Monday, February 03, 2003
For decades, it was illegal here to say anything positive about Kim Il Sung, just as it was forbidden to display a North Korean flag. The revised history textbooks reflect a broad overturning of taboos here recently that has resulted in everything from South Korean tourists traveling to North Korea, to the president-elect, Roh Moo Hyun, openly questioning the nature of the longstanding alliance with the United States.
Specifics:
What is most striking about the debate over Kim Il Sung is that there is little disagreement in South Korea over the facts. In the 1930's, Mr. Kim successfully led fighters in the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army, based in Manchuria, in a series of raids against the Japanese occupiers, including an attack on the Korean town of Pochonbo in June 1937. This was, by most independent accounts, a minor skirmish, but it is celebrated in North Korea as a huge victory.
Mr. Kim's raids prompted the Japanese to mount a major operation in the region, which eventually wiped out most of his fighters, forcing the Korean guerrilla leader to flee to Khabarovsk, in the Soviet Far East. He remained there for the duration of the war, and Kim Jong Il was born in Russia in 1942 during his exile. North Korea's hagiography of its founder is silent on these setbacks, and North Koreans are taught that Kim Jong Il was born at Mount Paektu, the legendary source of Korean civilization.
The newly approved textbooks say nothing about those historical inventions, limiting themselves instead to a relatively circumspect, but nonetheless groundbreaking, account of Mr. Kim's anti-Japanese efforts. The Northeast Anti-Japanese Army "backed by other fighters, set fire to Japanese administrative offices and attacked the police," one of the books says.
Later in the same passage, it adds, "after Korea was liberated from Japan, Kim Il Sung was revered by North Koreans as a leader of Korean independence," and goes on to note that South Korean experts have criticized North Korea for exaggerating the battle.
Of course, some don't like this:
Park Sung Soo, a prominent academic who heads the Institute of Documenting Accurate History, a conservative group that is critical of North Korea, says even such limited mention is going way too far and is an example of the sunshine policy run amok. For Mr. Park, and for other conservative historians who have objected to crediting Mr. Kim, history is a political weapon, and South Korea is naïvely lowering its guard.
"North Korea doesn't recognize the contributions of other people," said Mr. Park, whose institute unsuccessfully fought the textbooks' introduction. "They make it sound like Kim Il Sung single-handedly liberated Korea. Why should we give him so much credit? We are letting sunshine politics distort our historical thinking, and giving recognition to leftist facts is becoming a factor in the growing anti-Americanism here."
