Report On A Trip To The Korean DMZ

RG21 Researcher and global strategist Philippe Valdois recently made a trip to the DMZ seperating North and South Korea. Here are some of his thoughts on what he experienced. ED.

No other place on Earth can compare with the Korean Demilitarized Zone or DMZ for the weight of history it carries and as a place of unresolved animosities.

 I recently was offered the chance to visit part of the long gone village of Panmunjom, now the Joint Security Area, as a guest of the United Nations Command. Situated inside the DMZ, a strip of land 4 km wide and 250 km long separating North and South Korea, it has been the site of all negotiations between the 2 countries since the signing of the Armistice Agreement, on July 27, 1953, when each side agreed to move back their troops back 2,000 meters from the front line. It is also the most militarized border in the world. The line running in the center of the DMZ, the Military Demarcation Line, also goes through Panmunjom and in particular down the middle of the conference tables inside the buildings. When the main conference building is unoccupied, visitors have the possibility to stand on the North-Korean side of the table. Before that they have to be briefed and to sign a Visitors Declaration (UNC REG 551-5) warning that “The visit to the Joint Security Area at Panmunjom will entail entry into a hostile area and possibility of injury or death as a direct result of enemy action.”

 This is not in fact a trivial matter. Since the mid-60s’, many incidents have occurred in the DMZ resulting in deaths, including some inside the JSA.  The most famous one is the so-called axe murder incident, in 1976, when North Korean soldiers attacked members of a work party trimming a tree blocking the line of sight from a checkpoint situated at the entrance of the Bridge of No Return (where the return of prisoners of war had taken place decades before). Two unarmed US officers were murdered and the incident was filmed. Now a sobering monument marks the site where the tree originally stood.

The second major incident happened in 1984 when a Soviet defector ran across the MDL. Four people were killed in the resulting exchange of fire.

 It is however necessary to note than if, for the most part, incursions by the North-Korean agents across the DMZ, and the discovery of four tunnels having certainly be dug by North Korea to facilitate an invasion, have made the news, the North had also to contend with a number of raids and sabotage operations by South-Korean forces. Partly declassified documents such as this one http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve12/d286 show that such actions have taken place. Those operations, few of them having been made public, could only antagonize an already paranoiac regime.

 I came out of this visit and another to the War Memorial of Korea, convinced that it might take decades for trust to be built between the two sides. Manufactured or not, fear is a day-to-day reality for the people of South Korea. It is evident that with the present regime in North-Korea, peace and unification will not happen, but it is also clear that from a geopolitical perspective, support to a regime which has done so little for its people can only make this situation worse and encourage North-Korea to isolate itself.