S. Korean students at SEMO not worried about current tensions on Korean peninsula

EDITOR'S NOTE: This story has been changed to correct one of the students' educational background.

While there is always the fear of escalation in the uneasy peace between North and South Korea, Jae Hyun Lee has seen this movie before.

Lee, a 28-year-old graduate student at Southeast Missouri State University, grew up in Taegu, a southern South Korean city of 2.5 million people.

Tensions on the Korean peninsula remained high Monday, a week after North Korea shelled Yeonpyeong Island, killing four South Koreans. With more saber-rattling from the North, the disclosure of the communist nation's growing nuclear program and the political heat from planned U.S.-South Korean naval exercises, concern is rising that a new full-scale Korean War could erupt nearly 60 years after the cease-fire kept Korea divided.

Lee, who served in the South Korean army as all young men there are compelled to do, said he has seen acts of aggression plenty of times, and war never came. He believes cooler heads will prevail again. Lee sees it all as another power play from North Korea, an impoverished country known for raising the stakes at the international bargaining table through threats.

"North Korea picked its next leader and they want to show [they have] power to the outside," he said of Kim Jong Un, third son and heir apparent to ailing North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. "He wants to express his power to every resident so they see the next leader as powerful and recognized as brave."

Lee, who enrolled as a graduate student at Southeast Missouri State University in 2009 after graduating from Keimyung University in South Korea, is one of 12 South Korean students attending class at the Cape Girardeau campus. He said many in his generation, those far removed from the Korean War in the early 1950s, don't see the North using nuclear weapons on the South.

"If they use that, it will kill both of us," he said. "I think they don't want to use it. I think they don't want to make war. I think they want to make an issue" to bargain with.

Min Jee Kim, 23, a native of Seoul, is in her first semester at Southeast Missouri State. Kim, a senior who describes the American experience as much more relaxed than the constant competitive environment in South Korea, said her generation, unlike that of her mother and father, has come to terms with a divided Korea. But Kim believes it won't remain divided much longer.

"In my opinion, this is the final tension," she said of the current standoff.

She predicts in the next decade North and South will be reunited, that the millions of poor and starving North Koreans will rise up and demand reunification.

China, North Korea's strongest ally, seemingly agrees, at least according to leaked U.S. embassy cables indicating Beijing's openness to accept a reunited Korea.

But the State Department cables paint a picture of a China distancing itself from the North Korean regime, an ally it regards as a "spoiled child." In the documents, a South Korean official predicts the North Korean government would fall three years after Kim Jong Il's death and that China has "no will" to economically sanction its communist ally.

China is critical of the U.S.-South Korea naval drills and is calling for a resumption of nuclear disarmament talks.

Lee, from his perspective as a business administration graduate student, sees reunification through economics. He agrees North Korea's poor will force change, but it will be much like China's move from communism to capitalism.

Lee said he believes the long-standing partnership between the United States and South Korea has been good for both nations and that it will see South Korea through the latest crisis.

"I think North Korea and South Korea have similar [military] powers," he said. "If the U.S. Army helps us, our power is more than North Korea. And that can reduce the probability of war. The partnership is more bright side than dark side."

mkittle@semissourian.com

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