Korea, Are You at Peace?

Book excerpt: Is there hope for peace on the Korean peninsula? These deeply personal stories of two Western women reveal the almost unimaginable transformation of Korea from a culturally and politically united peninsula at the end of the nineteenth century into today's dangerously divided land. These two women's experiences bracket the twentieth century, a dark time in Korean history, when the peninsula was occupied by Japan, divided into North and South, and wracked by internal war-becoming an unwilling pawn of Cold-War superpowers. Despite everything, South Korea has emerged as an international economic success story, whereas North Korea has become a totalitarian ideological nightmare in which leaders spew the rhetoric of aggression and develop nuclear weapons. What would it take to heal this political schizophrenia that endangers our entire world?