I was flabbergasted and perused, to quote my bombastic senior in secondary school, when I read an online media story saying that President Muhammadu Buhari promised to resolve the dispute between North and South Korea in the interest of world peace. Quoting a statement said to have been made by his Special Adviser on Media and Publicity Femi Adesina, Buhari was said to have “given this assurance” at a virtual meeting of leaders at the World Summit 2022.
Did he actually give this assurance? Adesina’s statement, which I later saw, said Buhari’s video-message sent to the Hybrid Summit in Seoul, South Korea, described the Korean peninsula as “a flashpoint of conflict, lingering many decades and therefore deserving the attention of world leaders for a peaceful resolution.” That is true. The dispute, to put it mildly, between North and South Korea is a remnant of the Second World War. When occupying power Japan was defeated in 1945, the peninsula was divided between USSR-occupied northern half and US occupied southern half. In 1948 each power installed an ideologically compatible regime in its area of control.
Buhari was three years old when this “dispute” started, so he must have been hearing of it all his life. The Korean War of 1950-53, when the North invaded the South, cost 40,000 American, one million Chinese and two million Korean lives and ended exactly where it began, at the 38th Parallel. Since then, the border between North and South Korea has been the world’s most impregnable. The Nigerian world traveler Abdullahi No Sweat, now deceased, once said in an interview that he managed to enter every country in the world, except North Korea. I was not surprised. Crossing the Demilitarized Zone [DMZ] between the two countries is tough even for a lizard.
With the possible exception of Vietnam and Cuba, no country in the world imbued its youths with as much anti-American feeling as did North Korea. A story in one magazine many years ago cited a question in a North Korean kindergarten school textbook. It stated, “A People’s Army soldier kills one US imperialist, and then kills another. How many imperialists has he killed?” Any child who answered “two” without adding “imperialists” was punished.
Right now, North Korea has 1.2 million regular troops, 600,000 reservists and 6 million paramilitaries, the single largest military force in the world, backed by thousands of tanks and aircraft and several nukes. South Korea is no push over either. It has 600,000 regular troops, 3 million reservists and 3 million paramilitaries, plus 30,000 US troops in the country. US Navy’s Seventh Fleet is stationed just offshore. You must also factor in China with its 4 million troops, probably the main deterrent against US attack on North Korea despite many provocations by three generations of Kims.
Resolving this dispute between North and South Korea has defied seven decades of history, eluded three Kims, resisted 12 South Korean Presidents, spurned 14 US Presidents, thwarted 10 Soviet/Russian leaders, withstood 7 Chinese leaders and puzzled 8 UN Secretary Generals. Since 1960, 13 Nigerian leaders came, saw and left the Korean dispute in place. Did Buhari pledge to end it?
What Buhari actually said, according to Adesina’s statement, was that “The Nigerian Government encourages and supports every effort to promote understanding and a commitment to peace among the governments and people of both Koreas; and has for a long time, maintained relations with them at ambassadorial level. We have enjoyed cordial relations with both Koreas in trade and commerce, education, cultural exchange, and technology transfer. And so, when it comes to what needs to be done to ensure lasting peace on the peninsula, we are happy to be part of it.”
Very good. We have been able to maintain ambassadorial level relations with both Koreas only because they never presented us with a choose-us-or-leave it situation, such as Peoples Republic of China did with Taiwan. No country can have an ambassador in both Beijing and Taipei. In the 1960s and 1970s, most African nations chose Beijing but a few, such as Liberia, chose Taiwan. They were put to shame in 1979 when US President Jimmy Carter downgraded his embassy in Taipei and sent an ambassador to Beijing, the former labour leader Leonard Woodcock.
Before I saw the full text of Adesina’s statement, I was already making a mental note of the other protracted disputes around the world waiting for Nigeria to go and resolve after it would have successfully resolved the Korean dispute. I don’t know if Nigeria played any role in reuniting the two Germanys in 1990, the other World War Two dispute very similar to Korea. I don’t think we had a hand in reuniting North and South Vietnam in 1975. That one happened when legendary North Vietnamese Marshal Vo Nguyen Giap’s forces overran Saigon and the last American troops escaped from the rooftops of their embassy. It was a dress rehearsal for what happened in Kabul last year.
I briefly thought that our government was buoyed by the memory of our soldiers’ peace-keeping roles in many disputes in the 1970s to 1990s. Remember the scandal in 1982 when Israeli troops in southern Lebanon captured a Nigerian peace-keeping soldier and accused him of aiding Palestinians? Otherwise we had scandal-free peace-keeping roles in many other countries and a peace-enforcement role in Liberia and Sierra Leone through ECOMOG.
Other disputes around the world waiting for Nigerian resolution include Ukraine. Can the UN Security Council please request us to place an armoured division between Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region and the 100,000 Russian troops lined up across the border? We might just succeed in averting a major war for which the big powers are getting ready.
The Balkans is still ripe for our intervention. Peace between Republica Srbska, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia and Kosovo is still tenuous, and a Nigerian Army Special Forces battalion could just be the antidote. After that we should cross over into Afghanistan, then move on to separate Indian from Pakistani forces in Kashmir. That dispute has lingered since the division of the Indian sub-continent in 1947. At the UN Human Rights Summit in Geneva in 1996, a Kashmiri delegation accosted me and tried hard to convince me that Nigeria should support their cause. I wryly told them that I was a reporter, not any diplomat.
Syria could do with a Nigerian peace enforcement force. Though most of the guns have fallen silent in Damascus, Aleppo, Homs and Idlib, remnants of IS and Kurdish forces, plus edgy Turkish troops just across the border, could still cause trouble. If Nigeria had deployed troops in Syria, last week’s American commando operation that killed IS leader Abu Ibrahim al-Qurayshi would not have been necessary. Russian, Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah troops shoring up the Assad regime could also go home once we are there because peace will reign.
I suggest that from Syria, we should jump into the Mediterranean. Our Navy should do something that neither the US Navy’s Sixth Fleet nor the Russian Navy’s warm water fleet based in Crimea has been able to do, which is to round up all the refugees that flee to Europe from the Libyan coast in dingy boats. They will quickly find that their arduous travel across the Sahara Desert was in vain because Nigerian Navy will round them up in the Mediterranean and repatriate them to West Africa.
The border dispute between China and the Soviet Union that led to a border clash in 1969, has it been resolved? If not, President Vladimir Putin, who is attending the Winter Olympics in Beijing, should suggest to President Xi Jinping for them to jointly invite a Nigerian peace-keeping force.
Nigeria should deploy forces to end the mother of all territorial disputes, Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The solution here is simple. 45 years ago, UN Security Council passed Resolution 242 calling for a two-state solution in the area. Hot on the heels of the 1993 Oslo Accords, a summit meeting at Camp David between Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Bill Clinton only just failed to resolve the dispute. The main sticking point was Palestinians’ insistence on having East Jerusalem as their capital and Israeli leaders’ insistence on “a united Jerusalem as the eternal capital of the Jewish people.”
Nigeria can easily solve this problem. During a tour of Israel some years ago, we came upon a tank division on the Golan Heights. Hundreds of Mirkva tanks tightly packed like sardines in a very small area. Our 3 Armoured Division, backed by Super Tucanos, can overwhelm all of them and give effect to UN Security Council Resolution 242 the same way US gave effect to Resolution 82 in Korea in 1950.
