Inside the demilitarised zone
The 4km-wide strip dividing North and South Korea is an abyss.
It is not so much that history has stopped along the Demilitarised Zone, more that it seems to seize and skip and stutter, so that if you look too closely at events in and from it you get a sense of motion sickness, if not outright vertigo.
South Korean soldiers patrol along a military fence near the Demilitarised Zone.
The Demilitarised Zone is a preposterous place, not least for its name. The land on either side is lined with barbed wire, watched over by balloons and satellites, drones and electronic sensors; it is sown with mines and braced by two vast Korean armies which are in turn backed by two superpowers. There are nukes.
It seems inevitable that US President Donald Trump – far more natural a showman than statesman – would suggest this place for his talks with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un over other mooted locations, such as Singapore and Mongolia.
To get the weirdness of the DMZ you have to understand something of the violence that created it. Korea was bloodily occupied by the Japanese from 1910 until the end of World War II, when the country was divided along the 38th parallel.
The war that broke out between the north and south a handful of years later was fought with a staggering intensity, perhaps best illustrated by the words of Curtis LeMay, the US Air Force general who had spent World War II flattening Japan’s cities. ‘‘I’ll tell you what war is about, you’ve got to kill people, and when you’ve killed enough they stop fighting,’’ he observed in his later years, noting that he made little distinction between civilians and combatants.
But LeMay’s enemies were difficult to subdue and he never slacked off in the killing, boasting once that he grounded his aircraft in North Korea only when they could find no more buildings standing in the country to bomb. This was not meant as an exaggeration.
‘‘Over a period of three years or so, we killed off – what – 20 per cent of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure,’’ he said in an interview.
After three years of fighting, the belligerents finally exhausted themselves roughly along the same 38th parallel from which hostilities began. By then over 3 million people were dead.
‘‘I shrink — I shrink with a horror that I cannot express in words,’’ General Douglas MacArthur told the US Senate, just after president Harry Truman had sacked him as commander of the United Nations allies. ‘‘I have never seen such devastation. I have seen, I guess, as much blood and disaster as any living man, and it just curdled my stomach the last time I was there.’’ When the armistice was signed both armies were ordered to move back 2000 metres from their fighting positions, and the zone between them was cleared of human habitation and became the DMZ.
In the dead heart of the DMZ, just north of Seoul, is the so-called Joint Security Area (JSA), administered by the United Nations, where North Korean and South Korean troops stand, quite literally, face to face. It is here that the armistice was signed, where prisoners of war were exchanged; here where the two Korean leaders met so remarkably last week, and here where Trump proposes meeting Kim for talks.
To get to the JSA from Seoul you drive an hour or so north along a highway built hard and wide enough to move a mechanised army at pace to a checkpoint placed, weirdly, by a fun park outside the city of Paju. When Fairfax Media visited recently, K-pop blared from a rollercoaster and a little tourist train tootled around a memorial to the American dead and a statue of Truman while military choppers prowled overhead.
Daytrippers from Seoul ignored stacks of concertina wire and watchtowers dividing them from the north as they enjoyed the last mild days of autumn. From there it is a short drive to Camp Bonifas, headquarters of South Korea’s JSA security battalion. These are the soldiers selected to face off against their North Korean foes on the line of demarcation that runs through the centre of the DMZ inside the JSA.The members of the JSA Battalion are uniformly tall and broad. They wear aviator shades and immaculate uniforms. They move with a fast, clipped swagger, and on the line they stand in a fist-clenched taekwondo stance.
At Camp Bonifas is a visitors’ centre where old enmities are lovingly preserved. There is a fabulously detailed diorama of what is known as ‘‘The Axe Murder Incident’’, in which two US soldiers felling a poplar tree that was obscuring the view from their observation post were killed by North Korean soldiers with their own axes in 1976. This prompted Operation Paul Bunyan, which a propaganda video at Camp Bonifas describes as ‘‘the most extensive tree-clearing operation in history’’.
It is only a few minutes’ drive from Camp Bonifas into the heart of the JSA and the demarcation line along which sit the famous temporary huts that the UN built for negotiations over half a century ago.
Inside they have the close air and architectural banality of a demountable classroom. One is bisected by a plain-looking conference table, placed carefully over the line of demarcation so that negotiators from the north can sit in the north and those from the south in the south.
A photo of Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop was taken in this room. She is standing by a window in which you can see a North Korean soldier glaring down at her with his own camera. It looks as though Bishop is struggling to hide the ghost of a smile.
Before entering this room, visitors are told by JSA Battalion minders that if North Korean soldiers are inside they are not to seek to communicate with them, nor to make hand gestures, nor to make eye contact. Little gestures can be misinterpreted, and misunderstanding in this place can have catastrophic consequences. This might be why some foreign policy analysts, already spooked that Trump is meeting with Kim, are even more concerned that the JSA might be the venue.
‘‘In choosing the DMZ, my fear is that the Trump administration is focused on optics, rather than substance or practicality,’’ Alexandra Bell, a nuclear expert at the Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, told Vox. ‘‘Given that this is President Trump’s first nuclear rodeo, a less historically charged location might be a better pick.’’ - Fairfax
‘‘In choosing the DMZ, my fear is that the Trump administration is focused on optics, rather than substance or practicality.’’
Alexandra Bell, Centre for Arms Control and NonProliferation