I need to rethink my previous comments about the reunification of the two Koreas after visiting the DMZ with my mother and sister last week. Earlier, I stated that the long awaited reunion between the Koreas seemed to be occurring almost before our eyes because of all the increased political and economic activity between Seoul and Pyongyang, and the international crowd Kim Jung-Il was attracting to his palace.
It seemed last year's rash remarks by the North that it would turn Seoul into a "sea of flames" were just in good fun. But like any proper family reunion, the fat, broke, good-fer-nuthin Uncle soon gets drunk and decides to let out his financial frustration on his more successful brother for having gone off to that fancy community college while he stayed back to look after the failing farm. The more successful of the two, Lee Myung-Bak ("horse face"), the recently elected South Korean president, has a more hard-line stance towards North Korea than any South Korean president for a long time (his key policy is economic assistance in return for openness and nuclear disarmament). North Korea has labeled Lee a traitor and will probably soon cut off ties with his government. Economic assistance from the South will stop and border security will increase. So, the day after my mom, sister, and I returned from our DMZ tour, President Lee promised a preemptive strike on the North's nuclear targets should there be signs of an attack. The North expelled South Korean diplomats, test-launched a few missiles, and then shot back, "It should be kept in mind that once our preemptive attack [to preempt the South's preemptive attack] is launched, everything will turn into ashes, not just a sea of flames." I'm not saying our tour had anything to do with this change of hearts. But I'm not saying we helped the situation by mooning the North Korean soldiers.
The tour was informative, with the exception of a ridiculous tour video that I will address later. Our guide was a nice older man who spoke English, but who apparently was not confident that anything he said was coherent, so would rephrase each sentence three times so as to adequately explain his desired meaning. "To our left is the place where South Korean solders killed five North commanders ten years ago. What I mean to say is, ten years before this year, five North commanders were killed here by South soldiers here. In this way, five North commanders died at this place because South soldiers killed them, a decade ago." Strangely, when he was describing the various incidents that have occurred in the DMZ over the years, he would often refer to situations in which multiple North Korean "commanders" were killed. As the tour went on and more and more commanders were being killed, I began to wonder if Commander was actually the
lowest rank in the North Korean military (how Socialist of them), or if North Korea was now actually suffering from a severe depletion of its commanding officers! After about 50 commanders had been killed off by his stories, I had to assume that he wanted to say a different word, but could not explain it, even in three attempts.
We drove through an area in the DMZ known as the Joint Security Area where dialogue takes place between the Koreas and their UN/US mediators. It is a UN-monitored area, but there are North and South (and US) soldiers everywhere. I guess this area is meant to represent a neutral meeting ground for discussions, but the tension was obvious to anyone who could see the soldiers. Our tour group was told numerous times not to try to talk to or signal the North Korean soldiers in any way. It was awkward to be driving through this environment in a tour bus, snapping pictures
of the stern-faced soldiers, because it seemed to almost ruin the tense atmosphere. Each countries' respective soldiers were at attention, standing in positions that were least forward-facing to enemy fire in case of attack at any moment. I have heard from a US soldier stationed at the DMZ that they are each assigned a specific North Korean soldier nearby who, upon the order to attack, is to be their target.
We got a US soldier as a tour guide while inside the actual DMZ, and he first showed us a spot in a neutral JSA zone where, in 1989, US and Korean soldiers were trying to cut down a single tree that was blocking their view of another outpost, when North Korean soldiers stopped them for whatever reason and, when the US soldiers tried to get away, attacked them with axes and axed two US soldiers to death.
Other interesting areas of the DMZ included the two villages inside the DMZ, one village with South Korean ties and the other "village" with North Korean ties. I say "village" because the North Korean village is not actually real; it is a bunch of buildings with nobody living there (top picture). The area in between the villages is a densely-mined corridor. Neither side knows where all the mines are, and the logistics of de-mining this region are probably nightmarish. Farmers in the area are constantly finding mines wash up in their fields. Our guide said they could occasionally see one or two men walking
through the North's ghost town village, but otherwise the only sign of life is the huge speaker system that, until recently, blared North Korean propaganda non-stop towards the South. This village is known as "Propaganda Village" because of this, and it has a huge flag pole hoisting a North Korean flag that is 30 meters long and weighs 600 pounds. Soldier of Fortune magazine has offered a $1 million prize to anyone who can sneak into Propaganda Village, scale the flag tower, and bring back a 1 square meter section of the flag.
If you look in the background of the Propaganda Village pic, you notice that North Korea has no trees! They are way behind industrially, and have been forced to cut them all down! In fact, the only large industrial center in North Korea, the Kaesong Industrial Center, is a jointly run complex of buildings near the border that produce basic necessities (bags, shoes, etc.)
en masse, and the electricity is provided (for free I think) by South Korea! The South Korean supervisors were recently expelled from Kaesong, as a part of the recent flare in tensions. Anyway, that huge flag pole in Propaganda Village is a direct response to the not-as-large-but-still-huge flag pole in the other nearby village in the DMZ, nicknamed "Freedom Village". It is not technically in the South government's jurisdiction, so the residents do not have to pay any taxes and the men in the village have no military requirement (there are only about 250 residents). As a result, the village is actually wealthier than the rest of the peninsula. Women can marry into this tax-free utopia, but men cannot because all South Korean-born men must do two years of military service and cannot escape the requirement. Just to provide some perspective on how ridiculous North Korea is, in the North, men must do ten years of service, and women seven. The reason North Korea has such a huge army is because of this; the whole population is essentially the army!
This bridge was known as the "Point of No Return" because it was the bridge where all the prisoners of war taken by the North and South during the Korean War were led to (after the war) and told to cross into the country of their choosing. Once they crossed the bridge, they could never return to the other side. Hence, the point of no return.
I tried to take some pictures of the larger DMZ area from a lookout post that rose above the entire region, but we could only take pictures from behind a yellow line, which, naturally, did not offer much of a view. Obviously the military does not want some idiot taking pictures of their strategic layout and posting them on his blog. But, being an idiot of no ordinary nature, I accepted the challenge and tried to furtively take some pictures at the ledge. You know, just for my personal collection. A South Korean soldier saw me doing it (I don't know how, he must've been watching me), so he confronted me, accused me of lying, took my camera, found the photos, and deleted them. He seemed very angry, so I was glad he only deleted my photos. He obviously has had this problem many times, and told me that I should not lie to him because he had been "doing this job for over a year" and knew how to spot a picture being taken. I feel safer knowing a valuable fighting talent like GI Joe there was being finely honed to spot tourists taking prohibited pictures.
Near the end of our tour, we got to go down into one of four underground tunnels that have been discovered going under the DMZ from the North to the South. These tunnels could each move 10,000-30,000 North Korean soldiers an hour to within 25 miles of Seoul. There are apparently many more tunnels that have yet to be discovered, and each time a new one is unearthed, the North either accuses the South of having built the tunnel (though the dig markings in the tunnel clearly show the origin being the North), or that the tunnel is a coal mine (they even painted the walls of one tunnel black to cover it up). The fourth tunnel was discovered in 1991 when a North Korean tunnel surveyor defected to the South and led them to the tunnel's exit outside of Seoul. I have no pictures because pictures were not allowed on many parts of the tour, this being one of them, but I assure you that these tunnels were not made for soldiers of my dimensions, or
any man above 5'8". I would have succumbed to back spasms after an hours march through one of those tunnels.
After seeing the tunnel, they dropped us off at a tourist center where our tour group sat and watched a very funny video about the DMZ. Keep in mind, this video was shown
after we had already seen the realities of the DMZ. The video centered around a crying little girl who was supposed to represent the tragedy of the North-South split. Suddenly though, as the narrator voice told us of the "amazing reunification" that has occurred over the past few years, crappy animation turned the DMZ into a flowering paradise before our eyes! Grass covered the previously deforested, barb-wired hills, park benches blossomed out of the ground, "extinct animals living in the DMZ" flourished, and the little girl stopped crying. The entire tour group was laughing at the film by the end, and I can't imagine how the tour guide must have felt watching it for the umpteenth time, but it did provide a much needed chuckle laugh at the end of the tour. Oh, and about the extinct animals thing (exact words from the video), the DMZ actually is somewhat of a nature preserve because there is no fishing or hunting allowed. In fact, our US soldier guide told us that they often see what they call "vampire deer" nearby Freedom Village. These deer are apparently the size of dogs, have no antlers, and grow fangs. Now, I'm no animal expert, but that doesn't sound like a "vampire deer" that is the size of a dog--it sounds like a dog. Naturally I refrained from making this comment to the armed man at the front of the bus.
Well, that's it for the DMZ stuff. But there is one more thing you should watch. Sarah, I mentioned this to you already, but here are the videos. The first video was created by a group of Italians hired by the North Korean government to advertise a huge hotel that they were building in the capital, Pyongyang. The second video is actual footage of the hotel. Just some quick background of the hotel (description from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0r0fM31BXKk): The Ryugyong Hotel is a towering, empty concrete shell that was once intended for use as a hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea. Its 105 stories rise to a height of 330 m (1,083 ft), and it boasts some 360,000 m² (3.9 million ft²) of floor space, making it the most prominent feature of the city's skyline and by far the largest structure in that country. Construction started in 1987 and reached a cessation in 1992. If the building were ever completed, it would be the world's tallest hotel and the seventh largest building in the world.[1] However, as of now, it remains unfinished and uninhabited.
