DMZ Visit
Today Cheorwon bears witness to Korea's tormented past. Burned out buildings used by the Japanese during colonial rule, a bombed out train that once connected north and south, a bullet-riddled building where anti-communists were tortured and murdered--all testify to the legacy of a divided Korea.
Cheorwon, located about 50 miles northeast of Seoul along the Demilitarized Zone, is one of many towns altered by the Korean peninsula's changing borders. Part of North Korea when the peninsula was divided at the end of World War II, it became part of South Korea when the armistice agreement was signed in 1953.
The border decided by the agreement was still not secure in 1975, when a North Korean tunnel to Cheorwon was discovered. One of four known tunnels made by North Koreans sometime after 1953, its ostensible purpose was to transport thousands of troops quickly into South Korea in the event of future hostilities.
But remove man’s politics and weaponry from the DMZ and what you'll find is North Korea's beautiful rolling hills and rivers. On the South Korean side of the border in Cheorwon, the natural landscape has been obscured by a bounty of restaurants, homes and office buildings. It is a rural town of about 50,000 where visitors can leave their car engines running, step away for an ice cream break on a sweltering summer day and find their car waiting when they return half an hour later.
But as we approached the DMZ during a trip to Cheorwon in August, rolling along narrow rural roads outfitted with blockades hefty enough to prevent a tank invasion, the relaxed atmosphere disappeared. We were stopped by armed South Korean guards.
Make it past the sentries and you will sense the continuing collision of nature's beauty and man's capacity for destruction. From the Seungni Observatory at the center of the 150-mile DMZ, we saw pristine foliage layered with the wires and explosives that rig the entire 3-mile wide border. Land mines lurk beneath grassy fields. Barbed wired barriers keep majestic mountain ranges out of reach.
The DMZ is far from demilitarized, as many North Korea observers say. But what struck me most when I visited the DMZ in August 2005 is that Koreans in the north and south are both imprisoned--the North Koreans can't leave and the South Koreans can't enter.