The DMZ

After nearly a year and a half living in South Korea, I finally got around to making a visit to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) separating the still at-war countries of North and South Korea.  It is one of the best things I've done here without question.  The tour that I went on was arranged privately through a group called When In Korea (http://www.wheninkorea.com/) and I would highly recommend them to anyone looking for a superb and insightful tour of this area.

The tour brought us to two points on the DMZ, Imjingak (임진각) and Cheorwon (철원) observation areas, tunnels #3 and #4, and concluded at the site of a major battle called White Horse Hill, fought over the control of a strategic hill which dominates the local area.  That area had, and continues to have, major economic importance to whoever holds it because of its propensity for rice cultivation.

Imjingak is one of the most accessible and popular sites in the DMZ, but paradoxically, one of the most lackluster.  The area is highly commercialized - there is even a small amusement park set up at the site!  There, you can see the Freedom Bridge, a railway line that links North and South Korea. Along where the train is there are posters, flowers, and ribbons that have messages and photos that speak to North Koreans and the wish of reunification.  Many of them were written by children.  Although my Korean isn't extremely good, I was able to understand about 50% of what the children wrote.  What was really interesting was how each child began their messages - 북한친구들이게, meaning "To my North Korean friends."  There's a lot of animosity towards North Korea in the South, especially in recent years as a result of direct North Korean aggression and the policies of South Korean president Lee Myung-Bak, but with these simple messages these children touch on another dimension of way Koreans feel about their Northern brothers.  Koreans are one people, and their country has been split in half.  There is a great sense of longing, mourning, and sadness because of the separation.  While most/all South Koreans despise the North Korean regime, South Koreans still feel a great bond between them and the people of North Korea, and these children illustrate that with their simple greetings to their Northern counterparts.

The tunnels were interesting enough.  They were dug at who knows what expense by North Korea for the purpose of clandestine invasions.  I asked whether any of these tunnels were ever functional and successful in slipping in North Korean commandos into the South, but nobody on duty at the time had any knowledge about it.  However, tunnels #1 - 3 were all discovered in the mid to late 1970s and tunnel #4 was found much later in 1990.  This implies that there are more tunnels out there, and it's likely that North Korea has been successful in sending units through the tunnels at some stage in some capacity.  The tunnels are small, maybe 1.5 meters in height in some places and about as wide for two adults to stand abreast (although maybe less if wearing full combat gear).  The North claims that these tunnels were dug by the South, but as our guide pointed out, the tunnels angle slightly up towards the South Korean side allowing for the water to flow back towards the North, implying that these tunnels are of North Korean construction.

As I mentioned we went to two observation points.  Both were similar in design: on a hill with a large theater for presentations, a scaled-down model of the surrounding area, and many binocular stations where you can actually peer into North Korea.  The Imjingak observation station gave the best views.  You could see the famous propaganda village - a fake village set up by North Korea to show the South how nice their villages are.  The only problem is that nobody actually lives there, except for a few soldiers and maybe some people who are paid to live there and walk around and give the image that the village is populated.  I was able to see North Koreans through the binoculars farming, riding bicycles, walking around, and just doing normal stuff.  It was such an odd experience.  It almost felt akin to looking at living museum in the sense that you can look but can't touch.  It felt like I was almost doing something wrong; gazing into something forbidden, into the lives of people who although only were about one or two kilometers from where I was might as well been a thousand kilometers away.  There's practically no communication between North and South, and especially very little communication to the average North Korean living and working there, so it is nearly impossible to imagine the lives of people that you can visibly see, but will never know.  The only information that comes out about normal North Korean life comes through defectors, which as fortune would have it, there just so happened to be one at the Cheorwon observation post.

I'm pretty sure this was completely unscheduled, but at Cheorwon we were lucky enough to have a North Korean defector there to answer any questions we had about North Korea.  He was a high ranking military doctor who was sent to Germany four years ago on some kind of mission, and after two years fled to the United Nations and successfully defected to the South.  He had a lot of interesting things to say about the North, probably the most telling was his prediction that the North would collapse in about five years.  He said that although there were some things that he liked about the North - such as because it is a communist country everything is given to you by the state like food, education, medicine, etc (at least if you're middle-upper class and live in Pyeongyang) - the system was and is completely unsustainable.  He said that with the collapse of the USSR in '89, North Korea lost its biggest supporter and supplier of resources and without that help, the country has been spiraling into never-ending downward decline.  Interesting side note - not many people realize given the current economy of South Korea, but up until the 1970s North Korea had a more successful and powerful economy than the South did.  Obviously since then, South Korea has skyrocketed into the #15 largest economy worldwide by GDP and North Korea has degraded into one of the most impoverished nations in modern history.  He also said that North Koreans living in Pyeongyang are much more aware about the world than the world gives them credit for, although they have severe misconceptions.  For example, all North Koreans must serve in the army for a period of 10 years without exception (compare with South Korea's 2 year 2 month compulsory service).  North Koreans believe that compulsory military service is standard worldwide.  Also, Pyeongyang residents are aware of the comparative luxury that South Koreans enjoy, but for those living in the countryside, technology and information is stone age.

The place I thought summed up everything for me was Dorasan Station (도라산).  Although we only spent about fifteen minutes there, I thought it was one of the most introspective and insightful places we went all day.  It is a fully constructed railway station with all the markings of any mid-sized station you can find everywhere in the South: it has a place to buy tickets, the digital signs display when the next train will leave, it has a platform ready to accept trains and passengers, it indicates that the next stop is Pyeongyang, and everything is proper and prepared to go...except that it doesn't.  This station goes nowhere.  It is like visiting a ghost town, except instead of a place that had life and was later deserted, this one was built and hasn't had the chance to have life fill it.  The station is a solemn symbol that says "hey, we're ready to join up when you are"  It's like a handshake extended, but ignored and not received.  It was a very surreal place, like standing on the edge of Korea but knowing that nothing exists beyond it.  Except that it does, and that place is called North Korea, and hopefully in the future Dorasan station will connect to a station beyond, but for now, it remains a monument to the severed link between the two countries which one day hopefully will reconnect.