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October 12, 2004
[Have an opinion about the issues discussed in this article?
Sound
off in our Discussion Boards.]
By Joseph Giordono,
Stars and Stripes Pacific Edition
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| South Korean guards open the gates of the southern boundary
of the DMZ as a U.S.-Korean negotiating team returns from a
meeting with the North Koreans about traffic through the Western
Transportation Corridor. |
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| South Korean soldiers patrol the fenceline along the southern
boundary of the Demilitarized Zone. |
 |
| Officials hope that one day soon, these railroad tracks leading
north from Dorasan Station will send people and trade through
a reunified Korea. |
 |
| A group of South Korean officials is escorted across the Military
Demarcation Line, the official border between North and South
Korea. The border is where the painted lines on the road stop;
the blue road sign, reading in part “Good bye,” marks the final
10 meters of South Korean territory. |
 |
| Sgt. Yolanda Ballard, of the United Nations Command Military
Armistice Commission, chats Thursday with one of her South Korean
counterparts at Dorasan Station, just south of the DMZ. (Photos
by Joseph Giordono / S&S ) |
THE KOREAN DEMILITARIZED ZONE — Inside the world’s most heavily
fortified border, a small trickle of trade passes between North
and South Korea, carrying not just raw materials but the hope of
a thawing relationship on what’s sometimes called the last front
of the Cold
War.
The overland trade route is the Western Transportation Corridor,
a stretch of asphalt and rail lines that cut straight across the
Demilitarized Zone. On an average day, some 100 trucks cross back
and forth on the corridor, created after the 2000 summit between
then-South Korean president Kim Dae-jung and North Korean leader
Kim Jong Il.
When the corridor opened last year, it became the first land route
between the Koreas since 1945. In the near future, officials hope,
today’s traffic figures will be dwarfed by the free-flowing movement
of goods and people.
“This is a historic thing that has proceeded over the past four
years,” said Air Force Maj. Gen. Thomas P. Kane, the senior U.S.
member of the United Nations Command Military Armistice Commission,
or UNCMAC.
“This is a linking of the North and South in the hope that reconciliation
will occur in the not too distant future. Within a year, we could
have 2,000 movements, a thousand each way.”
In its role at the head of UNCMAC, the U.S. military keeps close
watch on the DMZ and the transportation corridor. The fledgling
trade route leads to the Kaesong Industrial Complex, a South Korean-built
initiative about 10 miles north of the DMZ. Most of the traffic
on the corridor is construction materials for an industrial park
and the rail line and highway leading north.
The road also is used by buses carrying a small number of South
Korean tourists on closely regulated trips to the North’s Diamond
Mountain resort.
According to U.S. officials, the corridor so far has cost South
Korea $230 million and North Korea $120 million.
During construction of the road, some 1,500 land mines and other
pieces of unexploded ordnance were removed from the area, said Lt.
Col. Kurt Taylor of UNCMAC. Only one worker, a North Korean soldier,
was injured in the demining project.
On a hill high above the Western Transportation Corridor, U.S.
soldiers give briefs to visitors at Observation Post Dora. Inside
the camouflage concrete structure, a large sand-table scale model
of the DMZ sits in front of a huge bank of windows, surrounded by
an amphitheater of neon-green plastic seats. On a clear day, soldiers
say, Kaesong is easily visible.
On this day, the morning fog means the only thing visible is a
pair of dotted lines painted onto the windows, representing the
northern boundary of the DMZ and the Military Demarcation Line —
the official border between North and South Korea. On maps, it is
a dotted line. In reality, the border is marked inside the transportation
corridor by a sudden change in the color of the asphalt and the
end of white-painted traffic lines.
From a concrete terrace at OP Dora, visitors can watch trucks rumble
along the route, adding to the daily trade figures.
The transportation corridor has not been a complete success. North
Korea is irked that the United States, as lead partner in the armistice
commission, will not allow 39 high-tech electronics and communications
items to be included in the cross-border trade.
And on-and-off negotiations between North and South are always
subject to delay or cancellation, as they were for three months
this year after South Korea took in hundreds of North Koreans in
a mass defection.
But on this day at Dorasan Station, which will become the main
rail portal for both trade and tourism, Army Sgt. Yolanda Ballard
stood chatting amiably with a South Korean soldier. Behind them,
a colorful train station sign listed Pyongyang and Seoul, with their
respective distances from the station listed below arrows pointing
opposite directions.
Ballard and the South Korean could have been any two people waiting
at any normal train station — if not for the miles of barbed wire,
thousands of soldiers and fifty years of forced separation represented
by the DMZ just a few thousand yards to the north.
Later, at a heavily guarded post on the DMZ’s southern boundary,
a convoy of dump trucks rumble South through the corridor. Each
of the twenty trucks is carrying about 20 tons of sand, one of the
items exported south from North Korea. As soon as the trucks pass
through the spiked gates, the South Korean guards close the fence
and resume their guard positions.
For as far as can be seen through the morning haze, the barbed-wire-topped
fence stretches to the horizon.
“The truth is, today this is a very hostile place,” Kane said.
“But the transportation corridor offers great hope for the future.”
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