WUNRN
Women Peace Activists Cross Demilitarized Zone Separating North & South Korea
By CHOE SANG-HUNMAY
24, 2015
PAJU, South Korea — A group of 30 female peace activists, including the
feminist leader Gloria
Steinem and two Nobel Peace Prize laureates, crossed the
demilitarized zone from North
Korea to South
Korea on Sunday, calling for an end to the Korean War, whose
unresolved hostility has been symbolized by the heavily armed border for six
decades.
A Stand for Peace
Ms. Steinem, center, and fellow activists march to the Imjingak Pavilion
near Panmunjom. “We were able to be citizen diplomats,” Ms. Steinem
told the South Korean news media shortly after crossing the
border. David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
It was rare for the two rival Korean governments to agree to allow a group
of peace activists to pass through the border area, known as the DMZ.
Yet some of the symbolism the activists had hoped to generate with their
Women Cross DMZ campaign was lost when South
Korea denied them permission to walk through Panmunjom, a border
village where a truce was signed in 1953 to halt, though not formally end, the
conflict, leaving the divided Korea technically in a state of war.
Instead, the women, who had traveled from Pyongyang, the North Korean
capital, were detoured to a checkpoint southwest of Panmunjom. There, convoys
of South Korean trucks go to and from a joint industrial park in the North
Korean town of Kaesong. The women, carrying banners, were again barred from walking
across the border, and had to cross by bus.
Still, they considered the endeavor a success. “We have accomplished what
no one said can be done, which is to be a trip for peace, for reconciliation,
for human rights and a trip to which both governments agreed,” Ms. Steinem told
the South Korean news media. “We were able to be citizen diplomats.”
The women — including the Nobel Peace laureates Mairead Maguire from
Northern Ireland and Leymah Gbowee from Liberia
— arrived in Pyongyang on Tuesday for the march, which they hoped would
highlight the need to build peace and set the stage for Korean reunification by
formally ending the war with a permanent peace treaty.
The crossing, however, took place amid tension over the North’s pursuit of
nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, and over its human rights record.
Just two days before the women’s arrival in Pyongyang, the North’s
state-run media hurled one of its harshest — and most sexist — screeds against
President Park Geun-hye of South Korea, calling her “a fork-tongued viper” and
one “not worth calling a woman” because “she has never given birth to a baby.”
Last week, Secretary of State John Kerry said the North Korean government, led
by Kim Jong-un,
was “one of the most egregious
examples of reckless disregard for human rights.”
Some rights activists in the United States and South Korea opposed the
women’s trip, saying that it would be used as propaganda by North
Korea. They urged the peace activists to call on the North to
dismantle political prison camps and end human rights abuses.
When the activists marched in Pyongyang on Saturday, North Korean women in
colorful traditional dresses lined a boulevard waving red and pink paper
flowers, according to North Korean television footage.
One of the roadside signs said “Let us reunify the divided country as soon
as possible!” On the other side of the border on Sunday, hundreds of South
Korean activists welcomed the women who crossed into the South Korean city of
Paju, north of Seoul. Not far away, however, hundreds of conservative South
Koreans, including defectors from the North, also rallied, accusing the
activists of “flattering Kim Jong-un”
and promoting a “fake peace.”