'Border Rider' Song Dreams of Finally Coming Home
By Seo Soo-min Staff Reporter
A professor of philosophy, protege of Juergen Habermas, a pro-democracy activist turned North Korean spy - Song Du-yul has been called many things in his life.
But these names fail to catch the essence, or tragedy, of his life over the last 37 years. Due to anti-dictatorship movement he led from Germany in the 1960s, the 59-year-old man has been unable to return to his home on Cheju Island.
Song, now a German citizen, has resisted Seoul’s more recent offers to come home on the condition that he undergo interrogation over his connections to Pyongyang and sign a paper usually required of political prisoners upon release promising he will abide by all the laws of South Korea, including the anti-Communist National Security Law.
With President Roh Moo-hyun recently indicating the government may finally scrap this practice, criticized by human rights advocates, the voice of the ageing scholar, who is on the brink of returning home for the first time nearly four decades, was surprisingly calm.
"My 37 years weren’t that short. I was out of my homeland all that time. But being outside and inside is always relative. The origin of the French word `hotel’ means where the guest and host are together, and some Western writers actually spend their whole lives in hotels," Song said in a telephone interview with The Korea Times from Berlin.
"I know my home Cheju is not going to be the same. I will be disappointed at the changes. But the home I long for is not just the home that was in the past, but also an archetype of the future, a home that I hope to create, a home where South and North Koreas live together," he said.
After dictatorship toppled and democracy arrived in South Korea, Song continued working towards a realization of his vision of unifying the two Koreas by leading scholastic exchanges between Korean scholars of the South, North and abroad since the early 1990s.
On March 26 to April 2, he organized the sixth meeting of scholars in Pyongyang, where scholars discussed the North Korean nuclear crisis. There was an overall feeling in Pyongyang was that it would become the next target after Iraq, Song said.
"They (the North Korean scholars) claimed the nuclear crisis is a phantom created by the U.S., a logic created to reorganize the world order," he said. "The different view North Korea holds of the outside world, plus the lack of a language system that others can understand, often added to the misunderstanding."
For his part Song has been an advocate of an ``immanent" approach to North Korea. He defended the methodology, which had come under criticism for being too lenient towards the Pyongyang regime.
"The immanent approach means I try to understand them first by putting myself in their position, not from the head but from reality. (Even now) we know so little about North Korea, that studying an obscure African tribe may be easier than doing research into North Korea."
Song’s visits to North Korea since 1991, which he said were made out of a scholastic need to ``get to know the North," led to accusations that he was a member of the North Korean politburo, charges which were only cleared in the South Korean court in 2001.
In February, a documentary film chronicling Song’s life premiered in the 53rd Berlin Film Festival. Titled "Border City," the movie by independent South Korean filmmakers took its name after the ``border rider," a name Song prefers to use for himself.
"To coin a phrase from the culture critic Homi Baba, who comes from South Africa but works in Britain, I want to be the `productive third.’ People usually think of `elimination’ with the word `border rider,’ but being at the border means also makes one most eligible to integrate," he said.
The term "border rider" itself, originating from bandits along the Scotland-England border, was given a new meaning in Australia, where it refers to moving between Aborigines and Caucasian immigrants and helping them communicate, Song added.
"After seeing the film in Berlin Film Festival, the (Western) audience ask me, `how is it possible that your body cannot go to South Korea when you have published numerous books and given video lectures?’ I still find it difficult to answer," he said.
The philosopher is currently working to complete a three-part series on the light and darkness of modernity spanning the West and East, titled "Return of Modernity."
"We cannot discern the color of a flower in dark. Only in the light of enlightenment can we tell its multifaceted beauty," he said.