Special Report on The Koreas: Contested Grounds

THE KOREAS

Contested grounds

Sep 25th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Of history wars and peace parks

DISPLAYED in nearly every government office in South Korea is one of two stunning landscapes, sometimes both of them. One is a volcanic mountain, with a turquoise lake in the caldera and forests on its flanks. The other is a pair of rocky islets, black-tailed gulls wheeling around the crags. These are the front lines of South Korea’s history wars.

FLPA

Good for goralsEmotions ran high this summer over the rocks, known as Dokdo in South Korea and Takeshima in Japan, when the Japanese education ministry reminded textbook writers that they were formally incorporated into Japan in 1905, when Korea was forced to cede the conduct of its foreign policy to Japan. Outraged Koreans claim historical rights to the islets going back more than a millennium.

The South Koreans are not laying claim to the volcano, Mount Paektu, which is divided in two by China’s border with North Korea, as is the lake. This was the area of one of Korea’s three founding kingdoms, Koguryo, which flourished between 37BC and 668AD. Koreans have an unshakable belief in their bloodlines, and most insist that holy Mount Paektu is the fount of their culture and myth. Tangun, Korea’s mythical founder, was born on its slopes, and Kim Jong Il, in his official biography, made sure he followed suit.

The problem is a Chinese state history project claiming that Koguryo’s ancestry and culture was Chinese, not Korean. China wants to hold the 2018 winter Olympic games on Paektu and list it as a UNESCO world heritage site. Koreans think China is stealing their mountain and may one day even claim parts of North Korea.

History wars are bad news for wildlife. China’s notion of conservation is to build golf courses and theme parks. Hordes of politicians, soldiers and tourists from South Korea now stumble around windswept Dokdo. The government has even planted trees, because the law on maritime claims suggests that trees differentiate an island from a mere islet.

Another heavily contested piece of ground could set a conservation example. The demilitarised zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea, 4km wide on average, is all that keeps two awesome lines of firepower and hair-trigger soldiery apart. But for any lover of wilderness the view through binoculars from the Seungri mountain observatory is breathtaking. Far below are willow flats and watermeadows, and the meanders of a stream that has not seen a rod in 60 years.

In the DMZ, the wilderness has smothered the human past. Below the observatory, a town and rail terminus that was thriving under Japanese occupation is now a dense wood. The zone is rich with a fauna that has disappeared from most of the rest of north-east Asia: the black-faced spoonbill, of which a total population of only about 2,000 remains; the solitary Manchurian goral (a goat-antelope); and the eagle-owl. An admirable outfit, the DMZ Forum, wants to keep the wilderness from voracious developers when north and south are reconciled. If only the nationalists left all contested ground to those species with the oldest claims.