Tuesday, February 6, 2018

Peering across the border

My second day in South Korea started early. I had to be at Camp Kim, the headquarters of the USO (United Services Organisations) by 7am to head off on a tour of the De-Militarised Zone between North and South Korea. I picked the same tour Julie and Andrew did back in 2014 as they'd recommended it - visiting the Joint Security Area (JSA) where the Republic of Korea and the UN keep tabs on North Korea from a few blue huts and a series of observation posts.

The Korean War isn't something we know much about in the UK, which considering over 1,000 British troops died in it is shocking. The split between North and South Korea is obviously better-known, especially given recent tensions, and I felt I ought to visit to learn more about the divisions between the two countries. 

The DMZ was established in 1953 after the armistice agreement signed, ending three years of bitter and bloody war that killed hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians. It extends 2km north and south of the Military Demarcation Line, essentially a border running along the 38th Parallel. At the JSA the UN, neutral observers from Switzerland and Sweden, and the two Koreas have an uneasy truce broken at intervals when a defector from the north crosses the line.

Tours are supervised by a US military policeman - ours was a young private called Zimmerman - who gives a short Powerpoint presentation about the history of the area  at the entry point in Camp Bonifas and then escorts groups up to the JSA itself. There, you're taken through the South Korean 'Freedom House' and into the conference building straddling the border where talks sometimes take place. For a moment, you can stand in what is technically North Korean territory and look at the locked door leading to the north. On our trip the room was guarded by two Republic of Korea soldiers and we saw no North Korean soldiers at all; Zimmerman said they hadn't seen any for a week. It was a very tense, odd sort of place. The Korean soldiers were intently watching the building on the north side through which visitors come when there are any, even though there was no sign of anyone there.

ROK soldier guarding the door to the north


The second stop was Dorasan Station, which has on occasions functioned for a while as a station to the north. It was the link up to Kaesong (or Gaesong) Industrial Complex, a joint venture between south and north until 2016. Then tensions grew, the complex was closed down and the station is now the last station in the south - or, as the Republic of Korea would prefer it, the "first station to the north". They have grand dreams of there one day being trains running through the whole Korean peninsula and on to join the Trans-Siberian and Trans-Mongolian Railways taking people all the way to Europe.

For the moment, tourists can catch the train from Seoul to Dorasan to tour the DMZ, or use it as a stop on a DMZ tour like us. You wander into a vast empty hall in a modern railway station. For 1,000 won (about 67p) you can go onto the empty platform. At one end there's a US railway truck and a chunk of the Berlin Wall which was a gift from Germany; at the other end, some railway sleepers associated with a visit by George W. Bush. If you stand at the northern end you can hear the sound of northern propaganda being blasted out through speakers. It was cold, and quiet, apart from the propaganda.

Tracks to nowhere

Near to the station is Dora Observatory, a site on a hill where they've helpfully put a lot of binoculars. The observatory is right at the southern limit of the DMZ so it's very close to the border and the binoculars are good enough to allow you to peer at the industrial complex and at the North Korean 'propaganda village', Kijong-dong. Kijong-dong is apparently mostly fake - facades of buildings with nothing inside, windows and doors painted on - but we did spot a tractor in the fields in front of it and quite a lot of people in those fields. On the horizon, hazy on the day we visited, is North Korea's third-largest city. We gazed for as long as a couple of 500 won coins would let us, and felt like we were voyeurs, or visitors to some sort of very peculiar zoo. It's not right to have to watch people in this way just because they're one side of a border.

The North's 'Propaganda' or 'Peace' Village (left) facing the South's 'Freedom' village (right)
The last stop of the day was the Third Tunnel - named as it is the third of four infiltration tunnels discovered by the Republic of Korea extending into their territory. A North Korean defector claimed that there are hundreds of these tunnels, but so far most remain undiscovered. The Third Tunnel was found in the late 1970s and North Korea claimed it was a coal mining venture - they painted the granite walls with coal dust - but the water run-off is to the north and why would they need to coal mine into enemy territory? As a tour I confess it wasn't the most exciting part of the day. We walked down an incredibly steep ramp into the tunnel and then along 250m or so to one of the three barricades put in when they found it.

The Third Tunnel site also has a small museum and a short video they show you which frankly was South Korean propaganda, claiming the DMZ is a "place of peace" where wild animals live in harmony. They literally showed us images of deer frolicking in sunlit meadows. The South Korean message is very much one of "one day we'll be unified again" and I'd like to think they'll get there, but despite the unified women's ice hockey team and joint marching at the Winter Olympics opening ceremony, I'm doubtful.

We left the Third Tunnel as South Korea played Gangnam Style very loudly into their neighbour's territory. That's the propaganda they give the north - lots of cheesy K-pop.


Back in Seoul I decided to continue the war-themed day by a trip to the Korean War Memorial Museum, which is surrounded by several memorials to the war, a huge collection of warplanes, tanks and heavy artillery, and inside has a large exhibition on the war. This was interesting but very one-sided. I got very little sense of why North Korea invaded in 1950 and what the war cost them. The section on the United Nations involvement was particularly well-done though, and I liked an artwork at the end called 'the Drop' using dog-tags to create a teardrop shape.

I left the museum feeling a little depressed about the state of the world. The South Koreans have a memorial in the park around it which includes two clocks - one with the current time, the other 'frozen' on the day the war began in 1950. By the side is another clock, waiting to be started when unification happens. It would be good if sooner rather than later they're able to lift it into place, but for the moment, I'm not that hopeful.

No comments:

Post a Comment