South Korea – Day 2

So, we spent the night in our buddhist retreat, very basic yet very warm and very comfortable.  Breakfast was another strange affair from the point of view of unknown food, but no one complained of hunger later in the day :-)

Today though was a serious day and gave us a lot of things to think about.  The first being that South Korea and North Korea are still officially at war and between the 2 sides there are 1,000,000 soldiers.  The Koreans are from a civilisation that goes back 5000 years and the last one per cent of that time has been spent as a divided people.  It’s like building a wire fence across the United Kingdom between Liverpool and Hull and saying to the people on one side, “So, you will have nothing to do with the people on the other side.  You can’t contact your family in any way.  If you live on the other side, I’m sorry, but you have to stay here.”  In days of mobile phones and internet, the people in the North and South are even unable to exchange letters with each other through mail.  It’s a totally inhuman situation.

And also it’s something that I think very few people in the West are really conscious of.  It’s like the days of the Berlin Wall and in these times also the experience of the Palestinians in the occupied territories.

The people of Korea have asked the World March to adopt their issue as one of the issues of the March and we are happy to do it and inform people where we can.

There is a complicated political situation around the issue and I’m sure we don’t understand even a small amount.  There is a UN force here which according to local Peace Activists is nothing more than a puppet US force.  There was also a UN Security council resolution to dissolve the force which was passed back in the 70s but that still has not been implemented. 

Anyway, today was extraordinary, because we visited the Demilitarized Zone and we understand that we are the first foreigners to visit the Zone in 56 years of it’s existence.  Now this sounds amazing if it’s true and it is true that it was hardly a tourist attraction when we got there.  Maybe we are the first to visit this part of the DMZ which is at the mouth of the river Han, an important ecological point as well as historical for the people of Korea.  When we got there, there were just a few soldiers who followed us, and an old lady growing rice and millet.  There are barbed wire fences everywhere, yet great calm, at least during the day.  We were told that the soldiers are mostly asleep during the day and like owls they come out at night!

Anyway, we heard from people who’s families are on the other side of the border.  We heard from Sung Yong Park, our host, who explained how the place he was born is in the DMZ now and that when he was growing up he lived with loud speakers in the village broadcasting propaganda messages to the people in the North and hearing propaganda messages to the people in the South.

We had lunch in the DMZ – a roll of sushi and a banana.  Rafa said a few words and we went to the next point which is an observatory point where you get a good view of the North.  This is like a tourist point where members of the public can come and see “the other side”.  There we had a minutes silence thinking of those who are split from their families, and the many hundreds of people who died trying to cross the river to the other side.

Later we went for a meeting with local activisits where we discussed the issues more and we were asked as guests to talk about how we think the Koreans can advance towards reunification.  What could we say?  But it made me think what would Gandhi do in this situation.  Surely one day he would have left his Korean Ashram and started a March.  He would have explained the need to reduce military spending and to act with love towards one’s enemies.  He would have spread a message of peace around Korea, then one day he would have approaced the wire fence and taken a pair of metal cutters from his small bag and made one cut in the fence.  The fence would have come down within 6 months!  For Gandhi he wouldn’t care at all that one side had a fence and weapons and the other side had renounced all of that.  For him it would have been his truth and history shows that his truth was not a bad one.

The need for each one of us to develop a little Gandhi within ourselves is the message of the World March, however each one of us may express it in the words used in our organisations, in our religions, in our philosophies and our beliefs, but the message of treating others the way we want to be treated is at the root of this March.

When one sees the suffering of the Korean people, one realises this more than ever.

With a big hug

Tony

P.S. One piece of joy for the day was the reunion of the base team!  After being spread all over India finally the team is together again in Korea.  However, not for long.  Half the team fly off in 5 hours time to Japan.  Which reminds me, I need to go to sleep for a while…

(Traducción: Juan E. Drault)