took questions from us, and told us we could “take photos with the ROK soldiers, but don’t get too close to them. I don’t want any accidents or you guys to get hurt.” I decided to pass on the photo-op. He then led us outside onto the nearby steps of Freedom House. “Do you see the North Korean guard standing on the steps of Panmungak?” he asked us.
We gazed across into the North, the guard distinguishable a hundred metres away by his uniform and tall hat. “Yes,” we answered.
“He’s staring back at us with binoculars,” said Naumenkof. I straightened my shoulders and nodded to the enemy. We were not permitted to wave.
A short time later, we boarded a military shuttle bus, which transported us a kilometre from the JSA along a lonely road through the woods to the remote UNC Checkpoint 3, located just south of the midpoint of the DMZ. We were greeted bya young, enthusiastic Korean soldier named Han. He announced that the North was monitoring our tour group at this moment from KPA Checkpoint 5, located in close proximity. “Their radio tower is jamming our hand phone signals,” he told us, adding rather gleefully that if we tried to use them now they would be inoperable.
Our view north out over the DMZ was limited by a soupy veil of white mist hugging the ground and reducing visibility to less than a kilometre. Photos in Major Kirkbride’s book on Panmunjeom show the area north of the DMZ as sparsely populated, a terrain of rugged foothills and brush. In the distance was a ridge of low, steep hills.
Because the DMZ’s long swath has remained untouched by humans and development since 1953, its nearly one thousand square kilometres of flora and fauna has grown unchecked for seven decades. Each winter, for example, several hundred rare red-crowned cranes — delineated by a small red patch on their head, and by snowy-white plumage and black necks and tails — arrive from their home in northeast China and Siberia to feed in the Cheorwon area in the DMZ about sixty kilometres east of Panmunjeom. Occasionally, a deer or small animal detonates one of the estimated one million landmines both sides have planted since the end of the war. In 2013, a South farmer was killed when he stepped on a landmine. In 2015, two soldiers on an ROK patrol in Paju, near Panmunjeom, had their lower appendages blown off after stepping on mines.
One has to wonder what happened for Korea to create this obtrusive border in 1948. Korean history books state that Korea as a society came into existence during the Gojoseon period (go means ancient), which began in about 2300 BC. Since that time, although the country’s kingdoms having had their share of royal murders and court intrigue, dynastic upheavals, peasant revolts, coup d’états, and foreign invasions, it has remained a singular nation. Prior to the 1948 divide, one could travel from Busan on the south coast all the way north to the shared border with China and Russia, a distance of about 1,400 kilometres. Today, though, the distance from Busan to the DMZ is only about five hundred kilometres.
We need to go back to August 15, 1945, when Japan’s thirty-five-year period of colonization suddenly ended upon its surrender ending the Second World War. About seven hundred thousand Japanese citizens living in Korea at the time fled back to their country. The Soviets, who had declared war on Japan on August 8, arrived in the northern part of Korea to ostensibly oversee the Japanese departure. The U.S. Army arrived in Seoul from Japan to provide a semblance of law and order in the chaos and confusion. Because the U.S. feared the Soviets might try to sweep south and impose a communist regime on the entire peninsula, the United States stipulated that the 38th parallel, just north of Seoul, would be the arbitrary line the Soviets could not proceed past. It turned out that the U.S. fears were well-founded.
The Soviets respected the 38th, but began to promulgate their form of rule, confiscating private land, farms, and livestock from the wealthy. They transferred 90 percent of private industry, banks, railways, and communications to the nascent state. They propped up a charismatic Korean, Kim Il-sung, as ruler. The Americans requested meetings with the Soviets in an attempt to eradicate the 38th line, but both sides held fast that their forms of government — a nascent rough-and-tumble form of democracy in the south, Communism in the north — would prevail.
When Japan surrendered, Koreans were ecstatic, looking forward to living under democratic rule. Those who had fled the country during colonization flooded back from Manchuria, China, and Japan, and many from north of the 38th headed south, many to Seoul. Between 1945 and 1947, the population in the southern half of the peninsula skyrocketed from 16 to 21 million. In 1947, Kim Il-sung made it more difficult for Koreans in the north to flee south.
The United Nations then mandated that elections should take place in Korea. The Soviets refused. With UN backing, the south held its own elections on May 10, 1948, and a U.S.–educated Korean, Rhee Sung-man, also known as Syngman Rhee, was elected president.
Believing there was no hope for uniting the country, Rhee established the Republic of Korea on August 15 of that year. Three weeks later, on September 7, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) was formed in the North.
About ten million families — brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, cousins, uncles, and aunts — who lived on different sides of the 38th, were now permanently separated. If you resided in Seoul, and your parents and relatives lived in Pyongyang, you would never see them again. As the regime in the North intensified its stranglehold, Kim Il-sung, using intimidation and assassinations to rid himself of political opponents, and backed by the Soviet Union, launched an attack on the South on June 15, 1950, in an attempt to unify the two counties under his dictatorship. His troops waltzed into Seoul. The Korean War had begun.
The conflict was brutal, and didn’t end until the summer of 1953. China contributed about 1.3 million soldiers to fight alongside the North. More than three hundred thousand U.S. soldiers, and considerably smaller numbers from sixteen other UN nations, fought for the South. The war left more than two million dead. In the aftermath there were half a million South Korean war widows and about one hundred thousand orphans. The South’s economy, land, and infrastructure were left in tatters; its per capita income about $89 annually.
In fact, the Korean War has never really ended. The July 27, 1953 Armistice Agreement was not a peace treaty; rather, it was an armed truce, now the longest ongoing armed truce in history. It would be nearly twenty years after the war ended, not until 1974, that the South and North, via Red Cross meetings, could bring themselves to have official contact.
In June 2000, an historic Summit Meeting took place between presidents Kim Dae-jung and Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang. Between then and 2015, there have been twenty rounds of family reunions, each usually involving several hundred North and South family members. I have watched televised news coverage of reunions, and long-lost brothers and sisters, mothers and sons, clung to each other, refusing to let go. Adult sons bowed deeply to mothers. Tears flowed unabashedly; the anguish, angst, and loneliness of six decades apart rushed out. It was even enough to get me emotional. The harder part for families comes a day or two later, when they are forced to split up again and return to their respective country. Only 66,000 war-divided family members remain in the South; half of them are more than eighty years old.
* * *
Our guide, Mr. Han, pointed to the DMZ and asked if we could see the A-frame building. In the thick mist, I could not spot it. He said it was the North Korean Peace Museum. “It holds the two axes the North soldiers used in the 1976 murders in the JSA.”
The museum, and the JSA, are located in the ancient farming village of Panmunjeom. In 1951, Panmunjeom was chosen as the site where the main participants in the Korean War would meet and iron out an end to the conflict. For two years, South, North, Chinese, and American officers sat at that MAC building table for countless meetings. The Korean Armistice Agreement that put an end to the fighting was signed in Panmunjeom in July 1953. But the resulting DMZ swallowed up the village, and all that remains of it today is the building in which the agreement was signed, now home to the so-called North Korean Peace Museum.
