The Winter Olympics’ biggest win: Korea will be undivided

The opening ceremonies of the 2018 Winter Olympics are still three weeks off but, cross your fingers, we might already be looking at the prospect of its biggest victory.

North Korea and South Korea, two countries that have been trading invective across the most militarized patch of land on the planet for the past 65 years, are preparing to march together instead of on each other.

Given the caustic tenor of the times, can you think of a bigger upset? Or, better timing?

In Pyeongchang, less than 50 miles from the DMZ, where an uneasy armistice has divided the Korean Peninsula since 1953, there is an agreement for its divided people to march, cheer and, at least on a token basis, compete together.

If that results in a toning down of the tweets and cessation of missile launches and anxiety (real and mistaken) for even a fortnight, it will have accomplished more than all the bluster about button pushing of the past year.

If it could, somehow, lead to wider, more meaningful talks and actions in favor of peace, well then, it would truly be a gold medal victory not only for a place that once was truly the Land of the Morning Calm but the world.

Because anytime the world and its feuding nations come together through sports is time when they are not blowing each other up.

Of course, this latest initiative comes with no guarantees and should inspire a healthy dose of skepticism and vigilance. Eighteen years ago in the Sydney Olympics, the Koreas first marched together under a symbolic flag of peace and hope, one with a united peninsula in blue on a white background. They did the same at Athens in 2004 and Turin in 2006 and were to have done it at Beijing in 2008 until plans fell apart under heightened demands by the North.

Then the emotional choruses of the traditional song “Arirang” ended, tensions escalated and here we are talking about evacuation plans, blast radiuses and casualty estimates.

Now, faster than you can say, “rapprochement,” an opening in Kim Jong Un’s New Year’s Day speech that his South Korean counterpart, Moon Jae-in, seized upon has opened dialogue and a door to inter-Korean cooperation.

And, this time, there is to be joint participation in competition as well in the form of a women’s hockey team, provided the details and personalities don’t get in the way.

Along with a figure skating pair — the only North Korean athletes who have actually pre-qualified for participation in these Games — and women hockey players, the North wants to bring a tae kwon do demonstration team, and several hundred cheerleaders, musicians, media and assorted others.

Speculation is that the group will include the Moranbong band, the Kim-selected, all-female, military pop group whose repertoire includes such hits as “We Love the Party Flag” and “We Call Him Father,” an exaltation of Kim.

Many in South Korea are understandably wary. A column in the conservative Chosun Ilbo, South Korea’s largest newspaper, read: “Without athletes who stand a snowball’s chance in hell in their actual Olympic disciplines, North Korea wants to steal the show with some pretty women and a lot of flimflam.”

Alternatively, in the past when the North has been on the outside looking in it has blown up a Korean Airlines plane before the 1988 Seoul Olympics and engaged in a naval skirmish during the 2002 World Cup in South Korea.

If it all comes together in Pyeongchang next month, there will be a couple of hundred North Koreans coming south, which is still preferable to the last time, 1950, when the North last arrived in large numbers.

That time the shouts of “jokuk tongil!” (unified fatherland) carried a vastly different meaning.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.