As one soldier waited in his Jeep for his partner to return, he passed the time on the radio, listening to the latest K-pop hits. Contact us at letters time. Related Stories. Here's What to Know About Him. Already a print subscriber? Go here to link your subscription. Need help? Visit our Help Center. Stretching miles along the 38th parallel, the 2. Tourists who visit the DMZ from the south are taken to a briefing room and given a presentation prior to the tour.
In the hallway, they can take photos with a soldier cutout. Though they are now known as two distinct, intensely polarized nations, for more than a thousand years Korea was a unified territory. In , at the conclusion of World War II, the United States and Soviet Union partitioned the peninsula at the 38th parallel with little regard to the sentiments of the Korean people.
Arbitrarily divided by ideologically opposed, interloping regimes, tensions between the North and South soon escalated into the three-year Korean War that ravaged the population. A peace treaty was never signed. Tourism can act as a force of peace: a mechanism that promotes empathy and supports reconciliation processes between nations. In addition to fostering cultural exchange, research suggests that countries with open and sustainable tourism industries enjoy higher levels of peace, economic prosperity, and resilience.
But the highly regulated movement of Korean nationals on both sides of the DMZ may limit the peace-building opportunities that are traditionally associated with tourism. This strict control of the border along with the careful curation of museums and war memorials has allowed each side to write its own version of history unchecked—and its own version of the other Korea.
A lot of people use the DMZ as a positive place, where families go and visit memorials and tie ribbons. Six decades of wind and rain have cleansed the gore from the landscape, and sheets of wildflowers bloom where fallen soldiers once lay—remnants of a tragic past, now made beautiful by nature.
Hundreds of thousands of heavily armed soldiers are deployed in the area surrounding the zone, but the interior has remained virtually untouched since the armistice was signed. Forests and mountains decimated by war slowly regenerated in the absence of human hands, forging one of the most unique wildlife preserves on Earth. As North and South Korea continue to vacillate between periods of hostility and hope, some believe the common goal of conservation could foster trans-border movement through ecotourism.
But under the careful watch of the military, most people never interacted with North Koreans, and very few were reunited with family members. In , a guard shot and killed a South Korean tourist who stepped out of bounds, and the border rapidly went from porous to impermeable within days. Cooperation between the two Koreas has steadily deteriorated ever since. The North Korean nuclear crisis now dominates the international conversation, and tourism initiatives to connect the divided nations have all but ceased to exist.
Though interaction between North and South Koreans is negligible and propaganda rife, some believe tourism can still exert a positive influence, particularly within the Hermit Kingdom.
The war was over but the Korean peninsula was faced with a more complicated state of crisis. With strong military power, North Korea started the Korean War on June 25, , in the name of liberation of the south and reunification of the peninsula. Soldiers kept fighting in continuous battles in the war, which was faced with a new phase on June 30, , when General Matthew Bunker Ridgway, Supreme Commander of the United Nations forces proposed a ceasefire talk to the Communist Army.
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