With South Korea about to achieve international acclamation, will the communist North Korean regime change its policies? How will the prospects for reunification of the Korean peninsula be affected by a successful Olympics in Seoul? This Special Report presents the opinions of Asian specialists from three continents.
As thousands of athletes from around the world--East and West, North and South--gather in Seoul for the 24th Olympiad, it is reasonable to wonder, Why look at the politics of the event? Isn't this a sports festival?
Yet, as with the past three Olympiads and others, politics has overshadowed these Games--from the moment they were awarded to Seoul by the International Olympic Committee. The Korean peninsula has been bitterly divided since 1948, and the South and North have been engaged in a protracted competition to win international recognition and legitimacy at each other's expense. The 1988 Olympics will mark a turning point in that struggle, with the South about to achieve international acclamation and the North virtually isolated even from its chief communist allies, the Soviet Union and China.
Those athletes and officials of the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe, as well as of the Third World, who attend the Olympics will observe a vibrant, dynamic society that is playing a major role in the world's economy--not the stereotypical "victim of imperialist exploitation". They will experience the warmth, openness, and drive of the Korean people. The present alignments of allies are likely to undergo, if not dramatic, overnight shifts, then certainly gradual ones. The leaders of both China and the Soviet Union are looking for models of economic change, and South Korea is a success story by any standard.
As Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Indiana), former chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, comments in his article, "If [South Koreans] are successful in achieving political reform that matches the vitality of their economic achievements, they will have written one of the most remarkable national success stories in the second half of the twentieth century."
What will this mean for the future, particularly the future of the Korean Peninsula? How will the prospects for reunification be affected by a successful Olympics in Seoul?
Gen. Richard G. Stilwell, former commander of U.S. forces in Korea and commander in chief of the UN Command there, believes that a "faint" prospect exists "that the 24th Olympiad will be a catalyst for the termination of the United Nation's role in Korea and the institution of more stable and enduring arrangements among Northeast Asian nations."
He bases such hopes on the expectation that Pyongyang will be motivated, in the wake of its being upstaged by Seoul, to review its past policies--both domestic and foreign.
The potential for Pyongyang to change its hostile attitude toward the South is also cited by Stephen Kirby, director of defense and disarmament studies at Hull University in Great Britain. "Even though it has boycotted the Games," Kirby writes, "Pyongyang must now recognize that the Seoul Olympics will be a celebration of South Korea's emergence on the world scene as a
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