Past & Present

The U.S. press has not picked up on this yet, but reports are that North Korea wants to put a more formal end to the unsatisfying end to the Korean War.

The two Koreas remain technically at war and since the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce, not a peace treaty. Such an official declaration to the end of the war is seen by the current administration as one of the first steps toward bringing lasting peace to the peninsula.

I would love to hear from a Korean living on either side of the 38th parallel about whether that even with a formal peace treaty, there will still remain among Koreans a sense that things have not been resolved. The histories I have read make it clear that most Koreans were left deeply unsatisfied with the very idea of a partition in the post-war period. Maybe today the newer generations take the division for granted. But the dreams for an independent unified peninsula have roots sunk over the centuries it was either under Japanese or Chinese control.