JAKARTA: August 15 marked the 73rd Liberation Day for Korea and President Moon Jae-in, in his speech, spent some time to focus on ensuring peace and prosperity in the Peninsula. “Fellow Koreans. Taking responsibility for our fate ourselves, we are now moving forward toward peace and prosperity of the Korean Peninsula. This is a way to overcome division. Even though political unification is still far away, building a single economic community first by settling peace and freely travelling back and forth between the two Koreas will become genuine liberation for us.”
Less than 48 hours later, the two Koreas — ‘Unified’ by name, flag and uniform — took to the court as a joint basketball team to face Chinese Taipei at the GBK Basketball Hall.Sports diplomacy is a powerful ice-breaker. Germany’s athletes competed under a ‘Unified Team of Germany’ at the Summer and Winter Games of 1956, 1960 and 1964. And the unified women’s team is the latest in a series of exercises that suggests that a thaw in the relationship between the two warring countries might be a possibility. Their war ended in 1953 with an armistice, but a peace treaty was never signed.
This is the fourth instance of the two nations asking their sportspersons to unite for a greater good this year.The movement started at the 2018 Winter Olympics, where a joint women’s ice hockey team generated enough feel-good clicks to almost break the internet. That spread throughout the North Korean contingent so much that their cheerleading squad made an impromptu appearance at a South Korea’s men’s hockey match against Czech Republic. They have also fielded unified teams at World Table Tennis Championships and ITTF Korea Open.
The latest show of unification wasn’t just limited to the court, where scores of South Korean expats held ‘We are one’ banners and egged their team on. It was also heard off the field, during the official opening of the North Korean delegation. “Isn’t it good to have a joint team?” North Korea’s Olympic committee vice chairman Won Kul U had asked. “We should have more unified teams. Let’s show the united power of the North and the South.”
That memo had reached the 300-strong crowd cheering for Korea on Friday. Their usual go-to phrase is ‘South Korea Hwaiting (fighting)’, but it was just ‘Korea Hwaiting’. That sense of togetherness might also be heard at sporting venues — they have unified teams in canoeing and rowing — in Palembang.
But a few have expressed dismay at the ad-hoc nature of it all. That was one of the main reasons why the ice hockey team came a cropper at the Winter Games. Played five. Lost five.
They may share a border but there is still a vast difference between them. “We actually made like a dictionary, English to Korean to North Korean, so we can communicate and hopefully learn how to speak other’s languages,” Sarah Murray, ice hockey coach of Team Korea, had said in February.
One Korean fan applauded the initiative but opined that “you cannot suddenly put 3-4 players in one team and expect it to perform like a well-oiled machine”. Those thoughts reflected the general view of the country.
“It seems a tad ironic that athletes from South Korea and North Korea would have difficulty understanding each other because the two peoples speak the same language — except when you consider that they are accustomed to different sets of basketball jargon,” Yonhap, a major South Korean agency, wrote two days ago. “South Koreans are familiar with English terms, such as shooting, passing and blocks. North Koreans are used to their own words that may sound foreign to South Korean ears.”
While the three North Koreans — Jang Mi Gyong, Kim Hye Yon and Ro Suk Yong — did seem to be on the same page as their South teammates, who are defending champions, they had practised with the squad for a few weeks. “We haven’t had a lot of time to work together, so we made defensive mistakes,” coach Moon Kyu Lee said.
Those mistakes kept repeating and they went down 83-85. But the unified team, who face India at the same venue on Monday, will not be too disheartened, as they are tipped to qualify. Irrespective of whether they go all the way or not, the entire team will give the Koreas, whose two contingents face each other at the Games Village. They will walk together at the Opening Ceremony. As one nation. As a unified Korea under a common flag without the border. Baby steps to the calls for liberation Moon had called for on August 15.
swaroop@newindianexpress.com