The year 2010 will mark the centenary of Japanese colonial rule over the Korean peninsula, but, 64 years after that colonial rule was liquidated, North Korea, Japan's neighbour, remains the one country in the world with which it has no relations. That failure to reconcile and to normalize has had, and continues to have, large consequences. The bitterness and anger that feed on the absence of normality fester and threaten to plunge the region back into war. If Asia is to have a future beyond conflict, the “North Korea problem,” meaning that country's unresolved colonial relations with Japan (which is much different from the meaning usually intended by US and Japanese policy makers, as discussed below), and its unresolved war with the US and UN, must be addressed.

The recent arrest near Johor Bahru, Malaysia of Mas Selamat Kastari, a fugitive Singaporean member of the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) group is an important achievement in the effort to stamp out Southeast Asian terrorism. Other actions by the Indonesian police over the past 18 months, including the arrest of JI members in Palembang and Central Java, have dealt a further blow to the organisation.

It has been ten years since the Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) embarked on a path of change. The first major course correction occurred in 1998 when the DPRK amended its constitution. A new cost accounting system in economic management was introduced, and a new political line of Songun (Army-First Politics) was promulgated in addition to the Juche ideology of national self-reliance. Although this adapted form of Marxism-Leninism continued to guide the country on its way to “Korean-style socialism,” the proposed changes would bring some elements of economic liberalisation and commercialisation of the economy. As part of this cautious plan, several enclaves scattered across the country were allocated by the DPRK government exclusively for inter-Korean cooperation.

On 27 May 2009, the government of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK, North Korea) provoked worldwide alarm and protest by announcing that it no longer considered itself bound by the 1953 armistice ending the Korean War. Amongst the mass of western media reports deploring this announcement, however, only a few noted the fact that the armistice has never been signed by the Republic of Korea (ROK, South Korea), because its then President Yi Seungman [Syngman Rhee] did not accept that the war was over, and wanted to go on fighting. The armistice was therefore signed only by some of the belligerents, and, since negotiations on the Korean Peninsula in the UN framework proved abortive and the US and North Korea have not pursued bilateral peace negotiations, there has never been a peace treaty. [1] More than half a century after the ceasefire, Korea remains uneasily divided along the 38th Parallel, one of the world's most dangerous military flashpoints. Of all the conflicts over history and memory which trouble the Northeast Asian region, this is surely the one most directly linked to contemporary politics: for rival understandings of the unfinished war lie at the heart of continuing political tensions on the Korean Peninsula.