Kim Il Sung and Korea’s Reunification

The Korean people are making vigorous headway in the efforts to achieve their national reunification in the face of the unscrupulous obstruction and challenges by the separatist forces within and without. Their progress is inconceivable apart from the exploits of President Kim Il Sung (1912-1994), father of socialist Korea, who dedicated all his life to achieving Korea’s reunification.

Thoroughgoing idea of great national unity

In his effort to reunify the country President Kim Il Sung always subordinated everything to achieving the great national unity, regarding it as a matter of priority concern. He considered the issue of Korea’s reunification as a matter of removing the mistrust and antagonism between the north and the south of Korea caused by the national division forced by foreign forces, and achieving the national unity.

He held that, in order to achieve the great national unity, it is important to put national interests above all else, transcending the differences in ideologies, ideals and social systems between the north and the south of Korea. He advanced the three principles of national reunification-independence, peaceful reunification and great national unity-the gist of the historic July 4 North-South Joint Statement (1972). His steadfast idea of the great national unity induced Choe Tok Sin, former foreign minister of south Korea, and many other people to bid farewell to their past stained with confrontation and make a U-turn in their life into working for the cause of reunification.

In April 1993 he put forward the “Ten-Point Programme of the Great Unity of the Whole Nation for the Reunification of the Country,” which serves as a key programme of the national unity for the Korean people aspiring to the country’s reunification. The programme calls for unity on the principle of promoting co-existence, co-prosperity and common interests on the basis of the love for the nation and the spirit of national independence, and subordinating everything to the cause of reunification, for an end to all kinds of political strifes between the fellow countrymen, and promotion of mutual trust and unity, for protection of the materials and spiritual assets possessed by individuals and organizations so that they are favourably used to promote the great national unity, and so on. It inspires the Korean people in the north, south and abroad to the struggle for the great national unity and reunification.

This program, along with the three principles of national reunification and the plan for the establishment of the Democratic Federal Republic of Koryo, constitutes a part of the three charters for Korea’s reunification.

Blueprint for reunified state

The prevailing circumstances on the Korean peninsula confirm that the day is not distant when the Korean nation is reunified. Then, what would be the features of the reunified Korea?

The answer to this question was given 30 years ago.

At the Sixth Congress of the Worker’s Party of Korea in October 1980 President Kim Il Sung proposed a plan to reunify the country and the nation by establishing a federal state on the basis of leaving the ideologies and social systems in the north and south intact and recognizing and tolerating them. The reunified state in the form of federation will be based on the regional autonomy that is exercised in two different social systems, and will include the whole territory of the country and the entire nation.

In this reunified state, a supreme national assembly will be formed with an equal number of representatives from the north and the south and an appropriate number of representatives of overseas nationals; this assembly will form a federal standing committee to guide the regional governments of the north and the south and to administer all the affairs of the federal state. The President defined the nomenclature of the federal state to be the Democratic Federal Republic of Koryo (Koryo was the nomenclature of the first unified state of the Korean nation that existed between 918 and 1392) and stated that the federal state shall be a neutral country that does not join any political or military alliances or blocs.

Even in his last days

From time immemorial a legend about the stars Herdsman Kyon U and Vega Jik Nyo has been handed down through generation in many countries in the East. According to the legend, the beautiful girl Jik Nyo and the diligent boy Kyon U loved each other but had to live separated with the Galaxy in between, and would meet on the Ojak Bridge every July 7 by the lunar calendar.

In the evening of July 6, 1994, President Kim Il Sung, all of a sudden, told this legend to the officials. About this time the attention of the world was drawn to forthcoming summit meeting between the north and the south of Korea and the Korean people’s enthusiasm for reunification was reaching a crescendo. Therefore, his narrative bespoke his intention to arrange an emotional reunion for the Korean people that had been suffering from national division for scores of years.

His office remained lit all through that night and the next. After he unexpectedly passed away early in the morning on July 8, officials found on his table a document on the country’s reunification, bearing his signature “Kim Il Sung July 7, 1994.”

The signature was later inscribed on a granite monument at Panmunjom on the Military Demarcation Line that divides the Korean Peninsula into north and south, to hand the exploits President Kim Il Sung had performed for Korea’s reunification, down through generations.