Episcopal Press and News
NCC Delegation Optimistic on the Reunification of Korea
Episcopal News Service. September 16, 1992 [92193]
In yet another manifestation of the end of the cold war, a 16-member delegation of church leaders returned from a visit to North and South Korea optimistic about a peacefully reunified Korean peninsula.
"Korea is one of the last remaining countries of the world where the walls erected during the cold war still stand," said the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, general secretary of the National Council of Churches (NCC) and a member of the delegation. "We noticed an eagerness on both sides for a normalization of relations, and our role is to make sure our own policies are supportive of that process."
The group, sponsored by the NCC, spent two weeks talking with highranking church and government officials in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) and the Republic of Korea (South Korea) about the division imposed by the allies along the 38th parallel at the end of World War II, a barrier that has separated some 10 million people from members of their families for almost 50 years.
At previous meetings in Japan and Switzerland, religious leaders from both Koreas agreed to work towards reunification by August 1995, the 50th anniversary of the end of Japanese occupation and the beginning of a divided Korea, but they have not been able to meet on either side of their home turf. As a result, delegation members offered to carry messages from one side to the other, a painful reminder of the gulf that still remains between the two countries.
"It was easy to see the pain in the faces of the people we told that we would carry messages," said Campbell. "And it was very clear to all of us that our ability to cross the barrier was privileged."
The Rev. Syngman Rhee, president of the NCC, and two other Korean Americans in the delegation had brief reunions with family members in North Korea whom they had not seen since the Korean War began in 1950. Rhee also delivered photos from two South Korean husbands to their wives in the north. In South Korea, the delegation participated in worship services and a conference on reunification sponsored by the Korean NCC.
Though it is tempting to compare the rapprochement of the Koreas to German reunification, both consequences of the thaw in relations between the United States and the former Soviet Union, the comparison is far from accurate, said Rhee. "North Korea is not East Germany, and South Korea is not West Germany," he added. "There is a way of reunification by negotiation that is not one-sided -- an absorption, really -- like the German reunification. And there is no clear-cut blueprint for what a new Korean government will look like."
One member of the delegation, the Rev. Mark Harris, East Asia, the Pacific and the Middle East officer for the Episcopal Church, suggested that the strongest force for reunification is memory.
"Our primary responsibility as members of the Christian community is to remember that there were people martyred in North Korea and people imprisoned in South Korea for their Christian convictions," said Harris. "If we remember these people, we are saying that their convictions are more substantial than artificial divisions like the 38th parallel."
In any event, said Harris, the normalization of relations between the Koreas will not happen overnight, and the NCC recognizes that it must continue in its efforts to remove barriers to Korean reunification within the United States and abroad.
"The NCC will continue pressing for normalization of relations in the United States and to encourage the ecumenical community in South Korea in its efforts to work for reunification," said Harris. "And in North Korea, where the church is so small, our standing with them is a way of saying how important they are to us."