Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Wilson Ignored the Koreans at 1919 Paris Peace Conference

About this time a century ago, the “war to end all wars” was over. Some 17 million people died in World War I, along with 23 million wounded. Germany had been defeated along with its ally Bulgaria, and the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires were history. They, the losers, could only wait to see what the victors (the United States, France and England, for the most part) had planned for them at the Paris Peace Conference. It opened on January 18, 1919 and did not close until the League of Nations was inaugurated on January 16, 1920, concluding with the Treaty of Versailles.

More than 400 people had official roles at the conference, and the key figures were Georges Clemenceau and David Lloyd George—the French and British prime ministers, respectively—and U.S. president Woodrow Wilson; the Americans, late to enter the war, made the crucial difference. The League of Nations, Wilson’s pet project, was among his so-called Fourteen Points, idealistic principles of post-war peace. The stickiest pertained to self-determination. That would not be easy when France and Britain were trying to hold onto their vast empires, and the U.S. wanted to maintain the Monroe Doctrine in the western hemisphere. Furthermore, what might constitute self-determination in the Balkans? What about the Kurds? A homeland for Zionist-minded Jews (well represented by Chaim Weizmann)? Poland (Ignacy Paderewski), Greece (Eleftherios Venizelos), China (Wellington Koo), Syria (Faisal I bin Hussein bin Ali al-Hashemi) and other countries had legitimate claims, pressing them with various degrees of effectiveness.

Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Wilson, their assertions to the contrary notwithstanding, were Eurocentric. Most of all, they wanted to punish Germany and prevent its military resurgence. Reparations were called for and national boundaries were re-drawn, pleasing some entities and drawing howls of protest from others. Countries uninvited to Paris could not officially present petitions. Nevertheless, Blaise Diagne of Senegal and W.E.B. Du Bois of the U.S. organized a Pan-African Congress in Paris that went on for most of February. Ireland and Tonga—yes, Tonga—found ways to make their views known. A pastry chef at the Ritz Hotel named Ho Chi Minh borrowed a suit from a French friend and delivered a petition demanding independence for Vietnam.

Japan, the rising power in the east, had sent a large delegation under Makino Nobuaki. Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Wilson often discussed the Japanese and how to handle them. One surviving memo emphasized that “Japan’s dignity should not be offended.”

This brings us to Korea, a country of which Japan was the colonial master. Recall the “Taft-Katsura Agreement” of 1905 by which Japan acknowledged the United States’ control of the Philippines (in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War), and the Americans reciprocated by saying Japan’s hold on Korea was valid.

As is well known, the March 1st independence movement in Korea was sparked by the perhaps naïve belief that Wilson’s call for self-determination applied even to a remote little country in East Asia. The Shanghai-based Korean Provisional Government, created soon thereafter, was riven by factions. Even if it had not been, the big powers did not want notorious men like Syngman Rhee or Kim Gu of the KPG to come to France and so visas were denied.

Kim Gyu-sik, another fervent Korean nationalist, was the KPG’s foreign minister but that was hush-hush. Calling himself a representative of the Korean YMCA, he and two others traveled to Paris in May 1919. Denied any opportunity to speak to the decision-makers, they had to settle for a quick meeting with Stanley Hornbeck, a minor American diplomat. Kim handed Hornbeck two documents: the “Petition of the Korean People and Nation for Liberation from Japan and for the Reconstitution of Korea as an Independent State” and the “Claims of the Korean People and Nation.” Hornbeck took them but made clear that he was in no position to make any promises. Wilson never saw the documents. Nobuaki, needless to say, was vexed to hear about the presence of a Korean delegation.

Before leaving Paris, Kim gave a speech. Where he spoke and to whom is uncertain, but he stated his disappointment with the lukewarm reception he had gotten. He asked whether Woodrow Wilson meant what he said about self-determination and criticized the French who pretended to love justice but cared little about 20 million Koreans suffering under Japanese colonial oppression. Kim may have mentioned that some of the people the Japanese had arrested, thrown into Seodaemun Prison and tortured said they had stood up for Korean independence only because they took Wilson at his word.

Kim was among 52 Koreans who, in 1922, participated in the First Congress of Toilers of the Far East in Moscow. Hosted by Vladimir Lenin, it was all about revolution, Communist-style. Frustrated and resentful over what he had seen in Paris, Kim wrote an article blasting the hypocritical Americans, French, British and Japanese, calling them “bloodsucker” nations. This was the start of the Korean Communist movement, and when Kim Il-sung disembarked from a Soviet ship at Wonsan 23 years later he beheld fertile ground. He would take bloodsucking to an entirely new level.

Poor Kim Gyu-sik! After division of the peninsula in 1945, he tried and failed to broker reunification (including a gutsy visit to Pyongyang in April 1948). With the outbreak of the Korean War two years later, he was abducted, hauled to the North and killed.