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NYTimes
New York Times
26 Jul 2023


NextImg:Life Along the Korean DMZ, 70 Years After the Fighting Ended
photophotophoto

The three-year Korean War was the single most traumatic event in modern Korean history.

It came to a halt in a truce 70 years ago, after millions had been killed.

The guns fell silent along the Demilitarized Zone, a 155-mile-long strip of land that divides the Korean Peninsula.

But a formal peace treaty was never signed, leaving the Korean Peninsula still technically at war.

Millions of troops on both sides stand ready to plunge back into battle at a moment’s notice.

Life Along the Korean DMZ, 70 Years After the Fighting Ended

Photographer Chang W. Lee made multiple trips to and along the Korean Demilitarized Zone to photograph this story.


Seen from the sky, the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, looks like a gigantic geographical wound across the Korean Peninsula, the continuous wire fences snaking up the hills and down the valleys from coast to coast.

It was created 70 years ago on Thursday, when an armistice was signed by the American-led United Nations Command and the North Korean and Chinese militaries at the “truce village” of Panmunjom, putting an end to the fighting, but not the Korean War itself.

The DMZ was meant to be a temporary buffer zone, dividing a warring nation. Instead, it has hardened into the world’s most heavily armed frontier, embodying not only an unfinished military confrontation but also what little hope remains for peace and reunification between the two Koreas.

Along this 155-mile stretch, soldiers stand ready to engage on either side. Families cope with decades of separation. Tourists come to witness living history. And dreams of reconciliation have slowly faded into the distance.

An Unresolved Conflict

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A South Korean Marine Corps Special Reconnaissance Battalion practicing at a training facility in Pyeongchang-gun, Gangwon-do, in February.CreditCredit...

Over the last seven decades, there have been attempts to breach the divide created by the DMZ, re-linking roads and railways across the border, allowing cross-border trade and investment and organizing reunions of separated families.

Such efforts have all eventually failed to create lasting peace, crumbling in the face of an unresolved conflict.

Despite its name, the DMZ and its vicinity are armed to the teeth.

An estimated two million land mines are strewn inside the 2.5-mile-wide zone. Its northern and southern perimeters are sealed by layers of razor-wire fences​ reinforced with booby traps or electronic sensors. Armed guards monitor the fences at every 100 to 200 yards.

Every 10 yards along the South Korean fences​ are Claymore anti-personnel mines​. All roads leading out of the DMZ are guarded by anti-tank obstacles. Behind them, two million troops stand ready for battle.

ImageThe windows of a conference room reflect upon a table in the center of the room.
The Korean War Armistice Agreement was signed 70 years ago in Panmunjom, on the inter-Korean border. The American-led United Nations Command and North Korea still maintain a joint conference room there.
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Korean War soldiers crossed the “Bridge of No Return” at Panmunjom during POW exchanges in 1953.

Soon after the armistice was signed, POWs were exchanged at Panmunjom. But the border has since been sealed tight, with the military standoff between North and South Korea reaching ominous new heights in recent years.

Enduring Wounds

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Forty-six South Korean sailors died in 2010 when their navy ship, Cheonan, sank in an explosion. The South said it was a North Korean torpedo attack. A memorial on a border island honors those who died.

If fighting were to recommence on the Korean Peninsula, North Korea said in June, it would “rapidly expand into a world war and a thermonuclear war unprecedented in the world.”

For Yoon Cheong-ja, 80, the fighting never ended.

Her son, Senior Chief Petty Officer Min Pyeong-gi, was among the 46 sailors killed when the South Korean navy ship Cheonan ​exploded in what the South said was an unprovoked North Korean torpedo attack in 2010.

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Yoon Cheong-ja, the mother of Senior Chief Petty Officer Min Pyeong-gi, one of the 46 victims of the Cheonan sinking, collapsed as she cried and called her son’s name.CreditCredit...
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South Korean families depart for an annual ceremony for South Korean victims who died during naval skirmishes with North Korea.

“When my son died, my heart was torn into a thousand pieces,” said Ms. Yoon, who recently visited the western border waters where her son died. “No mother should lose her son like I did.”

Families Divided

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The 2.5-mile-wide DMZ cuts through the Korean Peninsula at its waist, coast to coast. Guards keep hills around their border fences denuded to increase visibility.

War-separated families make annual pilgrimages near the DMZ, the closest they can come to their long-lost homeland.

During major holidays, they perform Confucian family rituals, placing rice, fruit and dried fish on an altar and bowing toward their ​ancestors’ graves in the North.

“When I die in the South, my children will lose the ties to their roots in the North,” said Hwang Bong-suk, 87, as she gazed at migrating birds flying over the DMZ on a recent afternoon.

Her widowed mother took her North Korean family to the South in 1948, three years after Korea was liberated from Japanese colonial rule and divided into the pro-Soviet North and the pro-American South.

The family traveled in two groups to avoid suspicion. Ms. Hwang was 12 years old at the time. Her two older sisters stayed in the North.

They never made it to the South.

Their mother saved gifts for them, hoping to one day be reunited.

During a recent boat ride to western border waters from which he could see North Korea through an afternoon haze, Choi Jong-dae, 87, remembered his homeland. “The older I get, the more I miss my hometown and my siblings in the North,” he said.

“I have been to Russia, Mongolia, New York and South Africa​,” added Mr. Choi, his voice shaking​. “But I can’t visit my hometown, even though it’s so close it feels as if I ​could stretch my arm to touch it.”

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Visitors hanging ribbons with messages calling for peace and reunification at a park near the DMZ.
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On the other side of the border, families in the North have had to cope with more recent separations.

Over the postwar decades, a score of North Koreans, mostly soldiers, have defected to the South through the DMZ, often leaving their families behind.

One of them, Ahn Chan-il, slipped through a North Korean fence while its high-voltage electricity was turned off. “Because of what I did, my family ​in the North ​was sent to a prison camp and is presumed dead,” said Mr. Ahn, who arrived in the South in 1979. “As long as I live, I won’t be able to forget them.”

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Ahn Chan-il crossed the DMZ to come to South Korea on July 27, 1979. “Because of what I did, my family ​in the North ​was sent to a prison camp and is presumed dead,” he said.
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Kim Gang-yu​ crossed the DMZ on Sept. 29, 2016: “It was my first hot-water shower in years.”

Kim Gang-yu​, 27, another North Korean soldier, fled through the DMZ in 2016.

At night, while their country fell into darkness for lack of electricity, North Korean border guards marveled at the blazing electric lights that lit up the South Korean border fences, Mr. Kim​ said.

“I realized I had ​finally ​made it to the South when its soldiers let me take a shower,” ​he said. “It was my first hot-water shower in years.”

Life Near the Zone

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Local fishing boats entering Jeodo Fishery Zone, ​located just one kilometer away from the inter-Korean border, ​the North Boundary Line, after getting clearance to fish there from the Korean Coast Guard.CreditCredit...

Though the DMZ is known as a desolate, unforgiving place, hardy people have settled nearby — or even inside — the zone.

They cultivate land under the watchful eyes of border guards despite the potential for land mines. When fishing season comes, fishermen venture into dangerous waters near the border​ to catch croakers, blue crabs and octopus​ while warships provide protection.

​In recent years, northern counties of South Korea have become unlikely tourist destinations, attracting people drawn to the history of the DMZ.

In a coastal campsite just outside the eastern DMZ, families pitch tents​ only yards away from wire fences and military signs ask campers to report “suspicious persons, objects and vessels.”

A ​DMZ-themed ​motel on the campsite ​has rooms decorated with barbed wire on the wall. Visitors can enjoy museums and tours along the border.

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A ​DMZ-themed ​motel room designed by the artist Omyo Cho is decorated with barbed wire.

“If anything, I can now claim to have spent a night at the farthest north campsite in South Korea,” said Kim Pil-soo, 42, a recent visitor. Near his tent was a warning against “stray land mines.”

Park Jin-woo, 42, took his son, Min-jae, 8, to the DMZ Museum after watching news about the war in Ukraine. “I wanted to show him that we Koreans also had difficult times and how terrible war can be,” he said.

Dreams of Reconciliation

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On a recent hot afternoon, 80 people gathered at a pier near the western sea border along the DMZ. They watched an artist dance with a flag that featured a unified Korean Peninsula.

They later sailed out to waters near the border while a South Korean Coast Guard ship trailed them from a distance.

“We pray for unification!” they chanted, holding their hands together. “We pray for peace!”

After nearly eight decades of living separated across the tightly sealed border​, many South Koreans see reunification as a distant dream. Affinity toward North Koreans has grown weaker among younger generations who were born decades after the war and have no memory of what it was like to live in an undivided Korea.

The youth are more preoccupied with domestic concerns, like dwindling job opportunities and the rising cost of living.

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A “peace walk” near the DMZ. Activists organize these walks to campaign for peace and reconciliation between the two Koreas.
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Lee San Hun, an artist, dances with a flag that symbolizes a unified Korean Peninsula. He was among people gathered on the anniversary of the Korean War armistice in 2022.

Kim Sang-geun, 69, a retired auto mechanic from Seoul, took his two grandchildren to the DMZ to teach them “the pain of the national division,” he said. One of his children, Cha-min, 11, said his school friends didn’t want reunification with North Korea “because it would only make us poor.”

Such attitudes make Korean War refugees feel like a dying breed.

“I once believed that Korea would be reunited by the time I was 50,” said Ahn Kyong-choon, 88, a war refugee from the North who was visiting a border island observatory from which North Korea is visible.

“I now have no such hope left in me.”

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Lighting fireworks on Myeongpa Beach, where families can camp near the DMZ border.