
The hope embodied in that warming trend in relations between the two Koreas is one of two recent developments that motivate me to get involved in this issue at this time. The other is the fear that the Bush administration does indeed intend to do to Iran and North Korea, the other two “axes of evil,” what is being done to Iraq as we speak. I believe that both the hope and the fear are well-founded.
Some foreign policy background will be helpful to you and please forgive me for elaborating if you already are informed. In the 1980’s and early 90’s, the U.S. became concerned about nuclear development in North Korea. In 1994, we were on the edge of war with North Korea. Washington had beefed up its forces in the area, installed Patriot missile batteries in the South, and was reviewing detailed war plans. The Clinton White House had even begun to consider the evacuation of American citizens. The crisis was averted through negotiating what came to be called the Agreed Framework. North Korea agreed to freeze its plutonium reactor at Yongbyon, in return for two new light-water reactors for generating electricity, an interim supply of fuel oil, gradual relaxation of economic sanctions, and above all, improved relations with the United States—an end to enmity.
North Korea did freeze its plutonium reactor. But, weeks after the Agreed Framework was signed, Republicans won control of Congress and denounced the deal as appeasement. The Clinton administration was unwilling to expend any political capital to fulfill the terms of the Agreement and backpedaled on implementation. So, in 1997, North Korea began its uranium enrichment program, which was a violation of the spirit of the Agreed Framework though not its letter. Then, in 1998, North Korea tried to improve relations, by publicly offering to negotiate an end to its development and exportation of ballistic missiles, in return for a declared end to enmity.
In 1999, an agreement was reached. North Korea agreed to suspend its test launching of missiles. Washington promised (again) to end sanctions, a pledge it carried out after the June 2000 Summit between North and South, which was the kick-off event for the “warming” of relations between North and South I mentioned earlier. Then in October 2000, high level talks yielded a pledge that “neither government would have hostile intent toward the other.” This opened the way toward a missile deal in which North Korean President Kim Jong Il offered to end missile technology exports and to freeze testing, production, and deployment of all missiles within a range of 300 miles. Kim wanted President Clinton to come to Pyongyang, the North Korean capitol, to seal the deal, consummation of a ten-year campaign to end enmity with the U.S. and improve North Korean economy, beset with famine.
Clinton didn’t go, negotiations stalled, and President Bush took office. A few months after September 11, 2001, Bush repudiated the U.S. pledge of no “hostile intent” by naming North Korea as one of the “axes of evil.” North Korea in turn began acquiring an operational capability to enrich uranium. In September 2002, the American president announced his new National Security Strategy, which includes a new foreign policy doctrine of preemptive war, with a change in our nuclear strategy as well. This past December, President Kim Jong Il announced North Korea’s intent to unfreeze the plutonium reactor at Yongbyon and to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.
Most observers, except those in the Bush administration and its related think tanks, seem to agree with a March 5th Wall Street Journal article which said that it is not unreasonable for North Korea to feel threatened by the current American administration, nor to fear that it will be the target of the next “regime change.”
Simultaneous with these tit for tat, back and forth negotiations between the U.S. and North Korea during the 1990’s, a warming trend between North and South was growing. It was formalized by former president of South Korea Kim dae Jung in his “Sunshine Policy” and was an expression of a deeply-felt desire for Korean reunification by many Koreans. As opposed to the long-standing American approach to North Korea—containment—what Kim dae Jung instituted is a policy of engagement with the North. Since then, the South has become the North’s primary trading partner and largest acknowledged source of humanitarian aid. Hyundai and other companies in the south have begun investing in projects in the north. Families split apart since 1945 have been permitted visitation rights. Tourism from south to north is opening up.
The newly inaugurated South Korean president, as of February 25th, Roh Moo Hyun is expected to further the engagement policy of his predecessor. In fact, the day after his inauguration, in a meeting with a former American ambassador to Japan and others, Roh responded quietly to the ambassador’s saying that Americans find the North’s regime “detestable,” by saying that in solving international problems it was not necessarily the best procedure to begin by name-calling and casting all blame on one’s adversary, and then he abruptly ended the meeting. (Nation, March 24, 2003, p. 5).
For North Korea’s part, as I learned from an article written by former US Ambassador to South Korea James Laney, last fall it enacted a series of economic and market reforms, including increasing wages, allowing the price of staples to float freely, and inaugurating a special economic zone similar to those in China (Foreign Policy, March/April 2003). The North also began to relax its fifty-year isolation policy. It sent more than 600 athletes and others to the Asian Games, held in South Korea last fall, and according to a recent issue of the Catholic newspaper The Pilot, North Korean Catholics were recently allowed to go south to worship with their counterparts there. It allowed a British film-maker unprecedented access to North Korean society for the making of a film about the North Korean soccer team’s triumph at the 1966 World Cup. Now the same film-maker is working on a second documentary about a young gymnast.
This warming trend between North and South, this opening up of North Korean society and economic practices, begins to create a “web of connections” with the world, a world from which North Korea has long isolated itself. In a speech this past week, another former ambassador to South Korea, Stephen Bosworth, now dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts, said, “ultimately, the only adequate safeguard is to tie North Korea in to a web of connections.” Making these connections will begin to ease conditions in that famine-torn country. As these benefits accrue, their “caring leader” Kim Il Sung will be less and less likely to want to jeopardize those benefits by acting out with nuclear weapons. This seems to me to be the best way to secure a better future for the North Korean people, including freedom and human rights.
The peace mission I plan to make, with Clergy Advocates for Peace in the Korean Peninsula, seeks to help create one thread in that web of connections, a thread of connection between people of faith wanting peace between our two countries. Given the repressive nature of the North Korean regime, it will be but a beginning. We understand that in any group of, say, Christians, a few will in fact be government observers pretending to be Christians. With that kind of beginning, other clergy will have to follow after us to continue the work. Indeed, we are planning for that. But, where else to begin but the beginning?
In North Korea, we will make people-to-people connections, seeing what we can of the life and culture of that country so different from our own. We will be connecting with people of faith in North Korea, weaving that web of connections, and helping us all—Americans and North Koreans alike—to put a human face on the other who we’ve been taught is evil. In so doing, we will help create a grassroots context in both countries that can support—and even demand—an end to enmity and nuclear proliferation, once and for all, or so we will hope.
May a sinparam blow in the hearts of all peoples, here, in Korea, Iraq and everywhere. Sinparam, that “strange wind” we heard about in the reading this morning, the strange wind that “billows in the hearts of people who have freed themselves from oppression, regained their freedom, and live in a society of mutual trust.” So may it be,
Amen.