“Does North Korea Want Peace?”
Sandra Fahy, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Global and International Studies, Faculty of Public Affairs, Carleton University
As the saying goes, actions speak louder than words. One need only pay attention to the actions North Korea takes to determine if they are pacificist, or provocative.
Since 1958, North Korea has taken over 370 provocative military actions, each a contravention of the armistice agreement. Each a declaration that they seek war over peace. North Korea has sought to goad military retaliation from the United Nations Command every year, and sometimes several times a year since 1958. North Korea seeks a resumption of war. They seek war, and they seek to provoke it. But they haven’t done so yet, and in the mean-time they will talk peace. This is with the hopes to weaken the UN Command. With the South Korean flank of the peninsula demilitarized, they will then successfully capture the entire Korean peninsula. The desire that struck the Korean War’s outbreak in 1950, to unify the peninsula under North Korea’s regime, has never died in the North.
Yet, during that time, so much else has died. Over the years of these 370 military provocations, the people have starved for food and information. The financial cost of these provocations can be counted in the debt owed to the North’s citizenry. The 25 million whose bodies have shrunken and stunted, withered and died, for want of basic nourishment. The top-most elite supper on a luxury goods budget of $650 million and watch as a missile budget of $1.3 billion dollars explodes into thin air.
What kind of peace can you negotiate with a belligerent opponent? Would such a negotiation even be considered ethical? What kind of peace would North Korea offer? A government which allowed a famine to occur in the 1990s, when nobody need have starved? And as I write these words, has let another famine take hold, in a world of food abundance? A government which blames international sanctions and natural disasters for its poverty, while it has hobbled its citizenry with one of the worst human rights records in the contemporary world?
As some of you may know, I have worked with North Korean defectors for over two decades now. In that time, I have heard many defectors say that when they lived in North Korea they often wished war would break out, because life was so unbearable. They were living with such suffering, that war seemed like a reprieve.
Now you and I might imagine that they wished war would break out so that the South could win, they’d have democracy and live happily ever after. But that’s a mistaken assumption. They wish for the North to win. “Of course,” they’d say, many times adding, “with the rest of the peninsula, we would be wealthy.” Not realizing that North Korean people are poor, not for lack of resources – the North has more natural resources than South Korea – but because of the government’s appalling corruption, absence of rule of law, and authoritarianism. What makes South Korea wealthy is its democracy.
North Korea has no interest in living peacefully with South Korea. To do so would be a recognition of its legitimacy. To live peacefully with South Korea would mean they could no longer justify their restrictions of basic human liberty in the North – such as freedom of movement, access to information, and freedom of speech. The presence of these would mean the great unraveling of the regime.
As of July 18th, 2023, North Korea has carried out over 370 provocations. None of these provocations have reignited war between the two Koreas. North Korea’s actions indicate that they do not want peace on the Korean peninsula.
