HONOURING THE FATHER OF PEACE STUDIES

By Dietrich Fischer and - - Reprint | | Print |

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BASEL, Dec 1 2010 (IPS) - Johan Galtung from Norway, universally recognized as “the father of peace studies”, who recently turned 80, has been awarded the Korean DMZ Peace Prize for 2010. The award ceremony will be held in Seoul on 7 December 2010. The selection committee cited “his long-lasting work for world peace and Korean reunification”.

The De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) has been a tense border since the end of the Korean war in 1953, but it should be converted into a Zone of Peace, a place of encounter, dialogues, trade, cooperation. The latest deadly incident, where North Korea fired artillery rounds at Yeonpyeong Island, allegedly angered over US-South Korean military exercises off its coast, shows the urgency of Galtung’s proposals to build trust and avoid war.

Galtung has worked persistently since 1972 to promote peace on the Korean peninsula. He has visited Korea two dozen times, including two visits to North Korea in 1989 and 2000. He has also held numerous dialogues abroad with diplomats from both South and North Korea. He advised the late South Korean President Kim Dae Jung and recipient of the 2000 Nobel Peace Prize, whose “sunshine policy” helped improve relations between North and South Korea.

Based on published speeches that Galtung held in North and South Korea, some key points of his analysis and proposals emerge.

He emphasizes the need for both negative peace -the absence of violence- and positive peace -cooperation for mutual AND EQUAL benefit. Violence is to conflict like smoke to fire. To get rid of the smoke, it is necessary to extinguish the fire, and to avoid violence, it is necessary to resolve the underlying conflict.

The West portrays the root of the conflict as North Korea’s attack against the South in 1950, at the start of the Korean war, which still has not yet been ended with a peace treaty. This was the first time since 1812 that the US has not won a war, and the US has not yet forgiven North Korea. But this was preceded by the 1905 Taft-Katsura Memorandum about zones of interest, giving to the US the Philippines and to Japan Korea; Japanese colonial occupation of Korea 1910-1945; the partition of Korea in 1945; and the 1948 Jeju uprising against American occupation, which was brutally suppressed by South Korean troops under US command.

True, there are human rights violations in North Korea, but the same occurred in the South during military dictatorship. South Korea has changed. So will North Korea, Galtung expects, following the paths of China and Vietnam, who have adopted a combination of capitalism and socialism with rapid economic growth.

Galtung does not foresee a collapse of the North Korean government and a takeover by the South, as it happened in Germany in 1989-90. Koreans in both North and South are too proud for that. Instead he advocates a gradual process, beginning with functional cooperation (like the European Coal and Steel Union of 1951) which leads later to closer cooperation and joint institutions.

The Korean people should be united as soon as possible, through free travel and economic cooperation between North and South.

Galtung sees potential in an Association of the Mahayana Buddhist Countries, which have a common culture: North and South Korea, China (including Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan), Japan and Vietnam. Such an association could produce goods of Japanese and South Korean quality, at prices of China, Vietnam and North Korea.

If the Soviet Union had adopted what in China is now called “capi-communism”, it might have survived. But it was too much in the grip of Western dualism, that there is one and only one correct system. East Asian countries understand that there can be many truths, and they choose the best from several schools of thought, including Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism and Christianity. Thus they can also combine socialism and capitalism.

The main conflict is not between North and South Korea, but between North Korea and the US, over a peace treaty and normalization of diplomatic relations, which the US has so far refused. It is understandable that North Korea seeks a nuclear deterrent as long as the US stations nuclear weapons in South Korea and refuses North Korea’s request for a mutual non-aggression treaty. If the US signs such a treaty, helps North Korea economically, and normalizes diplomatic relations, North Korea’s urge to possess nuclear weapons will lose its basis. In a similar way, when Libya was no longer treated as a pariah state, it gave up its nuclear weapons ambitions.

Galtung also proposes an open-ended Conference for Security and Cooperation for North-East Asia, with all parties at the table and all issues on the table, analogous to the 1972-75 Helsinki Conference, which prepared the end of the Cold War in Europe. This conference could form an organization to deal with security and cooperation issues in the region.

Galtung’s broad knowledge of numerous conflicts, having mediated in over one hundred international conflicts around the world, has helped him see solutions that others have overlooked. With his tireless efforts to promote peace, not only in Korea, but throughout the world, having helped avoid several wars, he has amply deserved the Korean DMZ Peace Prize. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Dietrich Fischer is Academic Director of the World Peace Academy in Basel, Switzerland ( www.world-peace-academy.ch) and Director of the TRANSCEND University Press ( www.transcend.org/tup).