Korean War Essay

Korean War made with specific focus on what the populace went through as primarily a policy of the local alliances or the foreign influences. The paper will focus on the numerous plights of the Korean civilians including the genocides, the economic strains, the social influences and the rehabilitation concerns. The paper will also discuss the extent to which the Korean War was a Cold War or a civil war.

The Korean War, which was essentially one of the many "limited wars" for forces like the United States and United Nations, ended up being a complete and destructive clash for the Koreans. What made this war particularly savage to Korean people, North and South, civilian and solder was the truth that the human and material sources of North and South Korea were utilized and exploited to the maximum. The material devastation and lack of existence in general on either side was nearly beyond comprehension; however the North experienced the higher damage, because of American infiltration bombing techniques and the scorched-earth principle of the receding UN military. The United States Air Force calculated that the devastation of North Korea's was proportionately more than that experienced by Japan in the event of the 2nd World War. In Japan, the U.S. troops had upturned and completely annihilated 64 of the major areas and had dropped the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the effects of which have still not completely been cleaned off in the country. American troops had used over 635, 000 bombs in the Korean War alone -- that's, majority essentially on the region of North Korea -- these also included a total of 32, 557 a lot of napalm explosives; the amount of these bombs of course seems to take a whole new weight of importance when compared with 503, 000 and upwards of the bombs dropped in the whole Pacific region in the events of the Second World War (Armstrong, 2010).

The amount of Korean civilians found dead, severely hurt or missing by the time the war had ended reached a high of over three million in recorded numbers, which was more than 10% of the entire populace. Nearly all those who were executed were in the region of North Korea, which occupied nearly 2/3 of the total population when compared to the South; even though DPRK doesn't have officially authenticated estimates, probably a dozen to fifteen % of the populace was killed in the war, a figure that is near to or going past the percentage of Soviet populace that was executed in the Second World War. Perhaps the worst of these attacks that annihilated half of the population was the aerial bombing that was done on all the major popular and populated sites of North Korea. The counter to this of course was in the form of Soviet MIGs which were primarily flown by the Koreans, Soviets and the Chinese, even though their success rate against the American aerial attack was only a low percentage. The reason behind this was not primarily the lack of strategies or willing soldiers -- it was the lack of planes as Stalin strictly ordered only a specific number of planes to be flown and only pre-determined number of flights was allowed. This was done as a preemptive strategy to avoid a deficiency of planes in case the U.S.-Soviet war escalated. Hence, the plight of the Korean populace in the peninsula was backed by the mediocre defense structures in place which led the masses to extensive destruction of the homes and neighborhoods to the extent that there were two major monuments and the region Pyongyang managing to stay intact from the whole region by the end of the war (Armstrong, 2010).

One of the major plights of the Korean populace in the peninsula was the influence of the other nations' policies on the local policies. We see numerous examples where the local authorities passed bills or policies as a reaction to the global policies of the U.S., UN, or other nations. Some of the counters of these policies are showing respite to the Korean populace and could potentially include efforts like the law passed by the government of Kim Dae-Jung as a reaction to the 1948 Cheju Uprising and the policy passed as a reaction to the 1980 Kwangju Massacre by Kim Young-Sam (Akira, 2010).

Despite the efforts aforementioned, it cannot be ignored that there have been, however, a number of supplementary unidentified nameless victims whose deaths were deaths brought on by official acts throughout the early years of the South Korean administration.A good instance of this could be the many civilian mass execution that took place throughout the political clashes amid the Koreans following the Japanese colonial engagement, in the Second World War as well as the Korean War (Akira, 2010).

In order to discover the historical factual statements about this particular civilian genocide throughout the Korean War, the Committee created in 2005, has been studying a myriad of data and facts inclusive of the interviews and records collected from the surviving household members of the dead and forensic evidence available. The commission also has separate departments each with its own set of responsibilities for either studying the bones of the victims or exhuming their remains. The work conducted by the Commission of exhuming the remains and presenting hardcore evidence of the Genocide is one of the aspects that the peninsula can work together on and reduce some of the current tension that exists between the North and the South (Akira, 2010).

In assessing the Korean War as a Cold War conflict pitched against a civil war conflict, it's important to observe that the Korean War wasn't just one war; it had been rather a mix of a few different types of war. It had been a civil war, obviously, waged amid two equally opposing and hostile post-colonial nations, which due to the opposition, aimed to primarily construct a typical, extensive, united and one modern nation-state under their power. It also had simultaneously been a global war fought, amongst others, between two of the very powerful states of the contemporary world, United States and China. So, while on one hand, it had been a worldwide war waged amid two extremely different and powerful global political, cultural, ethical, and monetary nations who had different perceptions and applications of the idea of modernity, which for a large part of history was referred to as the Cold War; it was on the other hand, also, a very different conflict that happened within the boundaries of the Korean peninsula between the years 1950 and 1953. This was the war that went from the national boundaries to the villages and was, from the point-of-view of the masses, the Korean War i.e. A civil conflict. Hence, the historical accounts on the national and local level have very different opinions and versions of the war that took place nearly crippling the entire structure of the Korean peninsula (Kwon, 2010).

Numerous practitioners, researchers and scholars have over the years attempted to draw to the attention is the truth that the Korean War wasn't of necessity or primarily a fierce clash or power struggle between contending global military forces. Alternatively, they assert that the conflict was primarily concerning the struggle for survival by unarmed civilians from the widespread, random and extreme form of violence that was primarily conducted by the militaries of all the parties involved (Kwon, 2010).

This struggle is probably the prelude to the major rehabilitation problem that has stayed consistent within the region. It is also one of the integral lasting clashes between the North and South Korea and there seems to be no peaceful progress that can be made between the two unless this issue is resolved. Amid the confusion with which North Korea's military strategized to be offensive in summer time of 1950, the UN Security Council ended up deciding to pass a number of resolutions and bills that allowed the United States-sanctioned UN Command (UNC) to take over the control of a majority of the areas in the Korean peninsula. An important part of the job of the control -- the 2nd takeover that southern Korea had undergone since the year 1945 -- was to tackle the refugees' rehabilitation issue. By August 1950, while the territory under UNC jurisdiction shrank and found centre round the Ky-ngsang region, many of the South Korean local authorities asserted and testified that it was the ambush by the northern forces that had caused the displacement of more than one million people from the South (Lee, 2010).

Included in the effort to cope with the refugee rehabilitation crises in South Korea, the Security Council passed a bill on the 31st of July, 1950, which offered the structure and design for the "relief" functions that the UNC would conduct for effective rehabilitation. The Council passed the resolution many days after American military had been involved in a mass execution in the peninsula that recorded as high as a….....