Adele Ferguson - Ship sinking shows hostility still at 38th parallel

IT’S BEEN A LONG time since I visited the Demilitarized Zone between North Korea and South Korea, and the way things are going it may be a lot longer before any journalists are allowed back in.

The hostility between the two Koreas just made the news again with the sinking of a South Korean naval ship near their maritime border on the Yellow Sea. South Korea doesn’t rule out the renewal of North Korean skullduggery but suggests it could have been an old mine left over from the Korean War when the North mined those waters. That didn’t stop the North from warning the United States and South Korea of possible deadly consequences if the South’s plan is carried out allowing a special visit and tour of the DMZ by journalists during this 60th anniversary of the 1950-53 Korean war.

North Korea has never forgiven the U.S. for agreeing at Potsdam with the Soviets to division of the country at the 38th parallel. The pending visit, it says, is nothing less than psychological warfare aimed at preparing “materials for anti-North smear campaigns.” Allowing the reporters in violates the armistice that ended the war, said the warning, and the U.S. is as responsible as the South because it was a truce signatory.

JOURNALISTS and tourists have been allowed into Panmunjom, the Freedom Village where United Nations and North Korean officials sat across from each other for two years of negotiations for the armistice that ended the war. Expansion of the area that can be visited is what the South is after, and the North objects to.

I was there in November 1985, with a trade mission led by Lt. Gov. John Cherberg. Only a handful of us got the OK to go to the DMZ 25 miles north of Seoul. We were bused under numerous highway overpasses, built to be blown up. filling the road with boulders if North Korea attacks. The fields are full of tank traps, also to stop an invader. There was no fence, just 1,292 rusting yellow metal markers stamped MILITARY DEMARCATION LINE in English and Korean, that stretch the 151 miles from the Sea of Japan on the east to the Han River on the west.

IN THE MILITARY Armistice Building is the billiard cloth covered table where the negotiators sat. A cluster of microphones hung over it. Every word spoken in there was monitored 24 hours a day. If we walked to the north end of the table, we would be in North Korea, said our guide, so do it if you want to because it’s the only way you can without causing an international incident. We walked up, and quickly back.

Out the window we could see the backs of two North Korea soldiers a few feet away Just beyond was the North Korean headquarters, fancy but only 13 feet deep, the front meant for picture taking by tourists. A guard in a window there watched us intently through binoculars. It was the one standing motionless in the low hanging branches of a tree across the street that gave us a sudden chill. There was a vast green valley with hills to the north. The air was filled with a weird garble of noise, propaganda broadcast from the North Korean Propaganda Village to the left.

Below us was the Bridge of No Return, where prisoners are exchanged and over which the USS Pueblo crew came home. Sticking up in the landscape was the stump of a very large poplar tree where two American officers were axed to death by North Koreans in 1976 when they brought a work party there to trim the branches so it was easier to see from one check point to the other. Photographs of the massacre are posted on camp walls. “Our lives are on the line here,” said Ambassador Richard Walker.

I have no doubt that the same would be said today.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, Wa., 98340.)