South Korea's 'Peace Olympics' overture to North Korea provokes backlash

Thomas Maresca | Special to USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption North and South Korea to march under same flag at 2018 games North and South Korea to march under same flag at 2018 Games:IOC Video provided by AFP

SEOUL — South Korean President Moon Jae-in's push to improve relations with North Korea is producing a public backlash here over an agreement by both countries to show unity at the Winter Olympic Games next month.

The accord calling for the athletes to march under a unified Korean flag and field a combined women’s hockey team is being panned by South Koreans as unfair to the South's players who worked for years to make the team.

A survey by SBS television station this month found 73% opposed a combined hockey team, including 82% disapproval among those in their 20s and 30s.

The International Olympics Committee on Saturday agreed to let North Korea add 12 players to the 23-player squad for the Olympics, which will be held in Pyeongchang, 80 miles east of this South Korean capital.

"We are forcing the athletes to sacrifice themselves. I doubt this unified team would be more than a one-time event,” said Cho Ganghoon, 30, who works in the accounting department of a Seoul logistics company.

Kim Hee Ryeong, who works at a tourism information kiosk in Gangneung, the city which will be hosting the ice sports at the Games, complained: "They didn’t really consider the South Korean players. They prepared for years to be in the Olympics but now they cannot play.

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"As usual the (South Korean) government is too willing to be fooled by North Korea,” Kim said.

Widespread negative reaction has lit up social media, with many expressing mistrust of North Korea’s motives — that it is using its Olympic participation for propaganda purposes and to ease international isolation over its development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.

One Twitter user wrote that the joint hockey team is "backstabbing all the athletes who sweat blood and everyone else who spared no effort to host the Olympics, just to use it as (North Korean leader) Kim Jong Un’s propaganda.”

An online protest petition on the website of Moon's office, the Blue House, has received more than 40,000 signatures.

Sarah Murray, the American-born coach of the women’s hockey team, told reporters Tuesday that she had “mixed feelings” about the joint team.

"It's exciting to be a part of something that's so historic, to have two countries so divided come together through sports," Murray said, according to South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency. "I think the story is great and to be a part of it is important. But at the same time, it's mixed feelings because it's at the expense of, 'We don't get to play our full roster.'"

North Korea’s participation in the Games — including a 140-member orchestra, a 230-person cheering squad and 30-athlete taekwondo exhibition team — has been seized upon by Moon's conservative opponents.

The leader of opposition Liberty Korea Party, Hong Joon Pyo, said Monday that the Olympics were becoming the “Pyongyang Olympics,” a reference to North Korea's capital. He claimed that the administration is “attempting to put the destiny of this country and its people into the hands of Kim Jong Un.”

Conservative protesters met a North Korean delegation led by one of the country’s most popular singers, Hyon Song Wol, in Seoul Monday, shouting anti-Pyongyang slogans and burning an image of dictator Kim.

The appearance by Hyon, who leads the North Korean all-female group Moranbong Band, attracted breathless coverage of the type normally reserved for South Korea’s K-pop megastars.

The singer was rumored to have dated North Korean dictator Kim, and it was reported widely in South Korea in 2013 that she had been executed by a firing squad as a result of a pornography scandal. Her appearance was obsessively discussed and dissected in the news and on social media.

Moon, who was elected in a landslide last year on a platform of improved ties with the North, has referred to the Pyeongchang Games as the “Peace Olympics.” He said Monday that the event has led to a “precious opportunity to peacefully resolve the North Korean nuclear issue and establish peace on the Korean Peninsula,” where the two countries have held an uneasy truce since the end of the Korean War in 1953.

During a visit to the national team’s hockey training facilities last week, Moon told players that the inter-Korean team at the Olympics would “make sporting history.”

The controversy around the joint team has dented Moon’s still strong popularity. In a poll released Friday by Gallup Korea, his approval dropped to 67% from 73% the week before.