SEOUL, Sept. 27 (UPI) -- Holding out against critics who protested the display of the North Korean flag, the South Korean government Friday decided to allow its unfurling for the first time in the country. The red star on its blue and red field has will fly above Busan, the host city of the Asian Games.
"The government has permitted the North Korean flag, strictly banned in the country, to fly at the Asian Game stadium," a senior government official told United Press International.
The North Korea flag, called "Ingong-gi" -- literally "the flag of the People's Republic," was allowed to hoist in five places, including the main press center and athletes village in Busan, the officials said. Its national anthem was first played on Tuesday when the North Korean squad entered the athletes village.
The allowance of the flag of the Cold War foe would be a victory of South Korean President Kim Dae-jung who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000 for his efforts to engage the communist North.
North Korea has sent a team to the international sports event in South Korea's biggest port city for the first time, amid recent reconciliation efforts. The North Korean squad arrived Friday.
Busan was the last capitalist bastion in the peninsula where the South's defenders regrouped during the 1950-53 Korean War, when U.N. allied forces led by the United States repulsed the communist troops armed with Soviet tanks. The war ended in an armistice without a peace treaty, leaving the two countries at the state of technical war.
Instead of abandoning their own national flag, the two Cold War rivals have agreed to use one flag --"unification flag," a blue image of the Korean peninsula on a white background -- at the opening ceremony of the Asian Games.
Athletes from the two Koreas will march together during the opening and closing ceremonies behind the unification flag, officials said.
But the two Korea's plan to give up their respective national flags and use the unification flag has touched off a heated confrontation between conservatives and pro-unification groups in South Korea.
Anti-communist and rightist groups have blamed the Seoul government for using the unification flag, saying it is aimed at appeasing North Korea's communist government. The conservative organization has said its members will keep South Koreans from waving North Korean flags during the Asian Games.
"Opposition has been growing over the government's move to appease North Korea by abandoning our national flag, which represents the nation's identity and pride," the Korean Parliamentarism Society said in a recent statement.
But pro-unification groups support athletes from the two Koreas march together under the single flag, saying it will demonstrate Koreans' desire to achieve unification and contribute to the reconciliation process.
"If South and North Korean teams march under their respective national flags in a sports event being held on the peninsula, it will present to the world the image of an eternally divided country," Lee Su-eon, spokesman for the Korean Council for Reconciliation and Cooperation, told UPI.
