Sixty years after the Korean War armistice split Korea in half, ways to reunite the divided nation were discussed in a daylong conference at Syracuse University.

‘U.S. Policy toward North Korea: Assumptions Untested or Unproved,’ held in Eggers Hall on Monday, focused on the need for all parties to come to the negotiation table and leave their Cold War conclusions behind. The workshop is the inaugural event of the Korean Peninsula Affairs Center, a new subdivision of the Moynihan Institute at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs that will focus on social, economic, political and security issues in North and South Korea.

Each speaker was limited to 10 minutes of presentation, followed by five minutes of panel discussion and a Q-and-A session at the end of the workshop’s two sequences.

Donald Gregg, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Korea from 1989 to 1993, was the panel’s keynote speaker. Gregg spoke about how American negotiators in Seoul failed to agree Thursday on a new trade pact. He said this leaves delays and disputes that prove relations between the United States and the Korean Peninsula are an ongoing challenge.

‘Things are very much in flux,’ Gregg said.

Gari Ledyard, professor emeritus of Korean studies at Columbia University, presented after Gregg. Ledyard, best known for his research on the history of the Korean alphabet, called Hangul, recalled America’s long history of divisions with Korea, most of which, he said, were provoked by America.

Ledyard said Korea was split along the 38th parallel in the Korean War armistice because the U.S. Department of State, then under Secretary of State Dean Acheson, did not know Korea’s provincial borders.

‘Here we had a country that had been united for 1,300 years … and survived in unity until Aug. 11, 1950, because the State Department couldn’t find a map,’ he said.

Cultural issues, such as the mourning of a North Korean leader’s death, are part of what maintain a gap between the United States and Korea, Ledyard said. When he died in 1994, Kim Il Sung was mourned in the tradition of ancient Korean kings, for whom the nation grieved for two and a half years, he said.

When he signed the guestbook at an event with North Korean delegates in the late 1990s, Ledyard witnessed the mourning himself.

‘Everyone there was physically in tears,’ he said. ‘This is not something that could be put on or acted. It’s hard to lay too much emphasis on that.’

The United States has difficulty negotiating with Korea because the public recollection of history in Korea is longer and the wounds deeper than anything in America, Ledyard said.

‘There was not a two-story building in North Korea that was still standing,’ he said of the end of the Korean War. The North remembers this, and that memory affects its ‘dealings with the outside world, especially with the United States of America.’

‘North Korea’s issues are with us — U.S. Us,’ Ledyard said. 

Jongwoo Han, an assistant professor in the Maxwell School, said the primary purpose of the workshop was to find new ways of solving the Korean conflict by overcoming the assumptions of the past.

‘We don’t want to get into the details of who did and who didn’t,’ he said. ‘We want the Korean Peninsula to be in peace.’

SU entered an academic exchange with North Korea’s Kim Chaek University of Technology in 2002, focusing on information technology. SU is the only American university that maintains an ongoing exchange with a North Korean counterpart, Han said.

Despite the missile tests in 2006 and the sinking of a South Korean ship in March, SU Chancellor Nancy Cantor still works closely with the university, and the exchange is supported by both governments, Han said.

SU has hosted delegations from the university, and educators from SU have been welcomed to Pyongyang, Han said. Another set of scholars from Kim Chaek is scheduled to visit SU next year.

Another of SU’s roles in solving the Korean conflict is supporting research projects such as that of Margaret Hermann, a Maxwell professor who uses specialized software to analyze the leadership personalities of world leaders as distant as Kim Jong Il.

Hermann’s project sampled 50,000 of Kim Jong Il’s words, spoken from 1994 to 2009, to separate the North Korean leader into distinct leadership styles that change over specific periods of his reign. Hermann said this information can be used to determine better ways to conduct negotiations with Kim Jong Il’s government.

‘It’s one of the great steppingstones for North Korean studies,’ said Changyong Choi, a doctoral candidate at Maxwell and 1996 graduate of Korea University in Seoul.

Erik French, a doctoral candidate in political science, said he believes a new way of thinking is required to reunite the Koreas.

Said French: ‘A new global generation of thinkers will come to the issue of Korea without the Cold War assumptions.’

geclarke@syr.edu

Published on November 15, 2010 at 12:00 pm