Marching Towards Peace in Korea

By Tim Shorrock

Politico, May 26, 2015

On Sunday, Gloria Steinem, looking radiant but tired in a white dress traditionally worn by Korean women, walked into a room packed with reporters and photographers at the Customs, Immigration and Quarantine building in Paju, South Korea, just a mile from the North Korean border. Gathered around the American feminist were 30 women from 15 countries who had just accomplished what only two foreign groups had ever done before—cross the demilitarized zone dividing the communist North from the capitalist South.

They were greeted in the south by hundreds of women and peace and unification activists from a country long divided by war and 60 years of tension. But their visit to North Korea incited harsh critiques from some journalists and a vocal community of activists within and outside Korea who oppose any contacts with the militaristic regime of Kim Jong Un.

Those criticisms were misplaced, said Daniel Pinkston, an Air Force veteran and long-time North Korea observer who lives in Seoul. If North Korea is ever to change, Pinkston says, North Koreans need to change their thinking. And the only way that can happen is for North Koreans to be exposed to different perspectives and points of view—something that can only happen from interactions with civil society from the outside, such as Steinem and her crew, or Dennis Rodman, the NBA star who was invited to North Korea by Kim Jong Un two years ago. Why?

“Because it completely contradicts the state narrative. Any of these types of groups, whether it’s students, sports, culture, music, I support it because it’s a mechanism, a transmission belt for new ideas and thinking,” he told me at a cafe in Seoul on Tuesday.

When Rodman went to the North—in a trip where Pinkston played an advisory role—the kids who met and played ball with him realized “they were people just like them,” Pinkston says. “It’s the same thing with these women. There are things we have in common as human beings. That in and of itself is subversive.” As for the groups in Washington who want to stop such interaction, “I just don’t get it,” he said. “What is the alternative?”

For the three days, Women Cross DMZ had been in Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, to talk about war, conflict and reconciliation. By Sunday, they had arrived in the South to do the same with their counterparts in Seoul.

“We were told this would be impossible,” Steinem triumphantly declared as the cameras clicked and whirred. “But we’re feeling very celebratory and positive we could cross the DMZ” despite those who predicted in would never happen. She then handed the microphone to Leymah Gbowee, a Liberian social worker and human rights activist who won the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to end the civil war there.

“Our purpose was citizen to citizen diplomacy,” Gbowee said while telling the crowd the marchers had accomplished all their objectives. Most importantly, her group had fostered “actual communication between North and South” that allowed the women to ride a bus across the DMZ.

Their original intent was to walk through Panmunjom, the nearby truce village run by a UN Command that’s dominated by the U.S. military. But the South Korean government, citing vague threats to security, demanded that the women use a road normally used by vehicles carrying goods to and from the Kaesong Industrial Zone, where North Korean workers assemble goods for South Korean companies.

The customs center is where I had been waiting for several hours with other reporters and photo-journalists cleared by South Korea’s Ministry of Unification to witness this historical event. Standing with us on the observation deck of the building were two soldiers from the UN Command, D.E. “Dan-O” McShane, a Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Navy and a Joint Duty Operator at Panmunjom, and Damian Jaques, a Lieutenant in the New Zealand Army.

McShane, a gregarious officer whose job is to brief American tourists to the DMZ, kept us apprised of the time of the crossing and told me that this would mark only the third time such a crossing had happened. A few years ago, a group of Russian-Koreans whose families had left North Korea during the Korean War had crossed from south to north to visit their loved ones.

And in 2013, a crew of motorcyclists from New Zealand had crossed from the north on an unusual tour that took them through the entire Korean peninsula. “I was here then, with two Kiwis,” McShane told me. But Americans crossing? “Never seen that.” Both he and Jaques shared the South Korean contention that their attempt to walk across the DMZ had been risky, though they couldn’t quite say why.

The Women Cross DMZ marchers were more concerned about the risks inherent to a divided Korea. Gbowee told the reporters back in the customs center that the trip was a huge success that could only advance the peace process. “We came here to end the war, and we think this is a first step,” she said.

With that, a barrage of questions began, mostly from men, and some hostile. What did they think about human rights in North Korea? Was it true that members of the group had praised the North Korean government? Doesn’t your visit give support to the regime of Kim Jong Un? Just before the women’s arrival, several North Korean defectors shouting slogans (“Women Cross DMZ are puppets of Kim Jong Un”) were removed from the area by South Korean police.

Maired Maguire, another Nobel laureate recognized for leading a non-violent movement in Northern Ireland, took on the human rights issue directly. Speaking in her deep Irish brogue, she explained that the purpose of the march was to create the environment for political change on both sides of the border. And that could only happen, she insisted, if the United States and North and South Korea signed a permanent peace treaty to end the Korean War, which was settled in an uneasy 1953 armistice that persists to this day.

“You can start talking about human rights when you have a normal relationship and not a country at war,” she explained. Her hope, she added, was to give Koreans on both sides “every strength to continue on the long journey of finding peace and reconciliation.”

As the press conference drew to a close, a Korean reporter began loudly berating Christine Ahn, one of the organizers of the march. Earlier that week, South Korean newspapers and the Associated Press had reported that  Rodong Shinmun, the daily newspaper published by the North Korean Workers Party, had quoted Ahn praising Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Un’s grandfather. Ahn told me (full disclosure: she is a friend of mine) later that she had said no such thing, and had demanded a retraction and apology from the Kim government.

The North Korean government frequently uses foreign visits to bolster its image and is infamous for redrafting interviews to reflect the personality cult around its leaders. And the outburst against Ahn, a diminutive Korean-American who lives in Hawaii, wasn’t unexpected. For weeks, a Washington group called the “Human Rights Foundation” had been viciously attacking her for allegedly “whitewashing” the North Korean government and acting as a “mouthpiece for the world’s chief abuser of human rights.” 

Many of their accusations have been aired on CNN, which has cast the march as a creation of Pyongyang (“What’s North Korea up to?” Wolf Blitzer asked as he introduced his first story on the march in late April). In fact, led by Ahn, the group had carefully negotiated their crossing with both North and South Korea and the UN Command. 

Several people, including former New Mexico Governor William Richardson, had interceded for them with the South Korean government and the UN Command. Tony Namkung, a former adviser to Richardson who has been on several official U.S. delegations to Pyongyang, helped make connections with the North.

The attacks on Ahn angered Steinem, who has maintained a serene and even regal presence during her stay in Seoul. The AP reports, she insisted, were totally inaccurate. “Christine is the real heroine of this trip,” Steinem said. “She’s the one who arranged it all.” When Ahn introduced me to Steinem a few minutes later, she laughed off the incident. “I should have called it McCarthyism, but I don’t think anybody here’s old enough to remember that,” she told me.

Still, the harsh questioning and the disruptions from North Korean defectors and right-wing critics laid the tableau for coverage of the march. The Korean government, which is led by Park Guen-Hye, the daughter of former dictator Park Chung Hee, posted hundreds of police at the site of a Sunday welcome rally for the women near the border. There were dozens more posted at the Seoul City Hall on Monday, where Steinem and others spoke at an all-day “Women’s Peace Symposium” (on the street outside, one group had posted a large banner stating that “Behind Women Cross DMZ we see Kim Jung Un, Slave of the Devill! Leave Korea Immediately.”) Security was also tight at the women’s hotel in Seoul.

And during their visit, the media coverage was almost uniformly negative. Several reports on Korean radio on the “Women Cross DMZ” denying they had praised Kim Il Sung were an exception (the big, conservative papers, reflecting the government’s unease, either trashed or ignored the event). And other than the  New York Times, foreign coverage was extremely critical.

The  Washington Post basically cast the march as a failure, citing the fact that the women had not walked across the DMZ or through Panmunjom. “Both changes were indicative of the controversy that the event generated, amid accusations that the women were legitimizing Kim Jong Un’s regime and ignoring its human rights abuses,” the  Post wrote in a rather sweeping indictment.

A BBC reporter that had led the questioning about human rights during the customs center press conference quoted a defector saying that the women were “promoting Pyongyang’s viewpoint.” A  Reuters story focused largely on the defectors who greeted the march and ensuing rally, and ran several paragraphs of criticism of the women from Joshua Stanton, the Washington-based blogger who has led the attacks on Ahn.

The foreign press focus on their critics disheartened the participants. “There’s a kind of unconscious sexism that women are naive,” said Suzy Kim, a professor of Korean history at Rutgers University who was a member of the delegation. They were also disappointed by the response of the South Korean government. 

Before Ahn could enter the country, she told me, Seoul’s immigration authorities made her sign a statement that she would not violate the National Security Law, a draconian law dating back to the 1940s that prohibits people from saying anything in public that echoes North Korean positions. Also forced to sign the statement was Medea Benjamin, the co-director of Code Pink, who is well-known in Washington for leading demonstrations against high-ranking government officials. “Pretty outrageous,” said Ahn.

The immediate press coverage also missed and even distorted the reception of the women’s delegation in both Koreas.

During their stay in Pyongyang, Suzy Kim told me, the women negotiated through a thicket of issues. For example, they insisted from the start that they would not be meeting any heads of state or commenting on the Kim Jong Un government. “We were there to meet women and talk about ending the war,” she said. They also negotiated their schedule to avoid visiting the huge statues in Pyongyang of North Korea’s former leaders, which is a pilgrimage for most citizens there.

During one meeting in Pyongyang, North Korean women talked about the terror of the war, particularly the indiscriminate U.S. bombing campaign that left the North in cinders. To keep their pledge not to engage with the government, the foreign delegation “kept the North Korean journalists out of the symposium,” said Kim. “They basically had to listen to us.”

The greatest point of contention was over the  Rodong Shinmun report. According to Ahn, she told the paper that her mother, a largely uneducated woman from South Korea, was aware that Kim Il Sung had been a resistance fighter against the Japanese—a historical fact that some Koreans (and many Americans) are unaware of. In the North Korean media, this translated into praise for the Great Leader, which greatly angered Ahn and her colleagues. They demanded, and were refused, a retraction.

But there were some breakthroughs. When Women Cross DMZ started writing their statement of purpose for the North Korean authorities, said Steinem, “we were told if we put human rights in it would not be approved, and it was. I think that was a great triumph.” In an interview, Steinem was well aware of the human rights problems in North Korea as well as its contradictions.

Pyongyang is “beautiful—there’s no billboards, you can see the stars, there’s no condoms in the parks, it’s clean,” she said. “But it’s very buttoned down and very, very regimented, the most regulated society I’ve ever been in.” Still, she added, “you don’t get the feeling people are rebellious about it—you get the feeling that this is their reality, period.” But based on her conversations with previous visitors, Pyongyang seemed more vibrant than before. “There’s less of a feeling that it’s a Potemkin Village,” she said. 

Still, there was one thing that gave her confidence in the future: “they laughed.” Steinem said she shared several jokes with her official interpreter. Once, when she asked about a sign on the street, her guide told her it said something about the Great Leader. “I said, ‘what a surprise,’ and she laughed.” It’s through such human connections, she said, that mutual trust can be built.

Pinkston, who has visited the North five times since 2008, agreed with Steinem. He believes that the Kim regime’s military-first policies have put the country on a collision course with the United States. “They absolutely view nuclear weapons as a necessary conduit for economic development and prosperity.”

Unfortunately, in his view, that leaves the U.S. government with two untenable choices: “either accept it and ignore it, or change it by force.” But with war out of the question, he said, the world can either adjust and accept the North Korean world view; or the North Koreans adjust. That’s were events like Women Cross DMZ come in. These types of outreach are the only way to begin repairing the relationship between North and South Korea.

In contrast to the criticism of the march from defectors and conservatives, and the obvious mistrust of the Seoul government, many South Koreans were overjoyed at the prospect of overseas support. After their arrival in Paju, the foreign women rode in their bus to the unification park called  Imjingak. There, they were met by several hundred Korean women, peace activists and nuns, who sang and cheered as the women joined the crowd.

One of the most beautiful moments came when they unfurled a giant quilt sewn by some of the participants and women from both North and South Korea. Quilts, Ahn told me, are a “woman’s art form in Korea” and were often used by women to wrap their belongings when they were forced to flee war-torn cities in both North and South. “It carries symbolic value of Korean women to cover and heal the divided peninsula with a message of peace.”

As they made their way from the Kaesong highway to the park, the marchers and their Korean supporters carried the peace quilt and sang Arirang, a beloved song about unification sung throughout the peninsula. A phalanx of photographers captured the scene. 

Passing by barbed wire fences and flanked by grim Korean MPs—some of them carrying automatic weapons—they slowly made their way to a giant stage, where they were met by hundreds more people who had been waiting for hours in the sun. The next morning, about 300 people gathered at Seoul City Hall for an all-day peace conference similar to the meeting held in Pyongyang. There, the women were greeted by the mayor of Seoul, Park Won Soon, a progressive politician. 

After 70 years of division, he said, Korea is “still a place of sorrow and pain. Based on your efforts, we can get a jump-start to unification and dialogue. You women lay a foundation for this work.” As I greeted some of the marchers, a Korean woman named Myung Shin Kim took me aside and told me, “I’m here to work for unification.” 

Her family, she recounted, was one of the 10 million separated by the division. Two years ago, her aging mother, who had left North Korea during the war, decided to visit the North on a government-sponsored visit. But the trip was cancelled by Pyongyang in a last minute dispute, and her mother died shortly after that. “So that was her last chance,” she said sadly.

It was decisions like that, Ahn told me, that convinced her to organize the march in the first place. In 2009, several villages in South Korea were flooded when waters unleashed by a storm in the North raised the levels of the Imjin River that flows from the North into the South; six people died. The incident angered her, she said, because the flooding could have been avoided if the two sides had been in regular touch. “Why couldn’t these men in North and South Korea just talk?” she thought.

Later, Ahn said, she had a dream about the South, where she was born (her parents brought her to the United States when she was three). In the dream, people came to cross the border and there was “a light,” she recalled. “I saw a circle of women stirring a big pot, pouring with a big ladle as light flowed down the road. I woke up and I thought, ‘women will end the Korean War.’” Steinem was one of the first women to embrace the idea, which eventually was joined by women from nearly all the countries involved in the Korean War. The planning meetings and negotiations began in March 2014.

The women will keep pressing the issue with all governments involved, said Steinem. Speaking of her visit to both sides of the conflict, she said “we had real human connections. There’s nothing like women sitting down in a circle and telling each other stories. That is what happened.”

To read the original article in Politico, click here.