As explained in another post about the DMZ, the cease-fire line between the two Koreas zig-zags the 38th parallel (38°N), and on either side there is a 2km-wide "demilitarized" no-man's land. Each side maintains a civilian farming village in the DMZ for propaganda purposes--the South village agriculturally productive, the North village mostly for show--and the former village of Panmunjeom, site of the "Joint Security Area" (JSA), where both militaries literally stare each other down on either side of a row of three one-room conference buildings, each of which are smaller than the portable classroom you might have had 7th grade health class in.
Starting out at 5:30 in the morning, I took at cab to the rail station, got the 6:25 train to Seoul, and arrived a bit past 7. I then took the subway one stop to City Hall, then slowly found my way to the Lotte Hotel for the 8:30 tour. From here you board a bus with assigned seats, and are taken to Camp Bonifas, a United Nations Command base just outside the DMZ. Though it is a UN base, with the flags of 16 countries flying, I only saw ROK army personal plus a couple U.S. soldiers. We were assigned a minder in the person of an ROK soldier and given bright yellow badges identifying us as UN guests.
At a visitor center set up at Camp Bonifas, we were given an historical briefing, including details of the Axe Murder Incident (1976), in which a U.S. army captain named Arthur Bonifas was killed, hence the name of the base, and the Soviet Defector Incident (1984), in which a Soviet citizen fled across the border into the South, pursued by KPA soldiers who then holed up in a sunken garden bed and engaged in a 20-minute firefight with UN forces. The point being, I think, that violent incidents can and do suddenly start without warning. They then made us sign waivers of liability holding the UN, U.S., and ROK blameless in the event of our injury or death in the even of enemy action.
We then boarded another bus bearing UN placards, told to sit in the same seats we had on the civilian tour bus, and headed into the DMZ, winding down an empty road, surrounded by foliage on all sides. Quite suddenly we were in Panmunjeom, dominated by the Freedom House, an impressive new structure ostensibly for the Red Cross to host cross-border family reunion, should they ever be allowed, but mostly, I suspect, as a way to stare down the DPRK's equivalent structure, Panmungak, in similar fashion to the "flagpole wars," where North and South built successively taller flagpoles (phallic substitutes), the North finally topping out at 160m with a 300kg flag, beating the South's puny 100m/150kg.
We were then ushered out of the bus and into the Freedom House, where we waited several minutes for the all-clear to proceed into one of the conference buildings. Since the Axe Murder Incident (more below), UN and KPA personnel have been absolutely separated, with the only jointly held territory now limited to the conference rooms which straddle the border. So only after verifying the buildings were empty were we allowed in them.
The buildings inside and out are a garish, unhealthy shade of UN blue. Inside is no bigger than double our hotel room, and considerably smaller than a portable classroom, as I've said. It consists of a door south, a door north, two observation rooms with one-way glass on each end, a conference table straddling the border, and two others, each by one door or the other. Inside are two impossibly still ROK MPs, in M1 steel helmets and aviator glasses, in a taekwondo ready pose, one at the head of the main table, the other by the DPRK door. As was explained to us, these are the cream of the ROK army. They have to be a certain height, good-looking, practice judo or taekwondo, and have a perfectly clean security background--even having divorced parents is disqualifying for service in the JSA. All this is meant to be psychological warfare against the KPA.
We were then allowed to mill about the room, the only instruction being we weren't allowed to take any photos looking south, only towards the North. This was the only time we were actually, technically in North Korea, and not by much more than 12 feet, at most. After a few minutes we were ushered back outside to stand on the steps of the Freedom House to take photos of the North Koreans (of which there weren't any in sight) and Panmungak. The minder walked back and forth making sure we stood in a single line on a single step, though after a while we sorta began to mill a bit on the step to get better photos this way or that.
It was then, quietly, that two KPA guards appeared on balconies of two buildings bookending Panmungak. Then out of Panmungak came soldiers who marched up to the border (marked by a low concrete step between the conference buildings) and took their positions opposite the ROK guards. The ROK guards, as previously described, stand in their martial arts poses, two with the bodies half exposed by the corners of the buildings, one standing fully exposed in the center. Three KPA guards, meanwhile, are positioned so that two face each other right next to the concrete step, and a third faces Panmungak, with his back to the South. While this can be explained symbolically, the practical reason suggested by our tour guide is that this allows the third soldier to intercept any defectors who decided to make a dash for the South, as happened in the 1984 incident. The KPA guards were wearing short-sleeved summer uniforms, like their ROKA counterparts, the first year our tour guide has seen them wearing a different uniform between cold and warm weather, and ballistic helmets in a PASGT shape, which the tour guide said appeared a couple years ago, replacing the more familiar, and formal, peaked cap. The reason for the appearance of the KPA soldiers became evident when a large tour group--composed entirely of Westerners to look at them--appeared on the balcony of Panmungak to take pictures of us. I felt strange for not feeling like I was in any particular danger, and for enjoying the peace and quiet of the place. But it was also a strange feeling to know there were other Americans and Europeans on the other side--us on the steps of the Freedom House, them on the terrace of Panmungak--maybe 200m apart, and we couldn't even wave to each other because of this artificial, man-made separation in front of us. Maybe that's how Koreans on both sides feel all the time.
I was asked on Facebook if the North looks any different: in Panmunjeom, not really. The northern buildings are older than the Freedom House, but then so too are a lot of the UN buildings. The North has a clean-swept but slightly weathered look, and the brutalist look of Panmungak is dated, in the same way a lot of mid-century SUNY campus buildings are back home. From the Dora Observatory, one can see over the other side of the DMZ, which looks a bit more built-up than the ROK side, but largely deserted. If one travels back down the highway along the Imjin River towards Seoul, on less hazy days you can see North Korean hills which have been clear-cut for fuel for heating and cooking.
Here's a link to another blog whose author traveled through North Korea and saw Panmunjeom from the other side of the border: http://www.lindsayfincher.com/category/asia/north-korea
When our minder figured we'd seen enough, we were ushered back into the bus and returned to Camp Bonifas. Along the way we saw the "Bridge of no return," where POWs were exchanged in 1953, as well as Checkpoint Three, site of the 1976 Axe Murder Incident. Prior to 1976, the whole of the JSA was jointly controlled by both sides, with KPA and UN soldiers in physical proximity, and buildings mixed together. A situation occurred where a poplar tree had come to obscure CP3 from Observation post 5, the nearest UN post. Meanwhile the KPA had erected three posts around CP3, creating what was called the "Loneliest outpost in the world." UN Command then decided to cut down the poplar to restore the line of sight between CP3 and OP5. A squad of men, including U.S. Army captain Arthur Bonifas and 1LT Mark Barrett, came out to cut the tree down. A KPA officer told them to stop, and when they ignored him, the KPA seized their axes and hatcheted the officers to death, wounding the rest of the squad save one. A couple days later, the USS Midway had been moved close to shore, and the UN responded with "Operation Paul Bunyan," where 60 armed men, 30 vehicles, attack helicopters, and even F-4 Phantom and B-52 Stratofortress overflights. The UN soldiers, this time armed with chainsaws, took the tree down while the KPA watched silently from a distance, then departed. Ultimately the JSA was divided into security areas with a strict division, and Kim Il-sung issuing a statement of "regret." The KPA outposts on the UN side were then dismantled.
At Camp Bonifas we had time to go to bathroom (under CCTV surveillance, signs told us) and visit the gift shop. I ended up with a set of DPRK banknotes and coins, the banknotes being former issue but the coins being in present circulations, and a pair of carved Korean wedding ducks. These are traditionally given at a wedding, with ribbons tied around the beaks to remind the couple that silence is a virtue. They're then displayed prominently in the home, beak-to-beak to show the couple isn't quarreling, and then they're given to the couple's eldest daughter on her wedding day, and passed down that way. After that we were taken for lunch at a Korean place in Paju and served bulgogi, where I had a chance to chat with my seatmate on the bus, an Austrian kid backpacking his way around Asia. Is it true few Americans have passports, he asked. Is it true most Americans don't speak any language besides English? True and true, I said. About a third have passports, and a quarter speak two or more languages. Which, I noted, has implications for the American worldview and foreign policy.
On the way back to Seoul, we had the chance to chat with a North Korean defector, with the tour guide as a translator. She had left the North some few years back, taking her family with her. She paid off a border guard at the Yalu River, and they snuck across the frozen river at night, and then a network of smugglers transported them to Thailand, where the ROK maintains a refugee camp for defectors. She said most escapees never make it that far, either being shot by border troops, drowning in the Yalu, or being arrested by the Chinese and repatriated to North Korea, where they are most certainly executed. The one family member she left behind was her husband, she didn't say why, but presumably he was loyal to the regime, or she didn't much care for him, or both. A cousin with a telephone later told her that her husband had been subsequently arrested, held for 10 days, then released when the police were satisfied he didn't have prior knowledge of the defection. She had kept it a secret from him for three years.
The answer to the question of "why" was the mass starvations in the 1990s. When Kim Il-sung died in 1994, the government shut down for a month and food wasn't distributed. Then as the '90s wore on, food shortages became full-on famines, where even the army was only getting 700kcal a day. She said they'd send around a wagon twice a day, at 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., to collect the dead. North Koreans remain genuinely fond of Kim Il-sung, but have no confidence or respect for his son or grandson, and are obedient only out of fear. There is about 30 percent of the population she says that is privileged at the expense of the rest, and these are the ones in the government and army hierarchies, and these are the ones propping up the regime. The rest of the population is sick to death of it, often literally, but is paralyzed with fear.
On this cheery note, we were dropped off at the Lotte Hotel again. The tour guide asked me if I thought Panmunjeom was scarier than the Third Tunnel of Aggression, and to her surprise I said no. "There's nowhere to run in a tunnel. At least in Panmunjeom, I have the illusion I could run for cover and hide."
After this I walked up the street to try seeing the Anglican cathedral again. It was "meh," much more interesting from the outside than the inside. The woman at the door strangely, for an Anglican, spoke no English, but somehow I convinced her to show me the crypt chapel, where a magnificent memorial brass covers the body of a former bishop. She then showed me a picture of their bishop meeting Queen Elizabeth II in Seoul in 1999, of which she was obviously very proud. I headed back outside to catch the metro back to Seoul Station and the KTX to Cheonan-Asan and home. I saw a gaggle of clergy in collars in the parking lot, smoking like the iron hinges of hades. I asked if they were the cathedral chapter, and they gave me the most profoundly blank look. None of them spoke English. Anglicans, in the Korean city with the most and best English-speaking Koreans, right next to the British Embassy, and not one of them speaks English. It was a strange feeling to cap a day of strange feelings.
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