Remembering the unfi nished confl ict: museums and the contested memory of the Korean War

Abstract

On 27 May 2009, the government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, North Korea) provoked worldwide alarm and protest by announcing that it no longer considered itself bound by the 1953 armistice ending the Korean War. Amongst the mass of western media reports deploring this announcement, however, only a few noted the fact that the armistice has never been signed by the Republic of Korea (ROK, South Korea), because its then President Yi Seungman [Syngman Rhee] did not accept that the war was over, and wanted to go on fighting. The armistice was therefore signed only by some of the belligerents, and, since negotiations on the Korean Peninsula in the UN framework proved abortive and the US and North Korea have not pursued bilateral peace negotiations, there has never been a peace treaty. [1] More than half a century after the ceasefire, Korea remains uneasily divided along the 38th Parallel, one of the world’s most dangerous military flashpoints. Of all the conflicts over history and memory which trouble the Northeast Asian region, this is surely the one most direct ly l inked to contemporary politics: for rival understandings of the unfinished war lie at the heart of continuing political tensions on the Korean Peninsula. As Sheila Miyoshi Jager asks, “how does one commemorate a war that technically is still not over?” [2] In English language writings, the Korean War is referred to, with almost monotonous regularity, as “the Forgotten War”. This description, however, begs an important question: forgotten by whom? Certainly not by the people of North Korea, where education, propaganda, TV dramas and repeated air-raid drills ensure that the conflict is experienced as an ongoing reality. Nor, I would suggest, have many South Koreans (particularly those of older generations) forgotten the Korean War. The term “Forgotten War”, then, refers largely to an American amnesia, although this amnesia is probably also shared by some of America’s major allies, including Australia, Britain and Japan. (The latter, of course, though not a combatant in the war, was deeply involved in providing bases and material support for the UN forces engaged in the conflict). Or perhaps, as Bruce Cumings has suggested (quoting French literary theorist Pierre Macherey), we should see the silence less as amnesia than as “structured absence”. [3]