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Refugee tableau at the No Gun Ri Peace Park (Photo: Charles J. Hanley) By Charles J. Hanley | March 9, 2015 Also published in the Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus On the 70th anniversary of the division of the Korean peninsula, the Korea Policy Institute, in collaboration with The Asia-Pacific Journal, is pleased to publish a special series, “The 70th Anniversary of the U.S. Division of the Korean Peninsula: A People’s History.”  Multi-sited in geographic range, this series calls attention to the far-reaching repercussions and ongoing legacies of the fateful 1945 American decision, in the immediate wake of U.S. atomic bombings of Japan and with no Korean consultation, to divide Korea in two.  Through scholarly essays, policy articles, interviews, journalistic investigation, survivor testimony, and creative performance, this series explores the human costs and ground-level realities of the division of Korea. In Part 1 of the series Hyun Lee interviewed Shin Eun-mi on the erosion of democracy in South Korea.  KPI and The Asia-Pacific Journal are pleased to present “In the Face of American Amnesia, The Grim Truths of No Gun Ri Find a Home” as Part 2 of the series. The truths of No Gun Ri have taken root in the heart of South Korea. A memorial tower, museum and garden of mournful sculptures have risen from the soil of the central valley where the 1950 refugee massacre took place. In the United States, however, home of the agents of those killings, much of the truth remains buried, by official intent and unofficial indifference. Built by the South Korean government at a cost of $17 million, the new No Gun Ri Peace Park, covering 33 acres in Yongdong County, 100 miles southeast of Seoul, offers a straightforward account of what happened over four July days early in the Korean War: As the North Korean army advanced into South Korea, residents of two Yongdong County villages were ordered from their homes by American troops, to be evacuated southward. Resting on railroad tracks near No Gun Ri, they were suddenly attacked by U.S. warplanes and many were killed. Over the next three days, U.S. troops killed many more as they huddled, trapped, under the No Gun Ri railroad bridge. An estimated 250 to 300 died.1 The No Gun Ri Peace Park, with its memorial tower on the left, museum in the center and education (conference) building at the upper right. The railroad bridge massacre site is out of the frame on the lower left. (Photo: Charles J. Hanley) In the 15 years since the world first learned of this mass killing, it has become increasingly clear that the U.S. Army’s 1999-2001 investigation of No Gun Ri suppressed vital documents and testimony, as it strove to exonerate itself of culpability and liability, and to declare – with an inexplicable choice of words – that the four-day bloodbath was “not deliberate.”2 But these suppressed archival documents, showing U.S. commanders ordering troops to fire on civilians out of fear of enemy infiltrators, are now on display at the peace park’s museum, illustrating a growing divide in how No Gun Ri will be remembered – or not – on two sides of the Pacific. The official U.S. version “has framed the No Gun Ri story as an anecdotal war tragedy that can be allowed to fall into the domain of forgetfulness,” Suhi Choi writes in Embattled Memories, her newly published study of how the Korean War is memorialized.3 This article will describe some of the glaring irregularities of the official U.S. version, and show how the No Gun Ri park may prove a final bastion for securing the truth against that “domain of forgetfulness.” The Deadly Orders of 1950 In the early weeks after North Korea’s invasion of the south on June 25, 1950, the fear that North Korean infiltrators lurked among southern refugees was fed by a few plausible reports and a torrent of rumors. Research at the U.S. National Archives by the Associated Press team that confirmed the No Gun Ri Massacre, both before and after their September 29, 1999 investigative report, found at least 16 documents in which high-ranking U.S. officers ordered or authorized the shooting of refugees in the war’s early months. Such communications, showing a command readiness to kill civilians indiscriminately, pointed to a high likelihood that the No Gun Ri killings, carried out by the 7th Cavalry Regiment, were ordered or authorized by a chain of command. A half-century later, lest that case be made, Army investigators excluded 14 of those documents from their report and misrepresented two others.4 In addition, the unit document that would have contained orders dealing with the No Gun Ri refugees, the 7th Cavalry journal for July 1950, is missing without explanation from the National Archives. The Army inquiry’s 2001 report concealed this fact, while claiming its investigators had reviewed all relevant documents and that no orders to shoot were issued at No Gun Ri.5 Here is how the Army report of 2001 dealt with three important pieces of evidence, among many documents suppressed or distorted:6 The Rogers Memo Classified “Secret” and dated July 25, 1950, the day before the No Gun Ri killings began, the below memo was written by the U.S. Air Force’s operations chief in Korea, Colonel Turner C. Rogers, and sent to its acting commander, General Edward Timberlake. It got immediately to the point in its heading: “Subject: Policy on Strafing Civilian Refugees.” Excerpt from the “Rogers memo,” in which an operations chief reported the U.S. Air Force was strafing South Korean refugees (paragraphs 3-4). The Pentagon’s 2001 No Gun Ri report omitted that fact from its description of the document. (Source: U.S. National Archives.) Rogers wrote that “the Army has requested that we strafe all civilian refugee parties that are noted approaching our positions. To date, we have complied with the Army request in this respect.” He took note of reports that enemy soldiers were infiltrating behind U.S. lines via refugee columns, but said the strafings “may cause embarrassment to the U.S. Air Force and to the U.S. government.” He wondered why the Army was not checking refugees “or shooting them as they come through if they desire such action.” Rogers recommended that Air Force planes stop attacking refugees. Nothing has been found in the record indicating the memo had any effect, and the No Gun Ri slaughter the next day began with just such an air attack. Pentagon investigators a half-century later couldn’t suppress this document, as they did many others, because it had been reported by the news media in June 2000, having been leaked to CBS News, possibly by Air Force researchers. Instead, the Army team, which did not reproduce the document in its report, chose to ignore the memo’s most important element, by not divulging that Rogers said the Air Force was, indeed, strafing refugees, in compliance with an Army request. Eliding that telltale paragraph No. 4, the Army investigators declared, “The Rogers memorandum actually recommends that civilians not be attacked unless they are definitely known to be North Korean soldiers.” For the sake of consistency in this particular deception, the investigative report went on to say that Rogers argued that the refugees were an Army problem and so the Army should be screening them, but it omitted Rogers’ clause, “or shooting them … if they desire such action.”7 In this way, the report that stands as the official U.S. record of a supposedly legitimate investigation disposed of one highly incriminating document. General Kean’s Order Major General William B. Kean, commander of the 25th Infantry Division, which held the front line to the right of the 1st Cavalry Division, the division responsible for No Gun Ri, issued an order to all his units dated July 27, 1950, saying civilians were to have been evacuated from the war zone and therefore “all civilians seen in this area are to be considered as enemy and action taken accordingly.” Again, the Army investigators of 2001 had to grapple with this explosive document, since it had been reported in the original AP story on No Gun Ri. And so they simply chose to write of this order, “There is nothing to suggest any summary measures were considered against refugees.”8 They suggested that when Kean said civilians should be treated as enemy, he meant front-line combat troops should “arrest” this supposed enemy, not shoot him—an implausible scenario in the midst of a shooting war. Maj. Gen. Kean’s order to treat South Korean civilians as enemy was relayed by his staff to mean they should be shot. The Pentagon’s 2001 report suppressed those instructions. (Source: U.S. National Archives) To posit this unreal notion, the Army investigators had to conceal another division headquarters document that said flatly that Kean’s order meant “civilians moving around in combat zone will be considered as unfriendly and shot.”9 Other, similar communications were relayed across the division area, including one in which Kean “repeated” instructions that civilians were considered enemy and “drastic action” should be taken to prevent their movement.10 These, too, were suppressed by the Army investigators of 2001. The Muccio Letter Perhaps the most important document excluded from the U.S. Army’s 300-page No Gun Ri Review was a U.S. Embassy communication with Washington that sat unnoticed for decades at the National Archives. In 2005, American historian Sahr Conway-Lanz reported his discovery of this document, a letter from the U.S. ambassador to South Korea in 1950, John J. Muccio, to Dean Rusk, then-assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, dated July 26, 1950, the day the killings began at No Gun Ri.11 In it, Muccio reported to Rusk on a meeting that took place the previous evening among American and South Korean officials, military and civilian, to formulate a plan for handling refugees. He wrote that the South Korean refugee problem “has developed aspects of a serious and even critical military nature.” Disguised North Korean soldiers had been infiltrating American lines via refugee columns, he said, and “naturally, the Army is determined to end this threat.” At the meeting, he wrote, “the following decisions were made: 1. Leaflet drops will be made north of U.S. lines warning the people not to proceed south, that they risk being fired upon if they do so. If refugees do appear from north of U.S. lines they will receive warning shots, and if they then persist in advancing they will be shot.” The ambassador said he was writing Rusk “in view of the possibility of repercussions in the United States” from such deadly U.S. tactics. U.S. Ambassador John J. Muccio’s letter to the State Department’s Dean Rusk, dated July 26, 1950, said the U.S. Army would shoot approaching South Korean refugee groups. Army investigators deliberately omitted this document from their 2001 report on the No Gun Ri refugee massacre, which began that very day. (Source: U.S. National Archives) The letter stands as a clear statement of a theater-wide U.S. policy to open fire on approaching refugees. It also shows this policy was known to upper ranks of the U.S. government in Washington. In 2006, under pressure for an explanation from the South Korean government, the Army acknowledged that its investigators of 1999-2001 had seen the Muccio letter, but it claimed they dismissed it as unimportant because it “outlined a proposed policy,” not an approved one – an argument that defied the plain English of the letter, which said the policy of shooting approaching refugees was among “decisions made.”12 In his book Collateral Damage (2006), Conway-Lanz attests to the letter’s crucial importance, writing that “with this additional piece of evidence, the Pentagon report’s interpretation (of No Gun Ri) becomes difficult to sustain” – that is, its conclusion that the refugee killings were “not deliberate” became ever more untenable.13 Washington’s sensitivity on the Muccio letter is seen in a 2006 cable sent by then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, found in the Wikileaks dump of State Department cables. Rice suggested the South Koreans would not get an explanation in writing of the handling of the Muccio letter, as requested.14 Presumably that would enable further obfuscation as necessary. In Embattled Memories, Choi notes that the Muccio letter “proved that the U.S. military had a policy of shooting approaching refugees during the Korean War. Nonetheless, this counter-voice did not last long in the U.S. media. The evidence of the No Gun Ri story quickly melted into the amnesia that is the American collective memory of the Korean War.”15 The Army’s conscious “amnesia” extended to more than a dozen other archival documents from the Korean War’s first months in which commanders, for example, ordered troops to “shoot all refugees coming across river,” ordered “all refugees to be fired on,” and declared refugees to be “fair game.”16 The Army researchers who found them highlighted such incriminating passages, but they were excluded from the Army report. The report also suppressed damning testimony from veterans of the mid-1950 warfront, who confirmed civilians were being killed indiscriminately. “It had been passed around that if you saw any Korean civilians in an area you were to shoot first and ask questions later,” one testified.17 “In that war we shoot [sic] everybody that wore white,” said another, white being the everyday garb of rural Koreans.18 “The word I heard was ‘Kill everybody from 6 to 60,’” testified a third.19 The suppressed documents were later found in the Army investigation’s own processed files at the National Archives; the ex-soldiers’ transcripts were obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests. In Defense of the Truth Although the truth of mid-1950 South Korea and No Gun Ri was whitewashed and distorted at every turn in 2001 in Washington, DC, it has now found a home in the two-story, 20,365-square-foot memorial museum and its surrounding three-year-old No Gun Ri Peace Park, a gently landscaped place of arched bridges and flowered walkways, stretching from the bullet-pocked railroad underpasses of 1950, through a garden of powerfully evocative sculptures bearing such titles as “Ordeal” and “Searching for Hope,” to the bottom of a path leading to a hilltop cemetery and the graves of No Gun Ri victims, marked “1950-7-26.” The No Gun Ri railroad bridge, site of the 1950 refugee massacre. (Photo: Charles J. Hanley) Visitors (an estimated 120,000 came in 2014) will find the warning words of Ambassador Muccio and Colonel Rogers behind the museum’s glass display cases, along with numerous “shoot refugees” orders. A diorama depicts the unfolding events of late July 1950. One wall bears the names of No Gun Ri’s dead. The truths of No Gun Ri can be found as well in nearby towns and villages, home of survivors who have testified to what happened, of a man whose face was shredded by bullets as a boy at No Gun Ri, a woman whose eye was blown out, others living with the legacy of livid scars, dents in their flesh and in their psyches. Elsewhere in South Korea, others have also worked to embed No Gun Ri in the national memory, producing a major studio’s feature film, a superbly drawn, two-volume graphic narrative, and an award-winning three-part television documentary.20 The park should become “a place where everyone can feel and learn the lessons of history,” South Korea’s security minister, Jeong Jong-seop, told a gathering last September of international peace museum directors at the park’s conference building. Park director Chung Koo-do told the same gathering that No Gun Ri is “a historical issue that both Korean and American citizens should remember.”21 No Gun Ri Peace Park memorial tower (Photo: Charles J. Hanley) But the memory divide—East and West—can only grow. In the United States, the Korean feature film, A Small Pond, found no distributor. The graphic narrative, though translated into French and Italian, has not been published in English. Kill ‘Em All, a hard-hitting BBC documentary on No Gun Ri, aired in Britain in prime time yet was shunned in America.22 Two years after the Army’s deceitful report, a Pentagon-affiliated publisher issued an Army apologist’s polemic on No Gun Ri, an often-incoherent book packed with disinformation.23 In the English-language Wikipedia, the “No Gun Ri Massacre” article became a Wikipedic free-for-all between jingoistic denialists and the truth. Finally, ironically around the time the Korean park was opened in 2011, the U.S. Defense Department purged from its website the Army’s investigative report, further pushing No Gun Ri toward official oblivion. That 2001 report, with its self-evident gaps and often clumsy deceptions, will remain on display at the No Gun Ri museum, as the memorial park grows into its role as final defender of the grim and unchallengeable realities of No Gun Ri. The realities extend beyond No Gun Ri: In 2005-2010, in good part because of the No Gun Ri revelations, South Koreans filed reports with their government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on more than 200 other alleged mass killings by the U.S. military in 1950-51, most said to be indiscriminate air attacks.24 The U.S. government has shown no interest in investigating those allegations.25 — *Charles J. Hanley is a retired Associated Press correspondent who was a member of the Pulitzer Prize-winning AP reporting team that confirmed the No Gun Ri Massacre in 1999. He is co-author of The Bridge at No Gun Ri (Henry Holt and Company, 2001). The original 1999 Associated Press interactive Web package on No Gun Ri Three 2008 Associated Press articles on the work of South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission: On mass executions On the U.S. role in mass executions On the U.S. military’s indiscriminate killing of civilians Recommended citation: Charles Hanley, “In the Face of American Amnesia, The Grim Truths of No Gun Ri Find a Home”, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 9, No. 3, March 9, 2015. Related articles Sahr Conway-Lanz, The Ethics of Bombing Civilians After World War II: The Persistence of Norms Against Targeting Civilians in the Korean War Charles J. Hanley and Jae-Soon Chang, Children ‘Executed’ in 1950 South Korean Killings: ROK and US responsibility Charles J. Hanley & Jae-Soon Chang, Summer of Terror: At least 100,000 said executed by Korean ally of US in 1950 [with interactive video] Charles J. Hanley and Martha Mendoza, The Massacre at No Gun Ri: Army Letter reveals U.S. intent The original 1999 Associated Press interactive Web package on No Gun Ri Three 2008 Associated Press articles on the work of South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission: On mass executions On the U.S. role in mass executions On the U.S. military’s indiscriminate killing of civilians Recommended citation: Charles Hanley, “In the Face of American Amnesia, The Grim Truths of No Gun Ri Find a Home”, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 9, No. 3, March 9, 2015. Related articles Sahr Conway-Lanz, The Ethics of Bombing Civilians After World War II: The Persistence of Norms Against Targeting Civilians in the Korean War Charles J. Hanley and Jae-Soon Chang, Children ‘Executed’ in 1950 South Korean Killings: ROK and US responsibility Charles J. Hanley & Jae-Soon Chang, Summer of Terror: At least 100,000 said executed by Korean ally of US in 1950 [with interactive video] Charles J. Hanley and Martha Mendoza, The Massacre at No Gun Ri: Army Letter reveals U.S. intent Notes 1 Information about the No Gun Ri Peace Park was obtained during a visit by author in September 2014. 2 Charles Hanley, “No Gun Ri: Official Narrative and Inconvenient Truths.” Critical Asian Studies 42:4 (2010): 589–622; also in Truth and Reconciliation in South Korea: Between the Present and the Future of the Korean Wars, ed. Jae-Jung Suh (London and New York: Routledge 2013),68–94. 3 Suhi Choi, Embattled Memories: Contested Meanings in Korean War Memorials (Reno: University of Nevada 2014), 17. 4 See Charles J. Hanley, Sang-Hun Choe, Martha Mendoza, The Bridge at No Gun Ri (New York: Henry Holt.2001), 286. See also Hanley, Critical Asian Studies, 609. 5 See Hanley, “No Gun Ri: Official Narrative and Inconvenient Truths,” 607. 6 The U.S. Army investigation’s handling of these three documents is detailed in Hanley, Critical Asian Studies, 599-609. 7 Office of the Inspector General, Department of the Army, No Gun Ri Review (Washington, D.C. January 2001), xi, 98. 8 Office of the Inspector General, Department of the Army, No Gun Ri Review, xiii. 9 Hanley, “No Gun Ri: Official Narrative and Inconvenient Truths,” 609. 10 Ibid. 11 Sahr Conway-Lanz, “Beyond No Gun Ri: Refugees and the United States Military in the Korean War”. Diplomatic History 29:1 (2005): 49-81. 12 “US Still Says South Korea Killings ‘Accident’ Despite Declassified Letter,” Yonhap News Agency, 30 Oct. 2006; Hanley and Mendoza, “1950 ‘Shoot Refugees’ Letter Was Known to No Gun Ri Inquiry, but Went Undisclosed,” The Associated Press, 14 April 2007. 13 Conway-Lanz, Collateral Damage: Americans, Noncombatant Immunity, and Atrocity after World War II (New York: Routledge 2006), 99. 14 U.S. State Department cable. 31 August 2006. “Response to Demarche: Muccio Letter and Nogun-ri.” From Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to U.S. Embassy, Seoul. 15 See Choi 11. 16 Hanley, “No Gun Ri: Official Narrative and Inconvenient Truths,” 609-610. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Namely, writer-director Lee Saang-woo’s film A Little Pond; the graphic narrative No Gun Ri Story, by Park Kun-woong and Chung Eun-yong; Munwha Broadcasting Corp.’s series “No Gun Ri Still Lives On.” 21 “Welcome Address,” “Tragic Memories of the No Gun Ri Victims’ Community,” Report of the 8th International Conference of Museums for Peace, Sept. 19-22, 2014, The No Gun Ri International Peace Foundation. 22 British Broadcasting Corp., Kill ‘em All, Timewatch, 1 Feb. 2002. 23 Robert L. Bateman, No Gun Ri: A Military History of the Korean War Incident (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2002) 24 John Tirman, The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars (New York: Oxford.2011). 25 Hanley and Hyung-Jin Kim, “Korea Bloodbath Probe Ends; US Escapes Much Blame.” The Associated Press (Seoul), 11 July 2010. #CharlesJHanley #KoreanWar #NoGunRi

W.E.B. Dubois: We want peace in Korea, but not a peace dictated by any foreign nation. By John R. Eperjesi* | April 20, 2015 [Originally published by TheWorldPost | April 15, 2015] May 24, 2015 is International Women’s Day for Disarmament. On this day, an international group of women are planning a walk for peace across the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the name for the 4-km wide buffer that separates North and South Korea. The goals of the peace walk are simple: to end the Korean War with a peace treaty, to reunite divided families, and to make sure that women are involved in all levels of the peace-building process. On August 14, 1945, the same day Japan surrendered following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, U.S. Army colonels Charles Bonesteel and Dean Rusk, armed with a copy of National Geographic, went into a room and drew a line on a map which divided the Korean peninsula at the 38th Parallel. In 1948, the northern side of this line became the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DMPRK or North Korea), while the southern side became the Republic of Korea (ROK or South Korea). Five years of intensifying ideological and economic conflicts that tore communities apart all over the peninsula culminated in all-out war on June 25, 1950. After a brief, disastrous attempt by U.S./UN forces to roll back the Communist threat and achieve total victory, the Korean War devolved into brutal WW I-style trench warfare. Beat down soldiers on both sides were fighting not for total victory, but for limited victory: securing the 38th Parallel, thus the division of the peninsula. On July 27, 1953, an Armistice Agreement was signed by the U.S., the DPRK, and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) — South Korean president Syngman Rhee didn’t sign because he wanted to keep on fighting — which halted the combat but did not end the war. Article IV of the Armistice Agreement stated that within three months: after the Armistice Agreement is signed and becomes effective, a political conference of a higher level of both sides be held by representatives appointed respectively to settle through negotiation the questions of the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Korea, the peaceful settlement of the Korean question, etc. 62 years after the signing of the Armistice Agreement, the Korean question has still not been peacefully settled, and the war continues unended, the longest military conflict in U.S. history. In recent years, there has been an increasing number of peace pilgrimages both to and across the DMZ. This current outburst of peace activism is continuous with calls for peace that first emerged as the war was happening. Not only is Korea the “forgotten war,” but opposition to the war has also been forgotten. In the early 1950s, opposition to the Korean War was articulated through an embattled peace movement and organizations such as the Peace Information Center (PIC), a founding member of which was an 82 year-old sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist, W.E.B. Du Bois. The mission of the PIC, which existed from April 3 to October 12, 1950, was to provide information and facts to the press about peace actions in the U.S. and other parts of the world. The PIC called for an end to the Korean War and withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Korean peninsula. Expressing opposition to the war at this time could ruin a person’s life. In Black and Red, Gerald Horne reports that a judge deprived a mother custody of her children after she termed the war “an imperialist adventure.” In addition to speaking at peace rallies, Du Bois drafted a statement entitled “A Protest and a Plea,” signed by 100 African American leaders, which interpreted the Korean War in terms of the histories of racism and colonialism in Africa, Asia, Oceania and the United States. Du Bois wrote: It is said that America is waging war for the sake of peace. But peace in Korea, in  Malaya, in Indo-China, and in other parts of Asia, Africa, and America does not mean that powerful nations can force their polices and demands upon weaker peoples. We want peace in Korea, but not a peace dictated by any foreign nation. The PIC circulated the Stockholm Peace Appeal, an internationally agreed upon document which called for an absolute ban on nuclear weapons. In his study of Du Bois’ peace activism at this time, Gerald Horne notes that the Appeal “may have been signed by more people than any other appeal ever devised by human hand and brain.” Du Bois and other leaders of the PIC were indicted by the U.S. government for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Secretary of State Dean Acheson charged that the Stockholm Appeal was a “propaganda trick in the spurious ‘peace offensive’ of the Soviet Union,” a charge refuted at length by Du Bois in In Battle for Peace (Mainstream and Masses, 1952). Du Bois countered Acheson by pointing out that the appeal was supported by political and religious leaders from all over the world, many of whom had no connection to the Soviet Union or communism. It was also endorsed by many prominent artists: Thomas Mann, Leonard Bernstein, George Bernard Shaw, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and jazz saxophonist Charlie “Yardbird” Parker. By September 1950, Horne notes, 2.5 million Americans signed the Appeal despite the threat of being beaten, arrested or losing their jobs. After the PRC entered the Korean War in October 1950, the U.S. threatened to use atomic bombs against Manchuria and China, critically intensifying the urgency of the Appeal. Du Bois was eventually acquitted, and went on to establish the American Peace Crusade, which continued the call for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Korean peninsula. In the early 1950s, McCarthyism was ascendant and President Truman was being instructed to “scare the hell out of the people” in order to win consent for the ideology of containment. The U.S. government and mainstream media worked to associate the concept of peace with communism and thereby delegitimize the growing peace movement. Despite constant intimidation by the U.S. government and being shunned by the NAACP, the organization founded by Du Bois in 1909 which made a sharp right turn during the Cold War, “It was to Du Bois’ credit,” Gerald Horne writes, “that he led a movement that attracted mass support during troubled times.” The fear, hysteria, and ignorance associated with McCarthyism in the 1950s recently reared its ugly head when Brian Todd interviewed Christine Ahn, one of the organizers of the 2015 women’s peace walk, on CNN’s Situation Room. In a pathetic display of journalistic integrity, Todd red-baited Ahn, calling her “pro-North Korean.” Ahn was clearly excited to discuss the peace walk on CNN, and was disappointed, but not that surprised, by CNN’s ugly witch-hunt. Ahn responded by writing an eloquent piece for Huffington Post explaining, once again, the goals of the peace walk: Why are we walking? We are walking to invite all concerned to imagine a new chapter in Korean history, one marked by dialogue, understanding and –ultimately — forgiveness. We are walking to help unite Korean families tragically     separated by an artificial, man-made division. We are walking to lessen military tensions on the Korean peninsula, which have ramifications for peace and security throughout the world. We are walking to urge our leaders to redirect funds environment. One year before his death, Martin Luther King Jr. described the United States as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” while decrying the fact that, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” King’s indictment is as true today as when he made it in 1967 in response to the escalating Vietnam War. It was also true during the Korean War. Blaine Harden recently described the massive bombing of North Korea by the U.S. during the war for the Washington Post. Harden, a former Post reporter, is the author of Escape from Camp 14 (Viking 2012), the story of Shin Dong-hyuk who was brutally tortured in and escaped from the notorious North Korean prison camp (Shin has recently admitted that parts of his story are inaccurate). Escape from Camp 14 is one of the central texts deployed by hawkish human rights activists in their campaigns against the North Korean government, so Harden is not someone who could be easily painted with the “pro-North Korea” brush. During the Korean War, Harden reports, the U.S.: bombed and napalmed cities, towns and villages across the North. It was mostly    easy pickings for the Air Force, whose B-29s faced little or no opposition on many missions. The bombing was long, leisurely and merciless, even by the assessment of America’s own leaders. “Over a period of three years or so, we killed off — what — 20 percent of the population,” Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, told the Office of Air Force History in 1984. Although the ferocity of the bombing was criticized as racist and unjustified elsewhere in the world, it was never a big story back home. Some 70 percent of the casualties during the Korean War were civilian. We have proper names for a few of the atrocities in U.S. history involving the massacre of civilians by the military: Wounded Knee, Balangiga, My Lai. Shocking images from civilian massacres have occasionally been burned into the national imagination, such as the image of Phan Kim Thi Phuc, the young Vietnamese girl whose naked body, burning from napalm, was photographed by Nick Ut. Kim Phuc, often referred to as “the girl in the picture,” survived her burns and went on to become an inspiring antiwar and peace activist. But what about the countless atrocities committed by the United States during those three years of saturation bombing of North Korea. How many massacres on the scale of My Lai were perpetrated during that period? Do those deaths count? What about the suffering from napalm burns of those hundreds or even thousands of young North Korean girls who did not make it into any picture? Does their suffering count? In Precarious Life, Judith Butler asks, “What makes for a grievable life?” The Korean poet Ko Un, a three-times Nobel Prize for literature runner up, addresses this question in his epic collection entitled Ten Thousand Lives (Maninbo), which comprises 4,001 poems in 30 volumes. This collection contains the names of some 4,000 people and has taken 30 years to complete. While in solitary confinement after being imprisoned for his participation in the democracy movement in 1980, Ko Un began thinking about people he had met or heard about during his life. He made a promise that if he made it out of prison, he would write poems about each of them. This would be his way of making sure their lives counted. A new English translation of volumes 11-20 has recently been published, entitled, Ko Un, Maninbo: Peace & War (Bloodaxe 2015). The second half of Maninbo is, as Ko Un states in his introduction to the volume, “For the Faces of the World:” filled with random, fragmentary portraits evoking the several millions who died during the three years of the Korean War from 1950, as well as those who survived amidst the ruins. Ko Un’s poems move between different scales, from the macrologics of military strategy: The whole country was turned into scorched earth From carpet bombing by the U.S. Air Force. Who among us wanted scorched earth? Was it ruins we so ardently desired? (“Old Sim Yu-seop”) To the level of everyday human gestures: That war took away the greetings we used to exchange even with strangers. It took away customs of speaking slowly, gently. Words became faster and sharp. That war took away the clarity in the eyes of people in autumn’s cool wind. (“Other’s Eyes”) The 2015 women’s walk for peace hopes to reimagine the tense geopolitical situation in northeast Asia by staging a greeting for Korean women across the DMZ. Of course this is a movement without guarantees. Nevertheless, this peace walk, which builds on some 60 years of peace actions for Korea, is a profound step into uncharted territory and deserves our support. In “Home,” Ko Un writes: That 10,000,000 families are divided between North and South is one fact of modern Korea’s history. It is not a past that we should go back to, but the start of tomorrow. *John R. Eperjesi is a Associate Professor of Literature at Kyung Hee University in Seoul and a guest contributor to the Korea Policy Institute. He received his Ph.D in the Literary and Cultural Theory program at Carnegie Mellon University, and is the author of The Imperialist Imaginary: Visions of Asia and the Pacific in American Culture (University Press of New England, 2005). He has published articles and book reviews in Amerasia, Asian Studies Review, boundary 2, The Contemporary Pacific, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Minnesota Review, Pacific Historical Review, and is currently working on a new book on representations of the Korean War in U.S. culture. #KoreanWar #SouthKorea #peacetreaty #ChristineAhn #Armistice #WomenCrossDMZ #NorthKorea

Christine Ahn and Gloria Steinem at UN press conference, April 3, 2015. (AP Photo) By Gregory Elich* | April 20, 2015 [Originally published by MRZine | April 11, 2015] A television news program opens with a clip of marching soldiers, an obligatory image when the subject is North Korea.  A voiceover intones: “A bold, ambitious plan apparently sanctioned by Kim Jong Un.  Is he in league with the women’s group to promote peace between North and South Korea?” The program in question is the April 6th broadcast of CNN’s Situation Room, with Wolf Blitzer and Brian Todd.  The focus, an organization called Women Cross DMZ, and its audacious plan for thirty women peacemakers to walk across the demilitarized zone from North to South Korea in a symbolic gesture for peace.  Symposiums will be held in Pyongyang and Seoul, where the group will engage in dialogue with women on both sides of the Korean border.  Participants, Women Cross DMZ says, will “share our experiences and ideas of mobilizing women to bring an end to violent conflict.”  The walk is timed to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the division of the Korean Peninsula, and one of its chief aims is to help spark progress towards Korean reunification. Organized by activist Christine Ahn, the group includes an array of luminaries, including such well-known figures as honorary co-chair Gloria Steinem, and Nobel Peace Prize laureates Leymah Gbowee and Mairead Maguire. The Situation Room had a different perception of Women Cross DMZ, however.  In the lead-in to the show, Wolf Blitzer tips his audience as to how he wants them to react, terming Gloria Steinem’s participation “shocking.”  Brian Todd chimes in by calling the walk “just plain strange.” The opening segment asks if North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is “in league” with Women Cross DMZ “to promote peace between North and South Korea.”  This statement is “just plain strange,” to borrow Brian Todd’s phrase.  Do the hosts mean to suggest that Women Cross DMZ and Kim Jong Un secretly got together to plan the event?  Are we meant to suppose that promoting peace between North and South Korea is a nefarious act? Twice it is pointed out that the walk is sanctioned by North Korea.  Certainly it is, and a similar request for permission was sent to South Korea and the UN Command.  One can hardly walk across the border without obtaining permission from the nations involved. Permission does not mean, as CNN seems to imply, sponsorship.  The UN Command has responded favorably to the request, on the condition that both South and North Korea agree.  At this stage, Women Cross DMZ is awaiting a reply from Seoul. Two guests are given ample air time to condemn Ahn, accusing her of being “pro-North,” and to talk about North Korea, rather than discuss the walk itself.  This technique, an example of the logical fallacy known as ad hominem, seeks to counter an argument by evading the subject and instead directing a personal attack against the other side. A clip is shown of Ahn firmly rejecting this attack as “a cold war, McCarthyist mentality, and that kind of framework is what has enabled Korea to remain divided.”  For those of a certain bent, anyone who speaks rationally and analytically about North Korea, rather than being drunk with emotion, is automatically marked as being “pro-North.”  Setting the record straight, Ahn points out, “I am pro-peace, pro-engagement, and I am pro-dialogue.  I am pro-human rights.” Christine Ahn’s two brief moments were both marred by CNN’s bizarre decision to show her segments in the wrong aspect ratio.  The Skype session was captured in 1.33:1 format, which CNN broadcast in 1.85:1 format, widening the video by a whopping 39 percent.  The result was an image of Ms. Ahn as she might appear in a funhouse mirror. The subtle effect is to undermine the authority of the speaker, and an inattentive viewer might only register a vague feeling that there is something abnormal about the guest. Only Ahn was accorded this special treatment.  One can only conclude that either the program’s visual editor is astonishingly incompetent, or this was a deliberate attempt to subvert Ms. Ahn’s message. Ahn’s interview with CNN took fifteen minutes, but she is only given a single sentence to partially explain what Women Cross DMZ was about: “We wanted to end the state of war on the Korean Peninsula.”  She had much more to say on the topic, but those words ended up on the cutting room floor.  CNN was more interested in the segment where Ahn responds to criticism, keeping the focus of the show on the personal attacks rather than the walk. How did CNN counter Ahn’s response to critics?  By trotting out human rights accusations, including an uncorroborated story of a baby being killed, which may or may not be true, but is in any case irrelevant to the walk.  Here, CNN employed the logical fallacy known as ignoratio elenchi, in which an argument is presented that, regardless of its merits, does not address the question. Women Cross DMZ aims to advance the cause of peace and reunification.  Even if one accepts all of the assertions made in the program about human rights, that does not logically lead to the conclusion that one should not work for peace and reunification, and that the division of Korea and militarization of the peninsula are to be preferred. It has been reported that the killing of the baby took place in 1999 — at a time when Kim Jong Un was 16 years old and in no position to influence the behavior of a guard. Chosen for its emotive power, the incident is evidently regarded by The Situation Room as an argument for why Women Cross DMZ should not proceed with its planned walk. A group of Russian women could just as easily use the same reasoning in not meeting American women to exchange ideas about peace because nine prison guards killed inmate Frank Valdes in Florida State Prison that same year.  As sad as both incidents are, they have nothing to do with the need to advance international peace. No doubt CNN would counter by saying that the baby’s death 16 years ago is indicative of the current situation.  But is it?  Western media are lacking in nuance when it comes to reporting on designated enemy nations, and no attempt is made to analyze current information, put it in its context, or to assess how matters change over time.  This is not to excuse any abuses, but Western moral outrage is highly selective, almost invariably reserved for nations that the United States plans to bomb or invade, or that it wishes it could attack.  Certainly, a group of women planning a visit to U.S. ally Saudi Arabia would not get this kind of treatment, regardless of that nation’s abysmal treatment of women. Nor would it ever be argued that other women should refrain from dialogue with American women to promote peace because in recent years the United States killed tens of thousands in its invasion and occupation of Iraq, bombed Libya, and tortured prisoners.  This is to say nothing of the 1,100 people killed by police last year, or the Obama Administration’s penchant for launching drone strikes on wedding parties. If one wants to stop dialogue and the advancement of peace, a justification can be found anywhere.  At any rate, a strong case can be made that the best prospect of improving the human rights situation in North Korea would be the reunification of Korea and a lowering of tensions — as it happens, the very goals of Women Cross DMZ.  In contrast, no amount of media breast-beating and hyperventilating has accomplished anything for prisoners. In the next segment of the program, CNN accuses North Korea of recruiting women into “joy brigades” to entertain and “give pleasure” to Kim Jong Un and “the ruling elite.” This story, which has made the rounds of Western media, is based on a single source: a report in Chosun Ilbo, a rightwing South Korean newspaper notorious for printing articles about North Korea that as often as not are later shown to be fabrications.  Perusing the Chosun Ilbo article immediately reveals that it is lacking in evidence.  Four brief sentences refer to Kim Jong Un’s father and his time, vaguely and meaninglessly based on “one source” that remains anonymous.  Otherwise, there is nothing to back up the statements that “authorities are apparently recruiting fresh members” and that Kim Jong Un has “developed a taste for them.”  Chosun Ilbo adds, helpfully, “The new recruits are apparently tall and beautiful.”  One wonders about journalistic standards in the West when such nonsensical, unsourced articles are accepted unquestioningly, and their content regurgitated without investigation or analysis. The subject is another distraction, aimed at preventing viewers from giving thought to the actual intentions of Women Cross DMZ.  It has nothing to do with the walk.  Brigades of dancing women, no matter how tall and beautiful, and even if not emanating solely from the fevered imagination of a Chosun Ilbo reporter, are no reason to eschew peace and reunification. It is difficult to avoid concluding that the show was a setup from the start.  Brian Todd contacted a spokesperson for Gloria Steinem via email at 1:34 PM on the day of the broadcast.  Todd redbaited Ahn and suggested that Steinem “may not be fully realizing what she’s getting into.”  He goes on to ask: “If the group is sympathetic with the North Korean regime,” is Steinem “still planning to participate?”  A bit later, Todd suggests that some critics “believe that Ms. Steinem is attaching her name, at least loosely, to a regime” which violates human rights.  This was nothing less than an outrageous bid to blur the distinction between Women Cross DMZ and the government of North Korea. From his pushy tone, it was clear that Todd hoped to cross the line from news commentator to newsmaker, and drive a wedge between Steinem and Women Cross DMZ and break the group apart.  Steinem responded simply and with honor, surely disappointing Todd: “am proceeding on the advice of women I trust and who know the region — including Christine.” Half an hour earlier, Todd contacted Ahn, requesting an interview within three hours. Even if she had no other plans that day, it left little time to prepare.  In both messages, Todd refers to her critics and their charges, and it was clear that he had already conducted interviews with them and that they therefore had not been given the same rush treatment. To ensure that viewers get the message, Todd closes The Situation Room program by quoting detractors accusing Women Cross DMZ of being “misguided,” “naïve,” and “doing this to embarrass the South Koreans.”  To organize an event of this scope is a daunting endeavor, requiring an enormous amount of work and considerable expense. That anyone would undertake such a task based on the petty motivation of embarrassing a government simply makes no sense.  It also overlooks the obvious.  One cannot advance the cause of peace without the participation of all parties.  Engagement with women in South Korea is essential to Women Cross DMZ’s mission. It may be expected that media attacks on Women Cross DMZ will mount as the event draws nearer.  The greater the prospect of success for Women Cross DMZ, the more driven the ideological handmaidens of the warfare state will be to ridicule, demean, and debase the group.  That does not mean we have to be taken in by their misrepresentations. Women Cross DMZ is clear about its intensions: “The unresolved Korean conflict gives all governments in the region justification to further militarize and prepare for war, depriving funds for schools, hospitals, and the welfare of the people and the environment. That’s why women are walking for peace, to reunite families, and end the state of war in Korea.”  In a world torn by war and suffering, Women Cross DMZ is engaged in a laudable effort that no media outrage can derail.  One hopes that the walk will be an emerging sprout that will grow in time into a sea of flowers of similar efforts, as people say no to war and militarism and reach out to each other. To donate to Women Cross DMZ: www.peacedevelopmentfund.org/women-cross-the-dmz. Or send a check to: Peace Development Fund, PO Box 40250, San Francisco, CA 94140-0250, Memo: WomenCrossDMZ *Gregory Elich is on the Board of Directors of the Jasenovac Research Institute and the Advisory Board of the Korea Policy Institute.  He is a columnist for Voice of the People, and one of the co-authors of Killing Democracy: CIA and Pentagon Operations in the Post-Soviet Period, published in the Russian language. #KoreanWar #SouthKorea #peacetreaty #GloriaSteinem #ChristineAhn #Armistice #WomenCrossDMZ #NorthKorea

NY/NJ Sesamo (People in Solidarity with the Families of the Sewol Ferry) at April 19, 2015 Rally KPI | April 23, 2015 A year has passed since the tragic April 16th, 2014 sinking of the Sewol Ferry in South Korea, which left 304 dead – the majority of whom were high school students. Despite it being one of the deadliest disasters in Korean history, there has been no substantive investigation of the tragedy to date.  All reports indicate that the ferry was overloaded; that passengers were instructed to remain in their cabins while the captain and the crew abandoned ship; that rescue efforts were delayed or not undertaken for unexplained reasons; and missing or ignored safety regulations were part of the cause. After year-long efforts of the families of the victims, calling for a thorough and impartial investigation of tragedy, the South Korean government has instead vilified the families, instructing police and National Security forces to conduct investigations of the families and their protest activities. Nonetheless, the families have been steadfast in their demand for a special law to create an independent investigative committee with subpoena and prosecutorial powers. On April 16th, 2015, the anniversary of the disaster, rallies and protests took place not only in South Korea, but in cities in the United States as well.  In Korea, where the families have been staging protests constantly, around 13,000 police and 470 police buses were deployed, arresting 100 protestors.   It was the largest protest organized by the victims’ families in recent weeks, with crowds in the tens of thousands. There was a march and rally in New York City, April 19th, in solidarity with the Sewol Families, staged by the broad based NY/NJ SESAMO group (People in Solidarity with the Families of the Sewol Ferry). Supporters crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and then held a rally at Foley Square.  The group called out the names of the 304 victims, and stated that the rallies would continue until the Sewol Ferry is raised from the sea, intact.   As supporters spoke and sang, the group read the 4.16 Manifesto of the Sewol Families and Supporters: The Korean president abandoned Korean citizens and escaped the country. The President’s vague speech and inconsiderate behavior devastated the whole country. [On the day of one-year anniversary President Park left Korea for a Latin American  trip, after a vague and empty speech.] President Park said that the Sewol ferry will be raised to the surface for investigation. But instead of saying WHEN, she said “as soon as possible”. [This might be politically calculated, with the upcoming election in mind.] Nine missing bodies are still inside the sunken ferry. Technical aspects of its salvage were estimated long time ago, but only now, she says, can they plan and prepare   the salvage carefully. This is a shameful confession of her negligence that she did not prepare for the investigation yet. We have been waiting in vain for a firm commitment and solid decision. She said that public and private groups will jointly investigate the Sewol tragedy. Her words may sound nice but are deceptive. One might think the investigation had started. The truth is that it didn’t, because of her. Her Presidential Decree of March 27th debilitates the Sewol Special Act and disables any independent investigation.   [The presidential decree laid out a specific execution plan for the Sewol Special Act,  but the President did not consult families of the victims nor the Sewol investigation  committee regarding this. Such also damages democracy and opposes the constitution. It involves budget cuts and it installs high-ranking officials in central posts of the investigation committee. While the government needs to be inspected for its corruption and legal loopholes, the guilty party will be examining themselves, and this does not make for an independent investigation.] The government failed to rescue passengers, and it also failed to support the families of victims. Instead, the Korean government talks loudly about financial compensation, again with empty words such as “they will do their best, and “they will make an effort”. When the tragic accident is not even being investigated properly, it is disrespectful to discuss money, and they are adding insult to injury. The victims and their families have the right to have the deaths explained and to have the accident investigated.  After Sewol, we want to make a safer society, but the government has again turned its back on us. The current government is trading safety for economic profits, and they are turning the rescue operation into new business opportunities. The Sewol investigation committee wanted to examine  safety regulations overall within the society, but the government has restricted their role to marine accidents only. The President blames the value system and personality of Korean citizens for an unsafe society.  She says that Koreans are not sensitive enough about safety issues. But the government sabotaged the society’s safety net, and when faced with danger, citizens are on their own to save themselves, unless they can afford the high price of hiring rescue services. The President told the victims’ families to live like normal families. The government is trying to silence us, ordering us to “stay still” even while in danger. The government hired police to use violence and tear gas at our peaceful rallies. We are so disappointed by the President that we cancelled the anniversary memorial today. We had hoped in vain that she would cancel the Presidential Decree which nullifies the Sewol Special Act. [We march, we go on hunger strike, and 70 of us shaved our heads in protest. But she does not listen. She hires police to throw tear gas at our faces and to block our marches.] On the day of the accident and even at  its one year anniversary, the President is simply absent, physically and spiritually.  The President abandoned the people. The people now abandon the President, who does not qualify. We will march to the Blue house today.” The [brackets] refer to additional comments made by the speaker in presenting the manifesto. For details on the questions surrounding the Sewol Ferry disaster, please refer to the KPI September 2014 article: South Korea: Still Stonewalling about the Sewol. #parkgeunhye #Sewol #SouthKorea

Dr. Chung Hyun Kyung and Professor Suzy Kim at the Women Cross DMZ press conference April 24, 2015 in NYC. (Photo by Ronda Hauben) By Christine Ahn | May 4, 2015 [Originally published by IPS, NEW YORK, April 28, 2015] Christine Ahn is the International Coordinator of Women Cross DMZ, a campaign of 30 international women walking for peace and reunification of Korea in May 2015. A century ago, the suffragist Jane Addams boarded a ship with other American women peace activists to participate in a Congress of Women in The Hague. Over 1,300 women from 12 countries, “cutting across national enmities,” met to call for an end to World War I. That Congress became the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), which is now gathering in The Hague under the theme Women Stop War. Just as Addams met women across national lines to try and stop WWI 100 years ago, from May 19 to 25, a delegation of 30 women from 15 countries around the world will meet and walk with Korean women, north and south, to call for an end to the Korean War. As WWII came to a close, Korea, which had been colonized by Japan for 35 years, faced a new tragedy. After Japan’s surrender in 1945, the United States proposed (and the Soviets accepted) temporarily dividing Korea along the 38th parallel in an effort to prevent Soviet troops, who were fighting the Japanese in the north, from occupying the whole country. Japanese troops north of the line would surrender to the Soviets; those to the south would surrender to U.S. authorities. It was meant to be a temporary division, but Washington and Moscow failed to establish a single Korean government, thereby creating two separate states in 1948: the Republic of Korea in the south and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the north. We are walking on May 24, International Women’s Day for Disarmament and Peace, because we believe that there must be an end to the Korean War that has plagued the Korean peninsula with intense militarization. This division precipitated the Korean War (1950-53), often referred to in the United States as “the forgotten war”, when each side sought to reunite the country by force. Despite enormous destruction and loss of life, neither side prevailed. In July 1953, fighting was halted when North Korea (representing the Korean People’s Army and the Chinese People’s Volunteers) and the United States (representing the United Nations Command) signed the Korean War Armistice Agreement at Panmunjom, near the 38th parallel. This temporary cease-fire stipulated the need for a political settlement among all parties to the war (Article 4 Paragraph 60). It established the Demilitarized Zone, two-and-a-half miles wide and still heavily mined, as the new border between the two sides. It urged the governments to convene a political conference within three months, in order to reach a formal peace settlement. Over 62 years later, no peace treaty has been agreed, with the continuing fear that fighting could resume at any time. In fact, in 2012, during another military crisis with North Korea, former U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta acknowledged that Washington was, “within an inch of war almost every day.” In 1994, as President Clinton weighed a pre-emptive military first strike against North Korea’s nuclear reactors, the U.S. Department of Defense estimated that an outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula would result in 1.5 million casualties within the first 24 hours and 6 million casualties within the first week. This assessment predates North Korea’s possession of nuclear weapons, which would be unimaginable in terms of destruction and devastation. We have no choice but to engage; the cost of not engaging is just too high. The only way to prevent the outbreak of a catastrophic confrontation, as a 2011 paper from the U.S. Army War College counsels, is to “reach agreement on ending the armistice from the Korean War”—in essence, a peace agreement—and “giv[e] a formal security guarantee to North Korea tied to nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction.” Recent history has shown that when standing leaders are at a dangerous impasse, the role of civil society can indeed make a difference in averting war and lessening tensions. In 1994 as President Clinton contemplated military action, without the initial blessing of the White House, former President Jimmy Carter flew to Pyongyang armed with a CNN camera crew to negotiate the terms of the Agreed Framework with former North Korean leader Kim Il Sung. And in 2008, the New York Philharmonic performed in Pyongyang, which significantly contributed towards warming relations between the United States and DPRK. Christiane Amanpour, who traveled with CNN to cover the philharmonic, wrote that U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry, a former negotiator with North Korea, explained to her that this was a magic moment, with different peoples speaking the same language of music. Amanpour said Perry believed that the event could positively influence the governments reaching a nuclear agreement, “but that mutual distrust and fear can only be overcome by people-to-people diplomacy.” That is what we are hoping to achieve with the 2015 International Women’s Walk for Peace and Reunification of Korea, citizen-to-citizen diplomacy led by women. We are also walking on the 15th anniversary of the passage of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325, which calls for the full and equal participation of women in conflict prevention and resolution, and in peacebuilding. Women from Cambodia, Guatemala, Liberia and Northern Ireland all provided crucial voices for peace as they mobilized across national, ethnic and religious divides and used family and community networks to mitigate violence and heal divisions among their communities. Similarly, our delegation will walk for peace in Korea and to cross the De-Militarized Zone separating millions of families, reminding the world on the tragic 70th anniversary of Korea’s division by foreign powers that the Korean people are from an ancient culture united by the same food, language, culture, customs, and history. We are walking on May 24, International Women’s Day for Disarmament and Peace, because we believe that there must be an end to the Korean War that has plagued the Korean peninsula with intense militarization. Instead of spending billions on preparing for war, governments could instead redirect these critically needed funds for schools, childcare, health, caring for the elderly. The first step is reconciliation through engagement and dialogue. That is why we are walking. To break the impasse among the warring nations—North Korea, South Korea, and the United States—to come to the peacemaking table to finally end the Korean War. As Addams boarded the ship to The Hague, she and other women peace activists were mocked for seeking alternative ways than war to resolve international disputes. Addams dismissed criticism that they were naïve and wild-eyed idealists: “We do not think we can settle the war. We do not think that by raising our hands we can make the armies cease slaughter. We do think it is valuable to state a new point of view. We do think it is fitting that women should meet and take counsel to see what may be done.” It is only fitting that our women’s peace walk in Korea takes place on this centennial anniversary year of the first international act of defiance of war women ever undertook. I am honored to be among another generation of women gathering at The Hague to carry on the tradition of women peacemakers engaged in citizen diplomacy to end war. #SouthKorea #peacetreaty #ChristineAhn #Armistice #WomenCrossDMZ #NorthKorea

Peace and Planet March and Festival in NYC, April 26th, 2015 (photo KPI) KPI | May 9, 2015 The 2015 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) is meeting at the United Nations in New York from April 27 to May 22, 2015. The conference in which NPT member states “review the progress of the Treaty” towards achieving nonproliferation is hosted every five years by the United Nations. This year’s conference coincides with the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the 70th anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japanese rule and the onset of its cold war division at the 38th parallel. Civil society groups from Korea and Japan also visited New York to speak at the NPT review conference and to participate in the Peace and Planet Conference, April 24- 25, a parallel conference of non-governmental organizations convened in part to call upon the NPT member states to immediately establish a timetable to ban all nuclear weapons. A new voice among those heard at both conferences was that of Korean survivors of the Hiroshima atomic bombings. When the bombs fell, Korea was a colony of Japan and millions had been forcibly taken from Korea to work in Japan’s military factories and mines, and 200,000 Korean women coerced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army. One in seven casualties from the bombings were Koreans and of those who survived, few received help from Japan, the United States or South Korea as they struggled with radiation poisoning, and continue to battle second and third generation radiation related illnesses. Even the memorial to the Koreans who perished, built in 1970 by Korean residents of Hiroshima, was not allowed to be situated within the Hiroshima Peace Park until 1999, after considerable community pressure. For the first time, Korean survivors of the Hiroshima atomic bomb blast spoke publicly in the U.S. about their continued suffering, demanding justice and the medical help for which they have been waiting 70 years. The speakers came from Hapcheon, South Korea, known as the “Hiroshima of Korea.” Most of the Korean A-Bomb victims originated from Hapcheon and returned there after World War II. The following are excerpts from the testimony of two of the representatives of the Hapcheon Chapter of Korean Atomic Victims’ Association, given at the civil society session of the NPT review conference and the Peace and Planet Conference. Sim Jin-Tae My name is Sim Jin Tae, I am an Atomic Bomb survivor from South Korea. I was born in Hiroshima in 1943.  I was there when the atomic bomb was dropped, and as a result, I became exposed to radiation. At the time, 100,000 out of the total 740,000 victims were Koreans. The majority of the Korean A-bomb victims were those who had been forcibly conscripted by colonial Japan. My father too had been conscripted as a laborer at a military base in Hiroshima. Forty three thousand Korean survivors of the atomic bomb returned to South Korea after August 15, 1945. But after living in abject poverty and facing social discrimination, many died from the aftereffects of the bomb without any medical care. Currently, there are only 2650 survivors registered in the South Korean Atomic Bomb victims’ Association. But the Japanese government has ignored the Korean A-bomb survivors. For decades, we each had to sue the Japanese government as individuals. While the Japanese government covers the full cost of medical treatment for Japanese survivors, it discriminates against Korean survivors by limiting their medical coverage. Japan needs to stop distorting the truth about its history of war and colonial conquest, and needs to apologize to the victims, as well as compensate the victims. In the town of Hapcheon, where I currently reside, there are approximately 660 atomic bomb survivors. Hapcheon is often referred to as Hiroshima of South Korea. In Hiroshima’s Peace Park, there is not any information about why atomic bomb victims had to be bombed. In Hapcheon, we seek to build a true Global Peace Park that can reveal the truth about the bombings. We want to build a peace park that questions the U.S.’s responsibility for using nuclear weapons and shows the world why we must prohibit the use of any nuclear weapon. Over the course of the past few weeks, we’ve been hearing about the bombs that dropped 70 years ago and the tragic stories of those who suffered as a result of the bombings. However, there have not been concrete actions taken to figure out what exactly atomic bomb victims can do to achieve justice. We’ve already said all we could about our experiences. We have testified enough. Now it is time for us to act. We, the Korean atomic bomb survivors have come together with second and third generation descendants to lead a movement that will establish a special law for Korean atomic bomb survivors. The Japanese government identifies itself to be the only nation in the world to have been a victim to nuclear weapons. However, people from 33 different nations who were living in Japan also fell victim to the atomic bombs at the time. To all of the victims of nuclear weapons (living in the 33 countries), let us organize ourselves and create a solidarity network. Even if just the atomic bomb victims in China, Taiwan, the U.S., and South Korea came together, that would strengthen this struggle. Atomic bomb victims in those nations, let us come together to demand accountability from the U.S. for its use of nuclear weapons. Peace-loving global citizens and A-bomb victims, let us stand together and renounce the non-apologetic U.S. government for its use of nuclear weapons, and the non-apologetic Japanese government for its aggressive wars and colonial occupation. A few days ago, we along with South Korean delegates of SPARK (Solidarity for Peace and Reunification of Korea) and PSPD (People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy) [who came to participate in the NPT Conference] met with the U.S. State Department. As the nation-state responsible for the use of atomic bombs, the U.S. State Department should determine who exactly will be accountable to the Korean victims. During the meeting with the representatives of the State Department, our delegation presented reports and data about the situation of Korean A-bomb victims, and made demands for the U.S. government to conduct a thorough investigation on the humanitarian impact of the atomic bombings (on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). After meeting with us, the U.S. State Department expressed their lack of familiarity on the experiences of Korean A-bomb victims. Is this what a country that used the first nuclear weapons should be saying? How can representatives of the Obama Administration, which has made claims to pushing for a nuclear-free world, say something like this? How can they not know anything about the Korean victims who have suffered from the U.S.’s atomic bombs? We realized from this meeting that, in order for us to put pressure on the U.S. government to do anything, we require more support and greater solidarity. I spoke at the United Nations headquarters last Friday on the issue of Korean A-bomb victims. Actually, that was the first time in history that such a testimony from a Korean A-bomb survivor has ever been presented to the UN. We have also requested to meet with various representatives of the UN, but so far, we have yet to receive any response. All this lack of response and respect for Korean A-bomb victims is indicative of the fact that the UN is failing to serve its true purpose and fulfill its duty. So, we want to ask you for your help on how we, the victims of nuclear devastation, together with civil society groups, can move forward with this issue. How we can get this issue of supporting A-bomb victims resolved at a United Nations General Assembly. Recognize, Apologize, Investigate, and Compensate for A-bomb Damage Suffered by the Korean Victims! Kim Bong-dae My name is Kim Bong-dae. I am here on behalf of my wife and son. I am here seeking solidarity as we continue our struggle for the rights of second generation descendants of A-bomb victims and fight to establish a Special Law that can support them, as well as protect their well-being. At age 6, my wife survived the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. She has suffered her entire life from skin disease, a tumor in her lower back, and osteoporosis. My son Kim Hyeong-ryul died in 2005 of a rare terminal illness called congenital immunoglobulin deficiency. It was because of hereditary transmission of radiation poisoning from the A-bomb damage. When he learned that he contracted his illness through hereditary transmission of radiation poisoning from his mother’s exposure to the atomic bomb damage, my son began to raise the issue around second generation descendants of A-bomb victims. The South Korean government, however, has turned its back on the Korean A-bomb survivors. The government has demonstrated dereliction of duty when it comes (especially) to second generation descendants of A-bomb victims. My son organized second generation descendants and mobilized them to struggle for a special law to be enacted for the descendants of atomic bomb victims suffering hereditary transmission of diseases linked to radiation exposure. He even went to Japan to attend public hearings on the matter. Since my son started this movement 10 years ago, the South Korean government has put the enactment of the special law on hold. However, the U.S., Japanese, and South Korean governments refuse to recognize the realities of hereditary transmission of the A-bomb damage. Even Japanese second generation victims have yet be recognized by their government. Following the atomic bombings, the U.S. established the Radiation Effects Research Foundation in Japan. And while it has been monitoring the health of second generation descendants of A-bomb victims, the research foundation claimed in 2007 that it could not find clear evidence of the connection between the atomic bomb damage and the illnesses contracted by second generation descendants. The Radiation Effects Research Foundation poses that there needs to be more research focused on looking at the hereditary/genetic effects of radiation exposure. One researcher from the Foundation, however, personally admitted to the existence of the links between the A-bomb damages and the heredity of radiation poisoning. The Japanese and U.S. governments, however, have yet to recognize the atomic bombings’ radiation effects on heredity, because such a non-admission continues to allow them to avoid taking any responsibility for causing the nuclear devastation. However, In 2013, South Gyeongsang Province in South Korea investigated 1125 people, who were either first, second or third generation A-bomb victims and their descendants. In all, 20.2% of descendants of survivors were found to have congenital deficiencies or hereditary diseases. My son Kim Hyeong-ryul and the 1300 second-generation descendants who suffer transmittable diseases as a consequence of the A-bomb were and still are living proof that the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons is permanent and is passed on through generations. The descendants of the A-bomb survivors had no choice but to be born into this world as hereditary A-bomb victims due to Japan’s war of aggression and the U.S.’ anti-humanitarian use of nuclear weapons. These descendants of Korean A-bomb survivors are the most extreme examples of victims of war crimes by the U.S. and Japan. The U.S., Japanese, and South Korean governments must recognize the transmission of A-bomb damage to second and third generation descendants. To recognize their crimes and apologize would be the least of their duties as the responsible parties of the nuclear devastation. Despite predictions that the bombs would cause enormous damage, death, and injury, the United States chose to drop the first atomic bombs. Therefore, the United States must take responsibility for its crime against the hundreds of thousands of A-bomb victims from 33 different nations, including Korea. The U.S. has yet to even apologize for its crimes against humanity, let alone accept responsibility, after 70 years. The banning of nuclear weapons would not even be assertive enough… We demand an honest and sincere apology from the U.S. government. The South Korean government must exact from Japan compensation for A-bomb victims, a condition which was excluded from the treaty that normalized relations between Japan and South Korea. In this 70th year since the atomic bombings, we must come together – along with civil society groups – to make sure that the enactment of the special law for A-bomb victims and their descendants comes into fruition. We ask that you please help us to achieve this. Humankind must be made aware of the horrors suffered by A-bomb survivors in Korea and around the world. The United Nations, charged with guarding peace and human rights for all humankind, should take leadership and actively work to ban and eliminate all nuclear weapons. #Japan #SouthKorea #AtomicBomb #UnitedNations #Nuclear #WWII

Members of the WomenCrossDMZ delegation arrive in Beijing. (L to R) Deann Borshay Liem, Christine Ahn, Gay Dillingham and Code Pink’s Jodie Evans at airport. (photo WomenCrossDMZ) Women Cross DMZ for “A Different Future, A Different Possibility for Korea” An Interview with Christine Ahn* By Paul Liem** | May 15, 2015 The international delegation of the Women Cross DMZ Peace Walk will cross the DMZ from the northern to the southern side of the 38th parallel in Korea at noon on May 24, 2015, KST. This interview took place on May 15, 2015 as Christine Ahn was preparing to depart for Beijing, en route to Pyongyang. On May 22, 2015, Ahn filed the following update with KPI. Update: On May 22, 2015 the International Delegation agreed by consensus to cross at Kaesong following the news from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) that the Korean People’s Army received an official reply from the Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Korea (ROK) that if we were to cross at Panmunjom we would be violating the Armistice Agreement. We were also told that the United Nations Command (UNC) communicated across Panmunjom by loudspeaker that we would need UN Security Council approval to cross at Panmunjom. Given how sensitive the situation is at the DMZ and that any misstep could lead to a full-scale war, we feel we have made the right choice to cross at Panmunjom. We want both Korean governments to give their support for our walk, and at this juncture in this political moment, this is where the two Koreas are at. But the incredibly wonderful news is that we have bought one-way tickets to Pyongyang and will be crossing the 38th parallel, the artificial division that is the source of so much suffering. As Korean women, north and south, cannot cross, we are crossing for them, calling for an end to this unresolved Korean War and giving light to a new possibility for Korea. [Liem – May 15, 2015] Can you please give us an update on the status of the international delegation’s request to cross the DMZ and comment on the recommendation of South Korea’s Ministry of Unification (MoU) that the delegation cross at Kaesong rather than Panmunjom? [Ahn] Here is the status of all three parties, North Korea, South Korea and the United Nations Command (UNC). On May 4th North Korea’s Committee for Solidarity with the World’s People, which is our host committee, sent a letter by hand through the Red Cross to South Korea’s Ministry of Unification (MoU) requesting permission to allow us to cross the DMZ by foot at Panmunjom. The South Korean MoU just responded yesterday. The MoU advised us that, after consulting the UNC, it decided to allow us to cross the DMZ, but recommended that we cross via Kyonghui Railway, which is the railroad that runs along the road from Kaesong and not at Panmunjom, by foot. While we’re happy to hear that the south side finally announced that we can cross the DMZ, we are disappointed in its apparent decision to deny us crossing at Panmunjom. We felt very strongly from the beginning that we are walking to end the Korean War, and we chose Panmunjom as our site because that was where the armistice agreement was signed, and it is therefore the most symbolic, living, physical manifestation of the unresolved Korean War and the division of millions of families. So we will need to discuss among the international delegates which is the right course of action for us to take. However, we did hear from the Yonhap reporter who broke the story yesterday, that when pressed, the MoU said that if the international delegates were to cross at Panmunjom we would not be arrested for illegal entry. So there’s this gray area that we need to explore. Interestingly, the UNC officer, John Burzynski, sent me an email last week where he was starting to signal us that Panmunjom would not be an option. What he said was that Panmunjom is generally reserved for official government purposes and that Kaesong is a more appropriate route for civilian crossings. While I understand that to be the case, that is precisely why we would like to cross at Panmunjom. The good news is that he didn’t cite all the provisions of the armistice agreement which might indicate that such a crossing by civilians would not be permitted. As it stands now, the way that I see it is that we have clear permission to cross the DMZ. It’s just a question of where that will happen and, there is some room for interpretation here. [Liem] You think the UNC would be open to allowing the crossing at Panmunjom insofar as Mr. Buzynsky didn’t cite legalities to discourage the international delegation’s plans to cross at that particular site? [Ahn] The UNC has attempted to appear that it is neutral. They have said that when we get approval from both sides they will facilitate our crossing. So right now we don’t have a “yes” from South Korea for crossing at Panmunjom. But we don’t have a definite “no,” either. They said that if we crossed at Panmunjom we wouldn’t be arrested for illegal entry. So it’s as though we’re 75% of the way, good to go, for crossing at Panmunjom. So I think there is some room for flexibility in this case. [Liem] Could you tell us about the meetings or conferences the international delegates will have with women in the north and south? Can you talk a little about what will take place at those gatherings? [Ahn] There will be an international peace symposium in Pyongyang in addition to the peace walk. The theme of the conference will be the impact of war on women and women mobilizing to end war. We’ve requested that the speakers illuminate what the impact has been of the war on women and children in North Korea. We don’t yet know who they will be, but in the morning session we expect there will be up to six North Korean women giving testimony about their experiences surviving the war and its legacies, including sanctions which continue to this day. We’ve also asked that the speakers talk about the human rights issues that arise in their daily lives. We do know that we will hear from a speaker who will share the North Korean women’s experience working with South Korean women on the comfort women issue. We are looking forward to that. On the south side there will be a similar conference. We’ve really tried to make it equal, so the South Korean women will also have a series of speakers presenting on essentially the same topics. At the conferences the international delegates will also share their experiences in organizing with women for peace in their countries. So there will be Mairead Maquire, Nobel Laureate from Ireland, Leymah Gbowee, Nobel Laureate from Liberia, Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink, Suzuyo Takazato from Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence and human rights attorney, Patricia Guerrero, who is coming from Columbia to name a few. So it’s an opportunity to bring the insights and experiences of these and the many other phenomenal women to Korea. [Liem] Do you foresee at any point the possibility, maybe as a result of this peace walk, of someday a joint conference of Korean women together, from the north and south? [Ahn] That has definitely been on the table among the international delegates. I know that we are already dreaming up lots of other possibilities for collaboration as well. So many amazing ideas have already emerged; for example, possible work on a land mines campaign. This would be a campaign to de-mine sections of the DMZ, to get government approval to allow such activities to take place. What’s so beautiful about women is how we focus on concretizing our visions. We ask what do we need to do to begin the physical work of ending this war, and making this DMZ a relic of the past. And then we start. [Liem] Will you be taking any sort of message from women in North Korea to the women in South Korea? [Ahn] There will be a joint declaration of our peace walk. How that has come about is very interesting. Everyone has such different concepts and even the choice of words is different among the parties. I drafted a declaration about why we’re doing this peace walk. The international delegation weighed in; South Korean women weighed in; and then we sent it to North Korea and the women there weighed in. It went through numerous iterations. In the end, the declaration as edited in English was approved by the international delegation and by the North and South Korean sides. [Liem] Can you give an example of an issue in the declaration that was viewed differently by the three parties? [Ahn] Well, for example, the international women felt very strongly that we could not leave out reference to human rights. As you know that has been one of the criticisms of our delegation; how we could go into a country that has gross human rights violations and not be even willing to engage or discuss about it, many have said. As you know our response, as Gloria Steinem so eloquently put it, is that that’s a “bananas” question. How could you go into a country that you’re basically, technically, at war with and start lodging accusations against them? Reagan never did that when he went to meet with Gorbachev. Nonetheless we are of course walking to improve human rights. We’re walking to reunite families and we’re walking to ensure that women are involved at all levels of the peace building process. We’re walking to end the Korean War and to replace the armistice with a peace treaty. We are walking because we believe that peace is a fundamental condition for human rights, and that the current stalemate is contributing to the worsening of human rights on both sides of the DMZ. [Liem] How did the women in the north and south view this issue? [Ahn] The South Korean women were a little nervous that we wanted to reference human rights in the declaration. There are many seasoned activists from the south side who have been involved in discussions with North Korean women in other contexts. Some of them have been involved since the 1990s, at the first North East Asia peace conferences. And during the sunshine policy era, the Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun years, there was frequent engagement and contact. From their experiences they advised us not to use the term “human rights” and other politically volatile language. However, the international delegates felt we really need to include this. I think the phrase we originally proposed was something like “whereas governments view the state of war to justify repression of human rights …” That is how we sent the document to North Korea. I went to Pyongyang last week to make final arrangements for the logistics of our visit, and to discuss the text of the declaration. I was a bit concerned about the declaration. But when I got the document back, I couldn’t believe it. There were just three changes. And of course the human rights issue was one of them. The way that they framed it was something like “whereas a state of war and instability affect …” and then something about “sovereignty.” I can’t quite recall. But I was trying to think fast on my feet so I asked, could we change it to, and I don’t know why we didn’t do this from the get go, but I asked, could we change it to “whereas peace and engagement is an important foundation to improve human rights …” They liked that. That is the final concept that they accepted. It’s something to the effect, “whereas peace and stability are an important foundation to improve human rights….” In any case I have to say I was impressed with their flexibility and willingness to compromise. [Liem] At this point is the text finalized and will there be a signing ceremony? [Ahn] Yes. We will make it public when we get to Korea. It will be signed in the north and south starting with the peace rally in Pyongyang as we gather at the base of the reunification tower to begin our peace walk. There will be a short speech by Chairwoman Kim Jong Suk of the Korean Committee for the Solidarity with the World’s People. . She will give the keynote speech at this rally on behalf of the North Korean women. She will sign it, and several other North Korean women will sign as well. Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire is giving the keynote speech on behalf of the international delegation, and the rest of the international delegates will sign the document in Panmunjom. Three of the delegates will read the declaration at the rally: Gloria Steinem, Leymah Gbowee, and Liza Maza, a former Philippine congresswoman and member of Gabriella Network. Then we will begin our peace walk. In the south it will be signed by the members of the organizing committee for Women Cross DMZ. And we’re also doing a symbolic stitching together of a traditional quilt. There are four sections being prepared; two, by international women, and Korean women of the Diaspora. The other two corners are being prepared by women in north and south Korea. We will stitch them together at the peace symposia in the north and south. [Liem] Have you had any contact or do you have any sense of how the Obama administration is viewing the peace walk? [Ahn] After our first press conference the U.S. State Department issued a statement warning Americans against going to North Korea. That may have been coincidence, but we were concerned that the message was being directed at us. But we don’t know. In another instance Vana Kim, who is a member of the international delegation and a U.S. citizen, visited Ambassador Mark Lippert’s office to explain the peace walk and ask for U.S. government support. His staff explained that the U.S. doesn’t endorse such civil society activities as ours. But they affirmed, generally, that the U.S. supports peace and reunification and all efforts in this direction. Naturally, we don’t have official support. But perhaps we have received some quiet support. The UNC, which agreed to facilitate our crossing, is, as you know, headed up by the U.S. Forces in Korea. In all honesty, beyond Vana’s visit to Lippert’s office we haven’t made a tremendous effort to reach out to the Obama administration. Neither have we reached out to the leaders of North and South Korea. We view our peace walk as an act of citizen’s diplomacy, women to women, as much as possible. [Liem] Do you plan to make any efforts to make recommendations to the State Department or congress after the peace walk? [Ahn] Absolutely. We are planning to organize a congressional briefing on the occasion of the July 27th Armistice Day. We’re committed to seeing this through to the signing of a peace treaty. Already there are so many women who have written to us to express their desire to join the peace walk and to somehow become part of this global movement. So we hope to do lots of educational briefing for various governments. For example the Women Peace Maker Program, which designated May 24 as International Women’s Day for Peace and Disarmament, is based in The Hague in the Netherlands. It is supporting the peace walk especially because the Netherlands was one of the countries that fought in the Korean War under the UNC. A goal of our campaign is to engage with women from all those countries that fought in the war and, in this way, create political pressure within those countries to advocate for an end to the Korean War. [Liem] What do you think are the prospects that something could occur in this final period of the Obama Administration to bring peace to Korea? [Ahn] It feels like it’s a great time to be doing this because President Obama has shown that diplomacy works. He has been able to cut through entrenched cold war relations with Cuba and also with Iran. We feel that ending the Korean War, along with his initiatives with Cuba and Iran, could be the tri-partite success of his foreign policy legacy. [Liem] Wherever you cross the DMZ, whether it is Kaesong or Panmunjom, how will you feel after this long haul of organizing the peace walk? [Ahn] It’s been incredibly emotional. I got a message yesterday from Lee Jinock, a member of the South Korean women’s organizing committee, and a longtime friend of mine. She wrote that the women of the committee are working around the clock. That they have children; they have full time careers. Everything is suffering, their families and professional lives, but it nevertheless feels good to be doing this, she wrote. They have been inspired and moved. They feel that the perspective, vision and boldness of the international women have inspired them to think about a different possibility. They’ve been in a rut, she continued, thinking that this is the status quo, and this is the way it’s always going to be. But now the women of our organizing committee see that there could be a different future, a different possibility for Korea. I feel the same way. *Christine Ahn is a member of the Women Cross DMZ Peace Walk Organizing Committee, a columnist and organizer for peace and justice in the U.S., Korea, and Asia Pacific. She co-founded Women De-Militarize the Zone, Korea Policy Institute, and National Campaign to End the Korean War, and was Senior Policy Analyst at Global Fund for Women. ** Paul Liem is Board Chairperson of the Korea Policy Institute #ChristineAhn #NorthKorea #SouthKorea #WomenCrossDMZ

“Women Cross DMZ” walk in Pyongyang, North Korea, at the Monument of Reunification. (Photo: Niana Liu) By Ann Wright | July 22, 2015 Originally published in Truthout | Op-Ed When we began our project “Women Cross the DMZ,” we knew the landmines in the DMZ would be nothing compared to the explosions of anger, vitriol and hate from those who oppose any contact with North Korea. Some US and South Korean government officials, academics, media talking heads and paid bloggers would have their knives out for any group that dared challenge the dangerous status quo on the Korean peninsula. No surprise that the knives have been attempting to slice away at the remarkable worldwide publicity our trip to both North and South Korea created. The latest slice and dice article, “How North Korea’s Marchers for Peace Became Fellow Travelers,” by Thor Halvorssen and Alex Gladstein of the “Human Rights Foundation,” was published July 7, 2015, in Foreign Policy. Halvorssen and the “Human Rights Foundation” are reportedly associated with an Islamophobic and anti-LGBT agenda. The authors’ goal seems to be to intimidate any group working for peace and reconciliation in Korea by using the issue of North Korean human rights violations to scare off groups from contact with North Korea. For these detractors, peace and reconciliation in various parts of the world might mean they will be out of issues and jobs as their livelihood quite possibly is made from undercutting attempts to resolve contentious and dangerous issues. In the lengthy article, their fixation on virtually every word, written or spoken, made by members of the delegation, centered on two themes: The only possible result of visiting North Korea is to give legitimacy to the government; and if you don’t hammer the North Korean government on human rights issues on your first visit, you have lost all credibility. It seems apparent that the authors have never been involved in the delicate art of diplomacy. As a diplomat in the State Department for 16 years, I learned that if your goal isto foster dialogue, you must first build some level of familiarity and trust before you can go on to difficult issues. Of course, Halvorssen and Gladstein’s commentary is not unique. In every international challenge, whether it deals with Iran, Cuba or North Korea, a cottage industry of writers emerges to make their fame and fortune on a confrontational approach to the governments. Some of the “think tanks” and organizations they represent are bankrolled by a handful of ideological billionaires or corporations in the weapons industry that benefit from fueling the status quo, continued sanctions, and a military approach to problems that only have political solutions. From the beginning our mission was clear: to bring international attention to the unresolved issues created 70 years ago by the division of Korea in 1945 by the United States and Russia. We call for all parties to implement the agreements agreed to 63 years ago in theJuly 27, 1953 Armistice. We firmly believe that the unresolved Korean conflict gives all governments in the region, including Japan, China and Russia, justification to further militarize and prepare for war, diverting funds for schools, hospitals, and the welfare of thepeople and the environment. Of course, this justification also is used by US policy makers in their latest strategy, the US “pivot” to Asia and the Pacific. We callfor an end to that very profitable war footing, which is why the knives are out for us. Without a doubt, North and South Koreans have much to resolve in the process of reconciliation and perhaps eventual reunification, including economic, political, nuclear issues, human rights and many, many others. Our mission was not to tackle those inter-Korean issues ourselves but to bring international attention to the unresolved international conflict that is very dangerous for us all and to encourage dialogue to begin again, particularly among the United States, North Korea and South Korea. That’s why our group went to both North and South Korea. That’s why we called for reunification of families and women’s leadership in peace building. That’s why we walked in North Korea and South Korea – and crossed the DMZ – calling for an end of the state of war on the Korean peninsula with a peace treaty to finally end the 63-year old Korean War. And that’s why we will remain engaged no matter what the pundits write, because in the end, if groups like ours don’t push for peace, our governments are prone to go to war. Ann Wright is a 29-year, US Army/Army Reserves veteran, who retired as a colonel and a former US diplomat. She resigned in March 2003 in opposition to the war on Iraq. She served in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia and Mongolia. In December 2001 she was a member of the small team that reopened the US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. She is the co-author of the book “Dissent: Voices of Conscience.” http://www.voicesofconscience.com #KoreanWar #peacetreaty #Armistice #WomenCrossDMZ #NorthKorea

Women Cross DMZ international delegation with South Korean organizers (May 24, 2015) By Suzy Kim* | August 17, 2015 Originally published jointly by the Asia-Pacific Journal and the Nautilus Peace and Security Network (NAPSNet) On May 24, 2015, thirty women peacemakers from fifteen nations, including American feminist activist Gloria Steinem and two Nobel Peace laureates, Mairead Maguire from Northern Ireland and Leymah Gbowee from Liberia, walked with Korean women of the North and South to call for an end to the Korean War and the peaceful reunification of Korea on the seventieth anniversary of its division. The arbitrary division of the peninsula in 1945 by the United States and the Soviet Union led to the creation of two separate states, setting the stage for an all-out civil war in 1950 that became an international conflict. After nearly 4 million people were killed, mostly Korean civilians, fighting was halted when North Korea, China, and the United States representing the UN Command signed a ceasefire agreement in 1953, which called for a political conference within three months to reach a peace settlement. Over 60 years later, we are still waiting.  To renew the call for a peace settlement by offering a model of international engagement, Women Cross DMZ organized peace symposiums in Pyongyang and Seoul where women shared experiences of mobilizing to bring an end to violent conflict, and crossed the two-mile wide Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that separates millions of Korean families as a reminder that division can be overcome.  As one of the members of the organizing committee of Women Cross DMZ, I travelled with other international women peacemakers to meet face-to-face with Korean women on both sides of the DMZ and cross the military demarcation line that divides Korea. On the seventieth anniversary of Korea’s partition this August 2015, I write as a historian of modern Korea to reflect upon the experience specifically from a feminist standpoint. One constructive definition of feminism defines it as: The belief that women and men are, and have been, treated differently by our society, and that women have frequently and systematically been unable to participate fully in all social arenas and institutions; A desire to change that situation; and That this gives a ‘new’ point-of-view on society, when eliminating old assumptions about why things are the way they are, and looking at it from the perspective that women are not inferior and men are not ‘the norm’.[1] On all these counts, I am a feminist and so was the explicit goal of the Women’s Peace Walk: to call attention to the need to formally end the Korean War through the full participation of women in the peace process so that long-separated families may be reunited.[2] While peace is not solely a feminist agenda, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1325 fifteen years ago, confirming that women, who comprise half of humanity, must rightfully be part of any peace process.  In the case of Korea, the divided state of the peninsula heightens militarization and masculinization of society, abetting everyday forms of sexism as well as covert misogynist violence against women. Politically, priority is given to the military and national security over that of social welfare and human security, which affects both women and men. In order to share these concerns and the many different struggles women have engaged in to challenge war-making and militarization, we met with women of both Koreas on formal occasions such as the peace symposiums planned in the months leading up to the crossing, but also through informal interactions during bus rides and mealtimes. It is a historical fact that modern warfare has increasingly come to target civilians with an inordinate impact on women and children.  One striking example of the impact of the current division system on Korean women can be seen from the disproportionately large number of women among North Korean refugees, topping at 80 percent this year.[3]Furthermore, according to estimates by aid workers, 80 to 90 percent of female refugees from North Korea are trafficking victims.[4]Such gendered analysis brings into greater focus the experience of women and girls in armed conflictand militarized societies, providing crucial insights into the day-to-day consequences of the ongoing war on women’s lives. To be clear, women are neither “natural”victims nor peacemakers; we are no better suited than men to work for peace despite consistent misunderstanding that advocating women’s participation in the peace process must rely on a belief in essentialized gender roles that see women as “natural-born” pacifists.  Women have become iconic peacemakers insofar as the vast majority of caretakers in contemporary times are women.[5]The everyday reproductive labor consigned to many women has become the basis for women’s call for the “valorization of everyday life” so that the disruption and violence caused by war and militarism are not accepted as given, but problematized and challenged.[6] In this essay, I begin by exposing the subtle forms of sexism embedded in the critical reaction to our Peace Walk while debunking the specific arguments made against Women Cross DMZ and the women of both Koreas who supported and co-organized the walk. Then, I situate the Peace Walk within the broader history of the global women’s peace movement, and finally go on to share some of my experiences behind-the-scenes of both organizing and participating in the Peace Walk that illustrate a feminist history of Women Cross DMZ. Debunking Sexism Thanks to the persistent work of the women’s movement, it has become increasingly unacceptable to overtly belittle or discriminate against women, but subtle forms of gender discrimination (and more overt forms such as the wage gap) continue and seem to manifest in some of the vocal reactions against Women Cross DMZ. Often coming from men, we were painted as naïve do-gooders whose hearts might be in the right place, but certainly could not understand the complexities of the Korean situation. Unfortunately, such attitudes came from the right, left, and those in between.  For example, Stephan Haggard couched his own support for the walk as “soft and fuzzy” even while acknowledging that the group consisted of “high-powered women,” warning that “We need to be clear-eyed. The poverty, malnutrition and even starvation of the North Korean population are not the result of sanctions; they are attributable to the nuclear ambitions, bloated military and ideological absurdities of the regime.”[7] Numerous scholars, such asRudiger Frank,[8]have shown how sanctions have comprehensive detrimental effects on a population, but somehow women’s opposition to sanctions is labeled naïve. Worse still, in a follow-up blog post evaluating the Peace Walk, Haggard writes that “the main question is simple: how badly did they get played?”[9]As I will describe below, this was no game or walk in the park, and we were not “played”. Another sympathetic critic,Tae Yang Kwak, aired his disappointment this way: “Despite their laudable goals and inspirational vision, Women Cross DMZ failed in their execution. They failed to collaborate with South Korean women and a broad spectrum of NGOs. They failed to overcome the innate, postcolonial apprehension against foreign paternalism. They even failed to demonstrate a clear understanding of Korean history.”[10]Regrettably, Kwak’s critique bordered on contempt, too quick to pass judgment without having all the facts. In a nutshell, his critique is that we didn’t cross at Panmunjom as we set out to do and were bused across the DMZ with celebrity women at the center without the genuine involvement of Korean women –North or South – and of all days on May 24, the International Women’s Day for Peace and Disarmament, which happened to coincide with the date that South Korea imposed sanctions on North Korea for the alleged sinking of the South Korean corvette Cheonan in 2010.  He tells us that the real problem is South Korea’s lack of interest in acknowledging North Korea as a genuine partner in brokering a peace treaty, as evidenced by the fact that South Korea was never party to the armistice agreement in the first place. While I am in agreement with the last point under the current political climate, one should not forget that there have been major breakthroughs between the North and South, where concrete agreements, particularly during the Sunshine Policy years (1998-2008), recognized and acknowledged each other as equal partners toward eventual reunification.[11] What is left out of these formulae for reunification is the role of the international community in supporting such initiatives for peace and reconciliation. As we were made painfully aware in the back-and-forth between the South Korean government and the UN Command over who could give the final approval of the DMZ crossing, the unending war is not just a North-South problem, but very much an international issue as the war was an international war even while it was a civil war, and the UN Command has jurisdiction over the southern side of the DMZ today. But Kwak proceeds to write that “even a basic understanding of Korean history would reveal that the Korean War can have no formal end, because it had no formal beginning.” Here he is likely referencing Bruce Cumings’ nuanced argument that “civil wars do not start; they come” because of the complicated origins beyond the first shot fired.[12] But Cumings would disagree that there can be no formal end. A formal end, and one that enables a political settlement that embraces the other side, is absolutely imperative if the core problems of the Korean peninsula are to be resolved. Even with Abraham Lincoln’s magnanimity toward the Confederacy at the end of the American Civil War, the divisive history of that conflict continues to haunt contemporary American society as indicated by the recent killing of nine people on June 17, 2015 at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The shooting spree was carried out by a 21-year-old white supremacist, donning the Confederate flag as seen in photos that surfaced later. Fires at several predominantly black churches in southern states were reported in subsequent weeks, at least three of them attributed to arson, in reaction against efforts to remove the Confederate flag from public buildings. This is the state of affairs in a country where there was a formal end to a civil war that ended 150 years ago. Needless to say, the two Koreas have a very long road ahead to begin to heal the history of division and war, but a formal end to the war is an essential starting point. Moreover, it is of course not just the South Koreans who need to be convinced of the need to sign a peace treaty. The Korean War was more than a civil war; it was an international conflict with the US leading the UN Command made up of sixteen nations, fighting on behalf of the South, and China and the Soviet Union directly engaged in support of the North. Twenty countries fought in the Korean War; it was – and continues to be – a global conflict. The impasse in normalizing relations between the US and North Korea over the last six decades only serves to underscore the importance of people-to-people engagement, particularly the role of American citizen diplomacy to break the deadlock. Since the so-called end of the Cold War and the breakup of the bipolar world, North Korea has justified its nuclear weapons development to counter the American nuclear umbrella and the maintenance of US military bases for its allies in the Asia Pacific, including South Korea. Such effects of the unresolved Korean War are ongoing with the continued division of the peninsula, mutual demonization, and military build-up at the expense of human security. The absence of a peace treaty and the ongoing militarization of Korea and other countries in northeast Asia are global threats.[13]A peace settlement to officially end the Korean War will be an important step toward building peace and stability in East Asia and beyond. The international community and the UN which took part in the Korean War have a responsibility to close this tragic chapter in Cold War history through a process leading toward true reconciliation.  But with international negotiations involving the two Koreas, the United States, China and other powers stalled, citizen initiatives can play a vital role in moving forward. Our group of seasoned women peacemakers was aware from the very beginning that we could model international engagement between women, an approach that is far from “dictating” what happens to Korea.  In fact, there was a major internal debate about whether to even include the word reunification in our statements and the eventual peace declaration (see Appendix 1), because reunification by definition is something that would have to be decided upon by the two Koreas. In the end, we decided to do so given the history of North-South efforts to move toward reunification in the first decade of the twenty first century and to reflect the views of the diverse composition of the delegation that included a sizable Korean diaspora and in agreement with our North and South Korean partners, who argued that the division of the Korean peninsula was carried out by foreign forces and the international community must therefore be a productive force for its reunification. We were hardly “uninformed outsiders.” Of the 30 women, five are South Korean emigrants with experiences of the 1970s-80s student movement and other social justice movements, two are Korean adoptees (part of a system of international adoption that was put in place as a direct consequence of the Korean War) engaged in transnational adoption and historical justice issues, and three are Korean Americans with knowledge of Korean issues (myself included).  Of the 30 women, four hail from the Asia Pacific, two from Latin America, and another two from Africa, long having worked on various peace initiatives. Of the 30 women, at least seven are 70 or over with a lifetime experience of peace activism, and despite fatigue, sickness, and disorientation at being kept guessing by South Korean and UN authorities about the crossing, the group practiced direct participatory democracy and consensus decision-making with candid and open discussions everyday into the late night over how best to handle the crossing.  Our delegation of women peacemakers included academic scholars, some with expertise on Korea (myself included), church-based leaders, former diplomats, feminist activists, humanitarian and human rights workers, artists, and filmmakers from a broad range of professional and institutional settings with experience in conflict resolution, peacemaking, and peace building in many contexts. All of the women were fully engaged as principled peacemakers, at times boisterous but always with a sense of humor. For example, Code Pink co-founders, Jodie Evans and Medea Benjamin, wore pink throughout the trip with giant pink hats, pink sunglasses, and pink signs that they displayed wherever they went; yet they were always earnest to learn more about Korea, to open up to honest conversations with our guides and hosts, and at times challenged what they heard while sharing their own experiences of struggling against militarism.[14] Undoubtedly, such spontaneous displays of citizen activism could not have gone unnoticed in a strictly regimented society such as North Korea, offering an alternative window into American society from official state discourse. Code Pink co-founders, Jodie Evans and Medea Benjamin, at the entrance to Myohyang Mountain (May 22, 2015) Appreciating the long history of Korean women’s efforts for peace and reunification, our group also reached out to a broad base of partners in Korea. In North Korea without the existence of a comparable civil society, we were of course limited in the variety of women’s groups to approach so that our main partner was the Korean Democratic Women’s Union, the oldest women’s organization in North Korea that was founded in November 1945, shortly after liberation from Japanese colonial rule before any other mass organization.[15] In South Korea, we partnered with religious women’s groups such as the YWCA, grass-roots local networks such as the Gyeonggi Women’s Network, as well as cultural groups like Iftopia, in addition to long-established women’s groups such as Women Making Peace and Korean Women’s Association United, as explained in our final closing statement (see Appendix 2). Although some critics of the walk have claimed that South Koreans do not favor reunification, the data is quite mixed on this depending on the way the question is couched, and a February 2015 report shows that there have been steady high levels of interest in reunification among the vast majority of South Koreans averaging at 70 to 84 percent of those surveyed, even recognizing lower levels of interest among the younger generation.[16] More to the point, we know, based on the history of social movements, that mass opinion should not be the determining factor in what is ultimately the right course of action. The recent landmark ruling on marriage equality in the United States would not have happened if gay rights activists stopped their work because they were told that the majority opinion did not support their cause just a few decades ago. In a vibrant democracy with open debate facilitated by online forums, there is bound to be diversity of opinion and analysis, but with so much disrespect toward women in the way such criticisms were framed, Katharine Moon, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and professor of political science at Wellesley, interjected: “The women’s journey sheds a light beyond the inter-Korean conflict: the multiple ways women are left out of formal foreign policy processes and the creative politics in which women engage to draw attention to difficult policy issues.  Imagine this: If male Nobel laureates such as Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin (1978), Lech Walesa (1983), Elie Wiesel (1986), Mikhail Gorbachev (1990), Nelson Mandela (1993), and Kofi Annan (2001) had joined forces to walk for peace across the DMZ, might they have been lambasted by critics and members of the media for their political naïveté? Would they have been so disrespectfully treated and insulted as know-nothings about the reconciliation of divided peoples?”[17] Indeed, she more than anyone understood the long list of credentials that the international delegation of women brought to highlight the need for a peace process in Korea. The thirty women with direct experience of conflicts in Korea, Liberia, Northern Ireland, Colombia, Mexico, the Philippines, Guam, and Okinawa, as well as those who have opposed the military policies of the United States, collectively bring at least 600 years of experience with some women having spent more than 50 years of their lives, advocating for peace and justice.  It was through this collective tenacity and wisdom that we accomplished what many thought impossible, the details of which will be shared in the second half of the essay. History of Women Crossing Borders Just a couple of weeks before embarking on the Peace Walk as the semester was coming to an end, I was asked to give the opening remarks at the Rutgers University Fifth Annual Asian/Asian American Studies Undergraduate Symposium on April 28 titled “Crossing Borders, Border Crossings,” from which I have borrowed the title for this essay.  The organizer of the event knew of my involvement with Women Cross DMZ and thought I could speak to the theme of the symposium through my own work.  Reflecting upon “border crossings”within academe in the burgeoning of transnational and interdisciplinary studies and my own path that had led me to that point, I thought about the many ways in which my own life had been about crossing borders. Not only had I crossed linguistic and cultural barriers to study Korean history as an American-born Korean American, but to become the Korean American that I am, my family had crossed the Pacific to immigrate to the US.  In short, my family history has been all about border crossings of various kinds as we moved from South Korea to South America, and finally to the United States.  Crossing borders in my adult life has been productive too, and my most recent crossing of the DMZ was yet another border crossing that has turned out to be both thought-provoking and inspiring. The 2015 Peace Walk stands in a long history of women crossing borders to challenge militarism and war. This year is the 100th anniversary of the 1915 Congress of Women in The Hague, which called for an end to World War I. The meeting led to the creation of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the oldest women’s peace organization today, currently active in over thirty countries. One of our delegation members, Kozue Akibayashi, was recently appointed its international president.[18] And Christine Ahn, our lead organizer, was invited to the celebration of the 100 year anniversary this past April.[19]Closer to the issue at hand, it was thanks to women who were willing to take risks crossing borders that an international delegation of women intervened during the Korean War to investigate war crimes and demand a stop to the fighting.  At the request of Pak Chŏng-ae, chair of the (North) Korean Democratic Women’s Union, and Hŏ Chŏng-suk, feminist activist since the Japanese colonial period (1910-45) and newly minted Minister of Culture in North Korea, the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) in 1951 sent an international delegation of women to investigate war crimes during the Korean War, representing women from the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa.[20] Founded in Paris in November 1945 in the aftermath of World War II, WIDF was formed at the World Congress of Women with some 850 women from forty countries in attendance. [21] The group expressly critiqued imperialism and racism as responsible for the latest war, and thus laid its main emphasis on peace, anti-colonialism, and anti-racism as directly related to, and indeed, preconditions for the protection of women’s rights.  Soon after its founding, however, the US House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) labeled the organization a “Soviet tool” and “front organization” in a 1949 report that charged the organization of being “a specialized arm of Soviet political warfare in the current ‘peace’ campaign to disarm and demobilize the United States.”[22] As a result, the American affiliate of WIDF, Congress of American Women, was forced to disband in 1950.   Although the WIDF had strong connections to the communist world with Soviet-sponsored conferences, publications, and festivals, and one of its most influential member organizations was the Soviet Women’s Committee, the organization’s overall membership grew to include a diverse array of organizations from the Third World.[23] True to its peace mission, the organization campaigned early on against the French colonial war in Vietnam, and in May 1951 it undertook the investigation of war atrocities committed in the Korean War by sending a fact-finding delegation of 21 women from 17 countries to North Korea.[24]The international women’s commission, not all of whom were WIDF members, consisted of: Chair: Nora K. Rodd (Canada) Vice-Chairs: Liu Chin-yang (China), Ida Bachmann (Denmark) Secretaries: Miluse Svatosova (Czechoslovakia), Trees Soenito-Heyligers (Netherlands) Members: Monica Felton (Great Britain), Maria Ovsyannikova (USSR), Bai Lang (China), Li K’eng (China), Gilette Ziegler (France), Elisabeth Gallo (Italy), Eva Priester (Austria), Germaine Hannevard (Belgium), Hilde Cahn (German Democratic Republic), Lilly Waechter (West Germany), Li-thi-Quê (Viet-Nam), Candelaria Rodriguez (Cuba), Fatma ben Sliman (Tunisia), Abassia Fodil (Algeria), Leonor Aguiar Vazquez (Argentina), Kate Fleron Jacobsen, (Denmark – observer) Compiled in five languages – English, French, Russian, Chinese, and Korean – their report titled We Accuse! provided a harrowing account of death and devastation from city to village, painting a ghastly picture of the war.  According to the report, “every page of this document is a grim indictment. Every fact speaks of the mass exterminating character of this war. More homes have been destroyed than military objectives, more grain than ammunition, more women, children and aged than soldiers. This war is war on life itself.”[25] The report concluded that war crimes had been committed in Korea by the “American occupants” in contravention of the Hague and the Geneva Conventions “by the systematic destruction of food, food-stores and food factories … by incendiary bombs,” “by the systematic destruction of town after town, of village after village … [including] dwellings, hospitals, schools,” “by systematically employing … weapons banned by international convention i.e., incendiaries, petrol bombs, napalm bombs, time-bombs, and by constantly machine-gunning civilians from low-flying planes,” and “by atrociously exterminating the Korean population … tortured, beaten to death, burned and buried alive.”[26] Cover of the Report of the Commission of the Women’s International Democratic Federation in Korea (May 16 to 27, 1951) From the number of farm animals, schools, houses, and hospitals destroyed to the number of women raped and children killed, the report was a scathing account of the effects of the war, particularly on women and children. The report ended with a letter to the President of the UN General Assembly and Security Council, and Secretariat of the UN, demanding that the “Report of the Women’s International Commission for the Investigation of Atrocities committed by U.S.A. and Syngman Rhee Troops in Korea” be examined with the utmost urgency, demanding that the UN stop the bombings in Korea to reach a peaceful settlement according to the principle of self-determination for the Korean people without interference from foreign troops.[27] The delegation’s investigations covered the worst affected areas in northern Korea: Sinŭiju, P’yŏngyang, Anak, Sinch’ŏn, Namp’o, Kangse, Wŏnsan, Ch’ŏrwŏn, Hŭich’ŏn, and Kanggye.  As evident in the limited geographic reach of the delegation’s visit, however, the Cold War divide was already inscribed into the scope of the commission’s investigations, as well as in the reception of its work. The delegation had attempted to visit the South without success, and consequently the report makes no mention of possible crimes committed by northern forces (or by any others) in the South. Consequently, the report was criticized in the United States as a one-sided propaganda ploy.  Despite the diversity of nationalities, religious beliefs, and political views represented in the commission, the US tried to discredit the report by red-baiting its members in order to deflect charges of war crimes.  Distinguishing between “proper” and “improper” forms of peace initiatives, the American public was warned against Soviet “peace offensives”, especially cautioning women not to be duped by the Soviets in their naïve desire for peace.  Such history of disparaging women’s work for peace as foolhardy goes back to the early days of the Cold War. Under these circumstances, the significance of the international women’s commission and its report, despite its limited scope, is underscored by the fact that the newly created UN could not provide the forum in which to discuss possible war crimes precisely because it was itself accessory to the war.  South Koreans and Americans fought under the banner of the UN, a joint command made up of sixteen member states led by the US.  Countering the male-led UN coalition, not only did WIDF launch an all-female fact-finding commission that specifically reached out to women affected by the war, but through its international network and member organizations, showed how the Korean War was another disastrous global conflict on the heels of World War II. Studying the history of women crossing borders and situating our 2015 Peace Walk in this long history has been a humbling experience and I posed the following question both to myself and the group while in Beijing as we took turns introducing ourselves during our first physical meeting: what does it mean to be making history as a historian? The always charismatic and indefatigable Gloria Steinem quickly answered, “It’s important, or perhaps even better, to make history.” I couldn’t agree more, and in another life before I became a historian, that would have been the end of that question. But as a historian, there is something to be said for situating events in historical context and to specifically historicize the kinds of challenges that arose during the walk, in order to build upon what has been achieved. That is to say, how do we make historically informed decisions so that history is made relevant in the making of history? Crossing the DMZ The DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea–North Korea’s official name) UN Mission in New York had shown interest in the initial proposal for the Peace Walk in 2014, but by February 2015, they were telling us that Pyongyang was no longer favorably inclined, asking why it had to be a women’s peace walk. At a meeting with the mission that month, history became relevant when I reminded them of the important role that international women peacemakers played during the Korean War. We agreed to submit a revised proposal in the lead up to March 8, International Women’s Day, highlighting this history of women peacemakers in the Korean context. During a panel at the annual meeting of the UN Commission on the Status of Women on March 13, I again reiterated this history as Cora Weiss, President of the Hague Appeal for Peace and among the civil society drafters of Resolution 1325, spoke about its significance in codifying the inclusion of women in all peace processes, and Christine Ahn shared her dream of the central role that women should play in ending theKorean War.[28]That same week, after the first press conference on our plans on March 11, we finally received word that the South Korean government was considering our request. We were hoping that both governments would be able to give us the green light on the same day in the spirit of bringing both sides together, but North Korea came back in the affirmative first on April 3 while South Korea continued to stall. Just one month before departure, many of us had not yet booked flights because we simply did not know whether we would be given the necessary South Korean approval for the crossing. In the end, two additional days were added to the North Korean itinerary in order to make sure that we would have the time to return to Beijing for a separate flight to Seoul if we were not granted approval to cross. This was why we ended up staying in North Korea longer than the original itinerary that would have been on par with the itinerary in the South, focusing on holding parallel peace symposiums and peace walks on both sides of the DMZ.  Uncertain what would happen, we boarded flights to Beijing en route to Pyongyang, which already began with some drama as airline officials at some US airports initially refused to let us board without a Chinese visa. We had to explain that we would be applying for transit visas upon our arrival in Beijing with the letter of invitation from the DPRK and flight itinerary to Pyongyang – a rare occurrence no doubt.  Once in Beijing, transit visas were only valid for 72 hours, and we had much ground to cover in terms of orientation and introductions as this was the first time that the entire group of women would be meeting and sharing the same physical space. This much-needed time was cut short by the need to hold yet another press conference to pressure the South Korean authorities and the UN Command to facilitate the crossing at Panmunjom.  Panmunjom is the location of the “truce village” where the armistice was signed, an iconic vestige of division where the militaries of the two Koreas stand off and face each other every day.  Just the day before departure, on May 15, the South Korean Ministry of Unification finally announced that “Seoul has decided to allow the foreign activists to cross the DMZ,” but with the proviso that“the government plans to recommend them to use the Western corridor along the Gyeongui railway.” Different from Panmunjom, the Western corridor is the transportation route used for the Kaesong Industrial Complex, a joint economic venture between the North and South located just ten kilometers (6 miles) north of the DMZ where immigration facilities are located. Once in Pyongyang, our nightly meetings turned into heated debates about where to cross – between the Western corridor that was approved by the South and the UN Command, and Panmunjom – and how far to push on this specific point when the vast majority of the world did not even know the difference. These debates reflected the diversity of experiences in the group from those who had engaged in direct action and civil disobedience to those who were more cautious and measured in their approach.[29]  Meanwhile, our North Korean hosts informed us that without the facilitation of the UN Command and approval from the South, it would be impossible to cross at Panmunjom as it is a military zone and the North Korean military would not allow the crossing without agreement from their counterparts lest there be an incident that could spiral out of control and they would be held responsible. Contrary to stereotypes about totalitarian governments functioning like one mass with all branches and bureaus following orders and marching in lock-step with each other, what I observed was each unit acting on its own with separate lists of guests between the three host organizations (Korean Committee for Solidarity with World Peoples, the Korean Democratic Women’s Union, and the Committee for Overseas Compatriots of Korea), and none of our hosts knowing how the military would respond should we insist on crossing at Panmunjom.[30] For three days and nights, the group discussed the best course of action, while receiving conflicting information about how South Korean women wanted us to proceed.  There were unconfirmed reports that the South Korean Ministry of Unification had unofficially stated that if we crossed at Panmunjom, we would not be arrested for it, and that this was meant to be a tacit form of approval. We had landed in Pyongyang with the understanding that we would be able to communicate with our South Korean organizers through international cell phone service purchased on site, but upon arrival, we learnedthat the service did not provide access for South Korean numbers.  It was yet another reminder of the state of division, and it took two long days for us to finally touch base with the South through an internet-based phone service by using a VPN to reroute the call through a third country.  In the end, we could not risk worsening relations between the North and South by failing to reach an agreement on where we would cross, and the final decision was made by group consensus on Thursday evening, May 21, when we were told that the two militaries of the North and South had finally communicated and reached an agreement that we would cross through the Western corridor.  Since communication lines had been cut with the end of the Sunshine Policy in 2008, it seemed the North and South had finally reached an agreement and we felt obliged to respect that agreement. Once the decision was made about where to cross, the next issue became how to cross. On our way to Kaesong on May 23, our hosts told us that the two sides had agreed to let a South Korean bus enter the northern side of the DMZ to pick us up, but this seemed an unacceptable compromise. We had agreed to go through the Western corridor with the understanding that this would provide us with full cooperation from the UN Command to walk across the DMZ.  Now we were being told that we would be bused across.  We strategized on our three-hour bus ride to Kaesong how best to put pressure on the UN Command to let us get off beforethe last check point on the southern side to walk across the DMZ to greet our southern peace walkers.  Before reaching the Kaesong DPRK Immigration and Customs Office, our northern hosts agreed to let us off the bus just before the first checkpoint on the northern side of the DMZ to make a symbolic walk with our banners.  With only our documentary crew and some news media there to witness, we walked to the first checkpoint on the northern side of the DMZ, singing of peace and reunification, before saying farewells to our northern hosts at the Immigration and Customs Office. Once we got through immigration and customs, we boarded the bus sent from South Korea and conveyed to the bus driver that we had been told that the UN Command would provide full support for our wish to cross the border on foot. At the next checkpoint, there was a group of officers from the UN Command in military uniform, and Christine Ahn, Gloria Steinem, and retired US Army Reserve Colonel and former US diplomat, Ann Wright got off the bus to negotiate on our behalf. The group came back satisfied that the UN Command had agreed to let us off at the last checkpoint to walk across, but before we knew it, the bus had already driven past the last checkpoint.  It remains a mystery to us all what happened; whether the bus driver just didn’t know where to stop, whether the UN Command had no intention of letting us off the bus in the first place, or whether it was mutual misunderstanding about exactly where the walk was supposed to take place.  But the point is that we tried to walk across the DMZ, and in large part succeeded in walking at various points from Pyongyang to Kaesong to Paju with a small symbolic walk to the DMZ on the northern side on the way to the South. Walking for peace toward the first check point on the northern side of the DMZ (May 24, 2015) Christine Ahn, Gloria Steinem, and Ann Wright negotiating with UN Command at one of the check points in the DMZ on the southern side (May 24, 2015) I need not reiterate the day-by-day schedule and site visits while in North Korea as these sites are toured quite frequently by visitors, and many of the delegation members have written and spoken about them eloquently.[31] I will just say that, as a historian, it makes a world of difference to visit North Korea on multiple occasions and see the changes across time.  Many first time visitors commented on how empty the streets were, and how the model textile factory we visited seemed devoid of workers.  For me visiting Pyongyang for the third time, it was startling to see so many more people and cars on the streets, particularly during rush hour, and the lines of taxis waiting at the Pyongyang Station.  I asked one of our guides why there were so many taxis waiting when most people seemed to use bicycles or buses and trams, and she replied that people take taxis when they are in a rush, perhaps one of the many signs of economic changes in North Korea.[32]  Although I missed the visit to the factory to prepare a press conference on our first full day in Pyongyang, I remembered my visit there in 2013 and how empty it had seemed then, until I was fortunate enough to catch a glimpse of the precise moment when there was a shift change, and peeking out through the window, I saw an entire mass of workers coming and going.  But just as soon as they appeared, they were already gone by the time I went outside, and I realized just how regimented the life of a factory worker was in North Korea with detailed schedules that designated times for work, study, rest, meals, and sleep for the full 24 hours of the day for those residing at the factory dormitories. As Ewa Eriksson Fortier shared, based on her longtime experience of humanitarian work there, “the point of the visit to the factory I believe was to show the model living quarters of the female staff. Although sleeping 8-9 girls in one room, they have modern facilities compared to sweatshops in many developing countries. Moreover, it was rice planting season, so many workers were mobilized to the countryside to plant rice.” Mangyongdae, the birthplace of North Korean founding leader, Kim Il Sung North Korean school children in school uniform visiting Mangyongdae (May 20, 2015) The other site that needs unpacking is Mangyongdae, the birthplace of the founding North Korean leader, Kim Il Sung, that became so controversial during our visit.  Christine and I had put our heads together regarding the itinerary in the planning stage, and having been to North Korea, we both knew that at least one site dedicated to the leader would have to be included.  But in retrospect, perhaps even this could have been negotiated. In lieu of visiting the statues of the two deceased leaders at Mansudae, however, Mangyongdae seemed a fitting site to visit to understand historically why North Koreans value their leader.  As historian Dae-Sook Suh has demonstrated in his detailed biography of Kim Il Sung, he was an anticolonial guerrilla fighter along the Sino-Korean border of Manchuria during the Japanese colonial period.[33] He was well-known among Koreans, especially in the northern areas of the peninsula where he operated, because his exploits were covered in the colonial era newspapers and he was among the most wanted by the Japanese colonial police. The birthplace itself has no towering statues of any of the leaders; indeed it is a relatively modest place that features the thatched-roof home (rather than the tiled-roof of the upper class) of Kim’s grandparents,situated within an expansive green park. By the time of Korea’s liberation from colonial rule after Japan’s defeat in the Asia Pacific War, both of Kim’s parents had died and he returned to a hero’s welcome to his hometown in Pyongyang where his grandmother lived. This is the home that is displayed there, and by simply reiterating this historical fact when asked by North Korean media what she thought of the place, Christine’s comments were distorted in the North Korean press as “praise for the leader” and subsequently vilified in the South Korean press.[34] In many ways, this particular episode pinpoints precisely one of the major fault lines of the Korean division that has become so vitriolic that it negates whatever came before: how to remember Kim Il Sung’s anticolonial exploits while holding him responsible for the Korean War? Ultimately, what drives the division within Korea is the civil war and international war that are remembered so differently by the two sides today and the many generations that have been educated from only one point of view.[35] At a gathering of my extended family in Seoul recently, a minor argument broke out as my uncle asked me about the Peace Walk and its goals. When I answered that it was to overcome division and achieve peaceful reunification by meeting with women of both sides, there was an immediate generational divide between two of my uncles: one who was born in 1946 and believed there was no way that North Korea wanted peaceful reunification since it started the Korean War by invading the South, and the other who was born in 1956 and stated matter-of-factly that North Korea, at least publicly, has consistently advocated peaceful reunification.  In short, one believed that peaceful reunification was possible and the other did not, and this division has everything to do with how the Korean War and its possible resolution are conceptualized. It is no coincidence in this regard that so many of the protesters against our Peace Walk played straight into this polarity, which is also why Korean reunification will have to be entirely different from the German model of peaceful reunification by absorption.  At no point was communication between the two sides in Germany completely cut off, and at no point did they see each other with such animosity that emanated from the experience of a civil war. And this is why we need to think about the impact of the unended and continuing war –psychologically, socially and politically – that creates stark binaries between good and evil, pitting one side against the other and leaving no room for compromise.  It is this kind of Manichean logic that associates any attempt at peace with the “enemy” as evil, pitting peace with North Korea against human rights in North Korea as if they are mutually exclusive. But peace is not against human rights; itis part and parcel of it. The continued state of war affects the human rights of North Korean people today in at least two ways.[36] Domestically, the North Korean government prioritizes military defense and national security over human security and political freedoms; this is also true in the South albeit to different degrees. Internationally, the North Korean people suffer due to political isolation and economic sanctions. Despite disagreements over the prudence of sanctions, various scholars have clearly illustrated its poor track record, especially of unilateral sanctions, to achieve concrete aims. Out of a total of 116 cases since World War I, there was only a 2 percent success rate of achieving the purported aimsfor sanctions against authoritarian regimes.[37] During the Cold War, multilateral sanctions were rare due to Cold War vetoes, but the US still instigated two-thirds of all sanctions.  With the end of the Cold War, the US imposed 61 sanctions against 35 countries in just four years between 1992 and 1996, affecting 42 percent of the world population.  In other words, sanctions in the post-Cold War era are to a great extent a direct manifestation of unilateral American power, often implemented for domestic political reasons as a form of “theatrical display” of power.[38] What is certain is that sanctions disproportionately impact the most vulnerable populations who do not have the resources to deal with rising prices and dwindling goods.[39]While meant to inflict damage across the board in the hopes that the pain inflicted on society will translate into resistance against the government, they usually provide more ways for the regime to control supply, allowing privileged elites to profit from black market activities. That is, sanctions promote evasion through illicit activities, such as trade in drugs, counterfeit currency, and weapons proliferation instead of encouraging marketization and more contacts with the outside world. One policy that proponents and detractors of engagement may agree on is the importance of access to information and communication networks.  But, Orascom, the Egyptian telecommunications company operating the North Korean cellular service Koryolink, recently announced that “international, U.S. and European Union sanctions were having a small but notable impact on its business by restricting the import and export of goods required to maintain and develop the Koryolink network.”[40]Moreover, the UN Commission of Inquiry(COI) report on North Korean human rights that is so often misused by those who advocate for isolation and sanctions also recommends “the promotion of incremental change through more people-to-people contact and an inter-Korean agenda for reconciliation.”  It concludes that “states and civil society organizations should foster opportunities for people-to-people dialogue and contact in such areas as culture, science, sports, good governance and economic development that provide citizens of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea with opportunities to exchange information and be exposed to experiences outside their home country.” The COI further stated that it “does not support sanctions imposed by the Security Council or introduced bilaterally that are targeted against the population or the economy as a whole.”[41] In the end, the most convincing case against sanctions on North Korea is the fact that they have only led to the expansion of its missiles and nuclear weapons program while impoverishing the people without weakening the grip of the state. Whenever civilian engagement has been tried, whether it was the 2008 visit to Pyongyang of the New York Philharmonic or the 2012 opening of the Associated Press Bureau, detractors have charged that these initiatives have been useful for the North Korean government as if engagement is a zero sum game in which only one side wins or loses.  Peace is not a zero sum game that is beneficial to just one side.  The Peace Walk endeavored to support peace in Korea, to be the rare empathic witness to listen to women on both sides of the Korean divide, to show that the conflict has not been forgotten by the world, and ultimately that there is hope of reconciliation and peace in Korea that will benefit all sides. This includes engaging with government bureaucrats such as the North Korean women leaders we met, military officials from the UN Command with whom we tried to negotiate, local government branches like the Seoul Metropolitan Government that offered the venue for the Seoul Peace Symposium, non-governmental organizations and activists such as our South Korean partners, as well as North Korean refugees in South Korea and elsewhere. Indeed, the international women’s delegation included among its ranks those who had previously worked with North Korean refugees. It is yet another imposition of division when North Korean people are categorized into those that are “normal” and “real” as opposed to “puppets” and “tools” of the government.  Under an extreme authoritarian system in which the state pervades most aspects of life, it would be realistically impossible to be outside the system.  One is educated in state schools, offered jobs through government oversight, and allocated housing, food, healthcare benefits, and other necessities all through the state.  What does it mean under these circumstances to be an “ordinary” North Korean as opposed to a “mouthpiece” of the government?  Does it simply come down to whether one endorses or opposes the government, so that one is authentically among the ordinary people only if one is a dissident or defector? Would it be impossible for a government bureaucrat or party member to have independent thoughts and individual experiences to share that could constitute genuine interaction as an example of people-to-people contact?  And what about factory workers or doctors and nurses at the maternity hospital– all government employees under a state socialist system? As political scientist Emma Campbell has written, she saw signs of non-conformity in everyday encounters during her visits to North Korea, where people were “enthusiastic to learn about ‘the outside’” and she was able to meet and talk to a variety of people, who like people elsewhere “were particularly interested in the topics of social norms and daily life in other countries such as prices of goods and services, marriageable age and women’s lives and responsibilities.”[42]  Campbell concludes that “even inside North Korea it is possible to engage at a personal level with ordinary North Koreans and the normal humanity, empathy and mutual interest commonly visible in personal interactions elsewhere is equally common when visiting and meeting people in North Korea.”  To deny such possibility is to relegate North Koreans, including the two million privileged residents of Pyongyang, to a category of the inhuman and therefore worthy of extermination by forced regime collapse.  It is the same Manichean logic by which human rights are denied to North Korean political prisoners, who are deemed less than full members of society by North Korean authorities. But these points seemed lost as a result of the so-called South-South divide, as ideological divisions within South Korean society undercut the main message of the Peace Walk.  While the protesters were few in number, the high profile of the international women’s delegation prompted the South Korean government to enhance security measures by surrounding our hotel in Seoul with plainclothes police officers and our South Korean organizers ferried us around in unmarked cars through underground parking lots for fear that if we took public transportation we would come under physical attack. Ironically and paradoxically, the tense atmosphere of fear in the South was a stark contrast to the relatively relaxed mood in the North. On the other hand, there was a strange sense of similarity between the two sides.  Landmines were not just in the DMZ; political landmines pervaded the entire Korean peninsula, and functioning within such spaces had accustomed everyone – North and South – to make sure to control every little detail from submitting advance copies of speeches (admittedly, this was a necessity for simultaneous translation and the publication of conference material), to seating arrangements with a formal head table, and a high level of orchestration and performativity throughout.  In other words, the level of formality and procedure, as well as a deep sense of national pride in Korean culture, felt eerily similar between North and South.  Both sides had enormous pride, not willing to fully share the bad along with the good; both sides wanted to show their best with formal dinners that featured authentic Korean food and Korean culture; and both sides displayed allegiance to their respective states with the portraits of the leaders hanging above our heads in the peace symposium in Pyongyang while the peace symposium in Seoul began with a salute to the South Korean flag. Toward a Multiplicityof Crossings Traversing the Korean divide as a member of the Korean diaspora, I felt like the progeny of divorced parents when asked by South Koreans what it was like in the North.  There seemed to be no right answer to the question of what I thought of the other parent that required me to choose a side. The fact is that both sides are terribly suffocated by the very fact that they confront each other with such ferocity.  Certainly, one side may have more money and the power that comes with that, while the other side is stern and stoic, offering fewer options that money can buy, but in the end, I wanted neither. For those of us Korean Americans who feel compelled to contribute in some way to overcoming the Korean division, it isn’t about the puerile desire to reunite divorced parents or the responsibility we may have to address problems in US-Korea relations.  It stems from our community history as a minority group, having faced racial and ethnic discrimination in the United States along with many other forms of discrimination that some have experienced as women, as lesbians, as transgendered, as queer, as multiracial, and so on.[43]  And this is why the Korean diaspora should be an integral partof the peace and reunification movement in Korea.  It is our marginalized position within our respective communities that has enabled us to see the importance of overcoming division by embracing difference rather than restoring an illusory homogeneous whole.  That is to say, the long-held aspiration for national reunification (minjokt’ongil) should be replaced by a more substantive and programmatic peaceful reunification (p’yŏnghwat’ongil), in which peace and reunification are more than slogans.  And for this, both Koreas have many borders to cross. Korea continues to be trapped in a time warp of the unending Cold War, where each side looks upon the other with distrust.  The North is painted as evil by South Korea and much of the world, not only due to its own poor record on human rights and nuclear brinkmanship, but as a result of the “triumph” of the West in the global Cold War.  It is depicted as a land of empty streets filled with untrustworthy brainwashed automatons repeating state propaganda,without spontaneity or knowledge of the outside world, rife with conspiracies and harboring dark secrets in the recesses of their minds. Meanwhile, the North looks upon the South as if its entire people are wallowing under the yoke of American imperialism in need of salvation.  In this pervasive mood of tight national security on both sides of the DMZ, women are portrayed as weak and naïve in need of protection and men feel justified in their paternalistic and patriarchal attitudes toward women.  If I’m not ever allowed to forget my ethnic and racial identity while in the US, I am never allowed to forget my gender identity while in Korea. The gender disparity in Korea that many pundits ascribe to legacies of Confucianism (perhaps another form of orientalist discourse), I ascribe in part to the division of the peninsula. This is why it is imperative for women to lead the peace and reunification movement in Korea – to dismantle the division system that enforces binaries between good and evil, between North and South, and between women and men.  This aspect of the gendered division system is apparent in the display of masculinities and femininities in both Koreas.  It is to protect the (divided) sovereignty that all able-bodied males on both sides are beholden to mandatory military service (up to 3 years in the South and 10 years in the North), and women are essentialized as mothers to reproduce the next generation of citizen-soldiers with the correct ideology. The challenges of overcoming this division system became evident during the peace symposiums in both Pyongyang and Seoul. In Pyongyang, the day was divided into a morning session where North Korean women shared their experiences of the war and its aftermath, while the afternoon consisted of our panel of international women – Mairead Maguire (Northern Ireland), Leymah Gbowee (Liberia), Suzuyo Takazato (Okinawa), Patricia Guerrero (Colombia) and Medea Benjamin (United States) – sharing experiences of mobilizing against militarism in our respective communities.  The afternoon panel was joined by Kim Ch’un-sil, a North Korean advocate on behalf of“comfort women” who were forced into sexual slavery to serve the Japanese Imperial Army during the Asia Pacific War. The morning began with eight speakers. The first four spoke about their experiences of the war, including a decorated female general with 65 years of military service, as well as a war casualty who had lost her arms in the war.  The next two speakers dealt with American violations of the armistice agreement that maintains “neither war nor peace in Korea,” as well as the effects of sanctions on everyday life that restrict the import of medical equipment (due to potential dual-use) and even cosmetics.  The last two speakers spoke of state benefits for women despite the hardships of the unending war, including maternity benefits and healthcare.  What came through repeatedly was the absence of closure in a war that was halted with a temporary ceasefire 62 years ago. Women with experience of the war spoke about it as if it had happened just yesterday, and demanded justice for what they had suffered, shedding bitter tears of “resentment” (wŏnhan). The highpoint that broke through this tragic embittered atmosphere –if for just a moment – was the quilting ceremony that emerged rather spontaneously at the end of the morning session.  We had asked our North Korean hosts to prepare a chogakpo(traditional Korean-style clothmade up of smaller pieces) to be sewn together with two other pieces we would bring – one made in the South and a third made by international women.  At the end of the morning session, a representative of the Korean Democratic Women’s Union brought out the piece that they had prepared, and one by one, women began to stand up from their seats and the solemn space of the conference room turned into an impromptu place – unrehearsed, unplanned, and spur-of-the-moment, where women improvised to begin to stitch the North Korean cloth to the other pieces, symbolic of our commitment and responsibility to heal the wounds of war and reunite families.  And despite our male host telling us that it wouldn’t be appropriate to sing, all the women broke out in song, singing “Our Wish is Reunification” (Uri ŭisowŏnŭn t’ongil), shedding tears this time of empathy rather than bitterness. Stitching ceremony that spontaneously emerged during the Pyongyang Peace Symposium (May 21, 2015) But such moments are brief, and the road to peace is long.  Shortly after,  one of the interpreters who sat next to me at lunch told me that as beautiful as the ceremony was, she was upset by what she heard.  After the symbolic stitching, one of our delegation members with South Korean nationality had brought out a separate much larger cloth from one of her performance artist friends to wrap everyone with in a symbolic gesture of healing.  As she did so, she had called out that everyone, Americans and Koreans, can now all forgive each other and be friends.  Perhaps swept up in the moment, she kept using the South Korean term for Korea, Hanguk, rather than the North Korean term, Chosŏn.  The interpreter, a city planner who spoke perfect English, explainedthat she did not appreciate such blanket statements of forgiveness when American policy had such negative effects in Korea, proving that not all Americans are friends.  It was a sobering reminder that a serious peace movement must go beyond symbolic gestures to address real social and political ramifications of the unended war. The trauma of the continued division of the peninsula erupted once again on the other side of the DMZ, during the peace symposium in Seoul.  The day was organized in like fashion with a similar mix of our speakers, joined by Kim Suk-ja, a South Korean organizer on US military camptown women’s issues.  But the morning session was punctuated by a North Korean woman defector, who desperately shared her story from the floor about her inability to send rice to her family back in North Korea.  Some of the negative reaction against the Peace Walk came from defectors, who seemed fixated on polarizing the call for peace as the very antithesis of North Korean human rights.  The intent of the Peace Walk, however, was to call attention to the need to dismantle precisely the division, represented by the DMZ, so that there may be freedom of movement between the North and South, and North Koreans do not have to trek across third countries in order to reach the South (or vice versa); so that North Korean women like her can send rice to their families back home; and ultimately so that millions of separated families – both more recent ones and those since the war – may finally be reunited.  To convey this hope, Leymah Gboweecame down from the podium and went over to the North Korean woman, to personally share her pain as she embraced her, but again, it was a momentary gesture that would need much more follow-up to build relationships across the Korean divide.  The agonizing question remained: How can women effectively embrace across the South-South, North-South, andthe US-North Korea divide while the war in its present form continues? What the high points, as well as the low, of the Peace Walk have affirmed for me is the true significance of crossing borders.  There are, of course, the territorial borders, such as the DMZ where lack of information was a major obstacle to our crossing.  The ambiguities over who has jurisdiction over the DMZ and uncertainties about the various routes and checkpoints within the DMZ showed just how difficult border crossings can be, especially when those borders are not fully understood.  Eye-opening for many of us was the precariousness of peace in Korea; the arbitrary line that has divided millions of families for over six decades; the challenges facing current North-South relations with nearly all communication lines cut; and the divisions within South Korean society itself, even within the peace and reunification movement which, for those of us on the outside,made the coordinating process so perilous to navigate. Here then are the multiple ways in which we need to cross borders – gendered borders that maintain inequalities between women and men, ethnic borders that discriminate against racialized others, biological borders that cast out the transgendered, religious borders that condemn nonbelievers, and ideological borders that paint the other as evil.  What does peace and reunification mean in concrete terms?  In the same way that peace is not simply the cessation of hostilities, reunification cannot remain an abstract term that anyone can appropriate as politically expedient.  It requires an active crossing of borders, the acceptance of difference rather than sameness, unity by embracing difference rather than homogeneity. Reunification should not be about the restoration of a prior whole, but about moving forward to be inclusive of difference, whether it is ideological, political, class, ethnic, national, racial, or sexual.  By initiating such border crossings, the women of the Peace Walk were not “played” nor did we “fail”. North Korean women waiting to join the Peace Walk in Pyongyang (May 23, 2015) South Korean families joining the Peace Walk in Paju (May 24, 2015) According to Netsai Mushonga, one of our delegation members and a member of the Women Peacemakers Program that has been celebrating International Women’s Day for Peace and Disarmament on May 24 for more than twenty years, our Peace Walk was among the most powerful commemorations of May 24 in two decades.  In order to coordinate our crossing, communication took place between North and South Korea after many years of impasse, and while we could not cross at Panmunjom, this effectively highlighted the current state of division and challenges that must be overcome. There was mobilization of thousands of women in both North and South Korea to walk for peace. We saw ordinary families cheering from balconies and apartment windows in Kaesong in the North, while numerous families came out in support of the walk in Paju in the South. High-profile women led by Gloria Steinem, Mairead Maguire (1976 Nobel Peace Laureate), and Leymah Gbowee (2011 Nobel Peace Laureate) drew international attention to the unended state of war in Korea, garnering wide international media coverage. There was unprecedented use of media and technology during the trip that included accompanying journalists from National Geographic (David Guttenfelder) and the Associated Press (Eric Talmadge), as well as Coleen Baik, former designer with Twitter, who used Periscope to send out live feed directly from North Korea. We were hardly naïve or uninformed; in fact, without the kind of flexibility and savviness that women have come to learn from overcoming challenges elsewhere, we could not have pulled this off. There were conciliations and adaptationsall along the way, even before we began our journey.  In one of our earlier organizational meetings in October 2014, Gloria Steinem and Cora Weiss suggested that a peace “march” was too militaristic and proposed the softer language of a peace “walk”. The North Koreans thought this language strange and kept their terminology to call it the “grand march” (taehaengjin), announcing the official title of the walk as the International Women’s Grand March for Peace and Reunification of Korea, even as we continued to use our own language. Chogakpo, the term used in the South to refer to a patchwork cloth, was foreign to the North, so they opted to use, saekdongch’ŏn, or multicolored cloth.  And most substantively, long before we began our trip, the international women along with the women of the North and South managed to establish lines of communication to come up with the language for a peace declaration that included all the basic points, including affirmation of the importance of human rights, to begin the long walk for peace and reunification of Korea (see Appendix 1). All of these efforts that culminated in the Peace Walk were examples of civic participation in the peaceful reunification of Korea called for by South Korean scholar, Paik Nak-chung, who has consistently emphasized the need to look beyond the state and stressed the importance of civil society as a major partner in reunification efforts. Although his focus is on the role of South Korean citizens as the “seventh interested party” (an addition to the Six Party Talks), the Peace Walk was an effort by international women to effect “change through contact”in order to overcome the inertia of “peaceful coexistence” (or “strategic patience”), whereby the US and South Korea await regime collapse and North Korea hunkers down for regime survival.[44] Just as Paik stressed the need for South Korean civil society to break the impasse of state-to-state level negotiations, Women Cross DMZ sought to model international civic engagement and highlight the important role and responsibility of the international community to be a productive force for peace and reconciliation in Korea.[45] Despite our tight schedule, we were able to meet with several other international representatives based in Pyongyang, some by mere serendipity. One such person was Robert Grund, who has been a resident in Pyongyang since 2013 as the Representative Officer of the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD).[46] After learning that WFD had no information on the status of the deaf in North Korea, Grund decided he would find out for himself. It took three separate visits by the fourth-generation deaf German for his North Korean hosts to finally allow him to visit a small school for the deaf on the outskirts of the city. In the two years that he has made it his mission to empower the deaf in North Korea, he has built schools for the deaf, helped document the North Korean sign language, and raised awareness about the deaf community in North Korea both within and outside the country.  It was another example of what crossing borders and breaking down barriers through international civic engagement can achieve in concrete terms.  When he learned of our delegation’s stay at the Yanggakdo Hotel where he dined on occasion, he sought us out to share his experience and we discussed ways that we might engage with the deaf women of North Korea. We also had a chance to meet with the Resident Coordinator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Pyongyang, who stated unequivocally that sanctions caused major disruptions in the delivery of aid, if nothing else because of the difficulty in financial and banking transactions.  The UNDP officials we met with in both Beijing and Pyongyang were fully supportive of our women’s delegation, sharing our belief in the important role of the international community, and seemed somewhat awed that we managed to get as far as we did. Speaking as a historian of social change and someone who has tried to make history relevant through socially engaged work, it is extraordinarily hard work to put your body where your mouth is, to be on the ground trying to change the status quo at risk to your own safety and wellbeing.  All of the women– North, South, and international women –on this Peace Walk did so, taking an extended time away from their demanding schedules and their families, many of them paying their own way and contributing even more to help others join the walk.  It could not have happened without each of their efforts, putting heart, soul, and body on the line, not knowing how it would all turn out in the end.  The Peace Walk was the result of women crossing borders with eyes wide open (even while dreaming the improbable), committed for the long-haul to take concrete steps to bring peace and reunification to Korea.  By comparison, it is easy to watch from the sidelines and add glib commentary without adding much that might contribute to progress.  It is much too easy to assume one knows all there is to know.  What will it take to end this division and what are you willing to do about it? That is the question I leave with, one which we are in the process of answering in order to devise concrete steps to move forward. Already, on July 21, Women Cross DMZ held a congressional briefing in Washington DC to discuss the results of the Peace Walk, which prompted the three remaining Korean War veterans in the US Congress – Representatives Charles B. Rangel (D-NY), John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI), and Sam Johnson (R-TX) – to introduce a bill calling for theformal end to the Korean War.[47]The Peace Walk was just the first step in building such long-term partnerships with a variety of sectors of women and men of both Koreas and the international community to address issues of peacebuilding, humanitarian aid, human rights, and the eventual denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.[48] After seventy years of division it is long overdue to formally bring an end to the Korean War and help bring about the peaceful reunification of Korea within our lifetimes. Appendix 1: Peace Declaration 2015 International Women’s Walk for Peace & Reunification of Korea Whereas the year 2015 marks the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Korea and also the 70th year since Korea was divided by outside forces; Whereas the tragedy suffered by the Korean people, the only nation to remain divided as a result of the Cold War, can no longer be ignored by the global community; Whereas the Demilitarized Zone is one of the most militarized and dangerous conflict areas in the world and the symbol of Korean division; Whereas peace & stability is an important foundation for human rights; Whereas the year 2015 also marks the fifteenth anniversary of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security which calls for the “full participation of women in the peace process,” including in the prevention and resolution of conflicts, and in peace-building; Therefore, on this day, May 24, International Women’s Day for Peace and Disarmament, we women, from North and South Korea and around the world, are walking to invite all concerned to begin a new chapter in Korean history, one marked by dialogue, reconciliation, mutual understanding & respect, and peaceful co-prosperity, we are walking to: Call for the official end of the Korean War by replacing the 1953 Armistice Agreement with a peace treaty as stipulated in Article 4 Paragraph 60; Help reunite Korean families tragically separated by an artificial, unwanted division; Lessen military tensions on the Korean peninsula; Appeal to the international community to lift sanctions that harm innocent civilians; Decry wartime violence toward women and girls and bring justice for the “comfort women” who survived sexual slavery during WWII; Redirect funds devoted to arms race toward improving people’s welfare and protecting the environment; Amplify women’s leadership in the peacebuilding process in Korea and around the world in accordance with international law; and Challenge the world to support Korea’s reconciliation and reunification as a cornerstone of building world . We hereby declare our commitment to support the desires of the Korean people and all people of conscience around the world, to work towards the peaceful reconciliation and reunification of the Korean peninsula for a durable peace and security in Korea and the world. By working together with Korean women at all levels, particularly from the grassroots, the International Women’s Walk for Peace and Reunification of Korea, mindful of Korean women’s right to determine the future of a peaceful Korea, will continue its work until these aims are fully achieved. Appendix 2: Final Closing Statement (June 3, 2015) Women Crossing the Korean Divide: Reflections and Resolutions Thirty women peacemakers from 15 countries made a historic crossing of the two-mile wide De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) from North to South Korea on May 24 International Women’s Dayfor Peace and Disarmament. We called global attention to the need for a peace treaty to finallyend the Korean War; to reunite families long separated by Korea’s division; and to assurewomen’s participation in the peace process. Because most citizens of North and South Koreaare not allowed to cross the DMZ, international women crossed the DMZ on their behalf insolidarity with Korean women’s desires for peace and reunification of Korea. The delegation included prominent women leaders, including two Nobel Peace Laureates,Mairead Maguire of Northern Ireland and LeymahGbowee of Liberia, who led citizenmovements of women to bring peace to their countries, feminist author activist Gloria Steinem,as well as seasoned peace activists, human rights defenders, spiritual leaders, and Koreaexperts. During the four-day visit to North Korea ahead of the May 24 DMZ crossing, we connectedwith North Korean women, learning about their experiences of war and division, and sharinghow we mobilize women to end conflict in our communities. Parallel events were organizedwith women of both Koreas, culminating in peace symposiums, one in Pyongyang and one inSeoul, and peace walks in Pyongyang, Kaesong, and Paju – all with thousands of Korean women. Successes The 2015 Women’s Peace Walk succeeded in bringing global attention to the unended,“forgotten” Korean War. By physically crossing the DMZ—the militarized division that wascreated as a direct result of the 62 year-old ceasefire—the Peace Walk generated major globalmedia attention and an outpouring of support from world leaders, including eight Nobel PeaceLaureates, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, U.S. President Jimmy Carter, ArchbishopDesmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama, authors Alice Walker and Naomi Klein, actor Robert Redford,Arun Gandhi, Cardinal Andrew Yeom Soo Jung, physician Deepak Chopra, co-founder of TwitterEvan Williams, U.S. Governor Bill Richardson, and Jack Rendler of Amnesty International USA. Leading women’s rights organizations supported us, including Nobel Women’s Initiative, GlobalFund for Women, AWID, MADRE, Urgent Action Fund, and Women Peacemaker Program, whichstarted International Women’s Day for Peace and Disarmament twenty years ago. Dozens ofSouth Korean women Parliamentarians across political lines issued a public statementendorsing our walk. And hundreds of individuals provided financial support to make our historic journey possible. We are so incredibly grateful for this community’s leadership and partnership. Inspired by the long history of Korean women peacemakers, we helped revive Korea’s peaceand reunification movements, which have been deflated since the souring of inter-Korean relations. Since 2007, their efforts to engage with North Koreans have been greatly hampered, and even criminalized. According to our South Korean partners, the solidarity of international women peacemakers helped renew debate and open political space in South Korea, including putting into public discourse the legal mandate of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, which ensures the female half of the world be involved at all levels of every peace process. The deadlocked situation on the Korean peninsula calls for game changer initiatives like Women Cross DMZ that go beyond conventional paths. As a group of people generally outside structures of power, women peacemakers offer a critical perspective in the analysis of conflict, providing strategies toward peacebuilding that focus on creating ties across opposing sides. As Korean feminists have taught us, the militarization of Korea leads to greater masculinization of society, which increases violence against women and strips resources away from social welfare and human security. In preparing for the Peace Walk, a diverse group of international women from a variety of backgrounds and political views came together, including artists, scholars, human rights defenders, and peace activists from the Asia Pacific, Africa, North America, Latin America, and Europe. We partnered with organizations in both North and South Korea. In North Korea, we established working relationships with the Korean Committee for Solidarity with World Peoples and the Democratic Women’s Union of Korea. In South Korea, we partnered with local women’s groups such as Gyeonggi Women’s Network, Korea Women’s Political Solidarity, and Iftopia, as well as several leading national women’s organizations, including WomenMaking Peace, YWCA of Korea, Korean Women’s Association United, and Korean Council forthe Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan. We are enormously grateful for their leadership and partnership, without which the Women’s Peace Walk could not have happened. Through a collaborative process with both North and South Korean women, we issued the Declaration of the 2015 International Women’s Walk for Peace & Reunification of Korea. At the end of our symposium in Pyongyang, through laughter, tears and song, we also stitched together a jogakbo, a traditional Korean quilt, with parts made by North and South Korean, diaspora, and international women, signifying the role that each group must play to help reunify the Korean peninsula. We believe that knowledge and connection lead to meaningful dialogue. To that end, we leveraged technology as a medium for empathy, exposure, and education by using a video streaming application called Periscope. We broadcast live footage via social media such as Twitter from both North and South Korea. This was the first time in history that moments both formal and casual were shared live with the world in such a manner from North Korea. By providing intimate glimpses from the inside, we transported the world into an otherwise inaccessible place and culture, helping to transform the unknown into the familiar. Finally, our walk brought renewed attention to the importance of world solidarity in ending the Korean conflict, particularly since the 1953 Armistice Agreement was signed by North Korea, China, and the United States on behalf of the UN Command that included sixteen countries. It helped highlight the responsibility of the international community—whose governments were complicit in the division of Korea seventy years ago— to support Korea’s peaceful reconciliation and reunification. Challenges The challenges of overcoming Korea’s division became apparent in the complex negotiations over our DMZ crossing between North and South Korea, as well as with the UN Command, which has formal jurisdiction over the DMZ. Although we hoped to cross at Panmunjom, the “Truce Village” where the armistice was signed, we decided after South Korea and the UN Command denied our crossing there that we would take the route agreed by all parties in the spirit of compromise lest our actions further strain the already tense North-South relationship. The challenges of overcoming division were further illuminated by the misrepresentation of our delegation’s comments made in North Korea. We registered complaints to our hosts, insistingthat our comments not be misrepresented and used out of context. Instead, these misquotes were further distorted by some South Korean and international news outlets. We did not meet with any heads of state or endorse any political or economic system, maintaining a neutral stance throughout, and yet, it was apparent that divisions within South Korea itself were manifested in the ideologically divided reception and reactions to the work of our group. Our Women’s Peace Walk has initiated discussion, at times heated, on the best policies and strategies for advancing peace and reconciliation in Korea. This is healthy and we are glad to generate and participate in such debate, but as we engage in respectful dialogue, we expect the same of those who oppose our position. Our efforts to end the Korean War and press for family reunification and the participation of women in peacemaking are a true expression of our fundamental human rights to peaceful assembly, to freedom of expression, and to defend the right to peace. Road Ahead The Women’s Peace Walk will be a “long” walk. The 2015 DMZ crossing is not the end, but the continuation of a long-term movement for peace and reconciliation of Korea. We bring an alternative civilian voice from an international feminist perspective to challenge over 60 years of military standoff. It is the first step in highlighting the significance and urgency of peace in Korea to strengthen our support of Korean women to help bridge the two sides. This is our first meeting with women of North and South Korea as an organized international body, and the beginning of relationships that we hope will foster deeper conversations about the impact of militarism on the North and South, including issues of human rights and nuclear disarmament. Peace is a necessary condition for the full realization of human rights. States of hostility and international conflict are the basis on which states have long violated the rights of their citizens. Article 28 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that all have a right to an international order that permits the fulfillment of all rights enumerated in the Declaration. The continued state of war between the two Koreas is a major obstacle to such an order and a rationale for the violation of human rights. Human rights and peace are integral one to the other. Neither is more important than the other; they proceed together. As we look around the world, including our own countries, we also see that the closer a country is to a war footing the less it respects human rights values. Our focus is to increase civilian exchanges and women’s leadership, highlighting the obligation of all parties involved to decrease militarization and move towards a peace treaty. We therefore urge increased engagement at every level — civilian, economic, cultural, academic, governmental. The alternative is heightened risk of full military conflict, which is not an option. Twenty countries fought in the Korean War, and thus, in many ways, it was – and continues to be –a global conflict. The absence of a peace treaty and the ongoing militarization of North and South Korea and other countries in northeast Asia are global threats. The international community and the UN which took part in the Korean War have a responsibility to close this tragic chapter in Cold War history. Thus, we will continue our efforts until a peace settlement is achieved in Korea for peace in northeast Asia and our world. *Suzy Kim is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Rutgers University. She received her Ph.D. in modern Korean history from the University of Chicago, and is author ofEveryday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 (Cornell University Press, 2013), winner of the 2015 James Palais Book Prize.  Professor Kim is a former KPI Fellow. * Acknowledgements: My gratitude goes to Christine Ahn, Gwyn Kirk, Deann Borshay Liem, and Ewa Eriksson Fortier for their helpful feedback and to Peter Hayes, Nan Kim, and Mark Selden for their astute editorial comments and suggestions. This article was developed in combined consultation to be published jointly with the Asia-Pacific Journal and the Nautilus Peace and Security Network (NAPSNet). Photos are from Niana Liu, who accompanied the delegation as the official photographer, as well as from members of the delegation, used with their permission. [1] See the working definition of feminism offered by a feminist discussion forum available at http://faqs.cs.uu.nl/na-dir/feminism/info.html (accessed July 27, 2015). I thank Nan Kim for this helpful reference. [2]The Korean War is conventionally understood as a three-year war between 1950 and 1953 but as discussed below, its civil origins complicate the beginnings that take its roots back to the colonial and postcolonial period, and the consequences of its unending remain to this day. For a fuller discussion, see Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History (New York: Modern Library Chronicles, 2010). [3] Shin Hyon-hee, “80% of N.K. defectors are female: data,” The Korea Herald (July 5, 2015) available at http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20150705000296 accessed July 27, 2015. [4] Jane Kim, “Trafficked: Domestic Violence, Exploitation in Marriage, and the Foreign-Bride Industry,” Virginia Journal of International Law, Vol. 51, No. 2 (December 16, 2010): 455. Available at http://www.northkoreanow.org/those-who-flee-the-bride-trafficking-of-north-korean-refugee-women/ (accessed July 5, 2015). See also, Good Friends: Centre for Peace, Human Rights and Refugees, Alternative NGO Report on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, First Periodic Report of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (June 2005). Available at http://www.refworld.org/pdfid/46f146320.pdf (accessed July 5, 2015). [5] Using this logic, feminist philosopher Sara Ruddick has coined the term ‘maternal thinking’ to describe the kind of praxis that arises from caring labor, a human activity that transcends gender but has come to be associated with femininity and motherhood due to particular historical developments. See Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989); and Sara Ruddick, ‘The Rationality of Care’, in Jean Bethke Elshtain and Sheila Tobias (eds), Women, Militarism, and War: Essays in History, Politics, and Social Theory (Savage, MD: Rowman& Littlefield, 1990), 229-254. [6] Cynthia Cockburn, From Where We Stand: War, Women’s Activism and Feminist Analysis (London: Zed Books, 2007), 208. [7] Stephan Haggard, “Women’s Walk for Peace,” North Korea: Witness to Transformation Blog (March 17, 2015) available at http://blogs.piie.com/nk/?p=13954 (accessed July 2, 2015) [8]Rudiger Frank, “Political economy of sanctions against North Korea,” Asian Perspective 30, no. 3 (2006), 5-36. [9] Stephan Haggard, “Women Cross the DMZ,” North Korea: Witness to Transformation Blog (June 8, 2015) available at http://blogs.piie.com/nk/?p=14184 (accessed July 2, 2015) [10] Tae Yang Kwak, “The Failure of Women Cross DMZ,” Korea Exposé (May 27, 2015) available at http://www.koreaexpose.com/voices/the-failure-of-women-cross-dmz/ (accessed July 2, 2015). As the unofficial resident historian for the delegation, I must point out that Kwak is incorrect that there were “only” one to two million deaths from the war. Bruce Cumings, a leading historian of the Korean War, writes that death tolls could be even higher than 4 million with “upward of three million North Koreans…along with another one million South Koreans, and nearly a million Chinese.” See Bruce Cumings, North Korea: Another Country (New York: New Press, 2004), chapter one. Moreover, while technically correct that Korea was divided by Allied powers, as those reassessing the history of the Cold War know well, the conventional understanding that the Cold War “started” with the Truman Doctrine in 1947 is simplistic. Some scholars take the origins of the Cold War back to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, but certainly it was no later than Roosevelt’s death and the use of atomic weapons in 1945 – and with that the demise of the vision for a pluralist and internationalist world – that marked the onset of the Cold War. Korea’s division in 1945 should be placed within that longer frame of the Cold War. Symptomatic of this perspective is the inauguration of the Korean Association for Cold War Studies this year on the seventieth anniversary of the division of the peninsula. See Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-2006 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006); David C. Engerman, “Ideology and the origins of the Cold War, 1917-1962,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, eds. The Cambridge History of the Cold War: Origins, Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). [11]Namkoong Young, “Similarities and dissimilarities: The inter-Korean summit and unification formulae,” East Asian Review, 13, no. 3, (2001), 59-80. Agreements between the North and South which explicitly state that the two sides recognize and respect each other’s system include the December 1991 Basic Agreement on Reconciliation, Non-aggression, and Exchanges and Cooperation, the February 1992 Joint Declaration on Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, and the June 15, 2000 Joint Declaration. [12] Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 238. See also Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History (New York: Modern Library Chronicles, 2010). [13]In calling for a formal end to the Korean War, statements issued by Women Cross DMZ have specifically referred to the need to replace the armistice with a peace treaty to underscore the importance of an official termination of the war. However, the peace settlement called for in the armistice can take many forms, and therefore I have used the terms peace treaty and peace settlement or agreement interchangeably throughout this essay. According to legal expert Patrick Norton, under international law “any [formal] agreement between states, however denominated, constitutes a ‘treaty’ in the sense of an agreement legally binding the parties to its terms.” For Norton’s incisive discussion of the legalities involved in replacing the armistice agreement, see Patrick M. Norton, “Ending the Korean Armistice Agreement: The Legal Issues,” Northeast Asia Peace and Security Network (March 1997) available at http://oldsite.nautilus.org/archives/fora/security/2a_armisticelegal_norton.html (accessed July 28, 2015). For concrete suggestions for steps to formally end the Korean War, see Peter Hayes, “Overcoming US-DPRK Hostility:TheMissing Link between a Northeast AsianComprehensive Security Settlement andEnding the Korean War,”NAPSNet Special Report (December 21, 2014) available at http://nautilus.org/napsnet/napsnet-special-reports/overcoming-us-drpk-hostility-the-missing-link-between-a-northeast-asian-comprehensive-security-settlement-and-ending-the-korean-war/ (accessed August 4, 2015). [14] For Jodie Evans’ reflections on the trip, see Jodie Evans, “Stitching Korea Back Together After 60 Years of Military Divide,” AlterNet (June 15, 2015) available athttp://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/stitching-korea-back-together-after-60-years-military-divide (accessed July 2, 2015) [15]For the history of the women’s union, see Suzy Kim, “Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950,”Comparative Studies in Society and History, Volume 52, No. 4 (October 2010), 742-67; Suzy Kim, Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), chapter four. [16]Asan Report, “South Korean Attitudes toward North Korea and Reunification,” Asan Institute for Policy Studies (February 2015), 29-30. [17] Katharine Moon, “Why did ‘Women Cross DMZ’ in Korea?” Up Front, Brookings (June 3, 2015) available athttp://www.brookings.edu/blogs/up-front/posts/2015/06/03-women-cross-dmz-korea-moon (accessed July 2, 2015). For an earlier piece that also pointed out the sexist difference in receptions to Women Cross DMZ in comparison to Hyundai founder Chung Ju-Yung’s 1998 DMZ crossing with 500 cattle, see John Feffer, “Women’s Delegation to Cross the DMZ,” The World Post (April 22, 2015) available athttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-feffer/womens-delegation-to-cros_b_7122802.html (accessed July 2, 2015). [18]Kozue Akibayashi, “Women Cross Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) on Korean Peninsula for Peace,” available at http://peacewomen.org/e-news/article/women-cross-demilitarised-zone-dmz-korean-peninsula-peace (accessed July 5, 2015). [19] Christine Ahn, “Continuing the Centennial Work of Women and Citizen Diplomacy in Korea,” Inter Press Service News Agency (April 28, 2015). Available athttp://www.ipsnews.net/2015/04/opinion-continuing-the-centennial-work-of-women-and-citizen-diplomacy-in-korea/ (accessed July 5, 2015). [20]HŏChŏng-suk was an important feminist figure during the colonial period, but she is rarely acknowledged in South Korean historiography of feminism. Just one indication of this is the Sŏdaemun Prison Museum in Seoul. As a prison that held many of the political prisoners during the colonial era and later anti-government democracy activists in the post liberation period, it has been renovated as a historical site and museum since its closing in 1987. There is a women’s building within the prison that commemorates the female prisoners held there, especially highlighting Yu Kwan-sun (a Christian independence activist tortured to death in the prison), but there is no mention of Hŏ Chŏng-suk despite her prisoner identification card being displayed. She has been relegated to anonymity due to her high-level ascendancy in the North Korean government after division. For a biography, see Ruth Barraclough, “Red Love and Betrayal in the Making of North Korea: Comrade Hô Jông-suk,” History Workshop Journal 77 (1) (Spring 2014), 86-102. [21] As historian Francisca de Haan argues, the history and work of the WIDF have largely been overlooked as a direct result of the Cold War. Francisca de Haan, ‘The Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF): History, Main Agenda, and Contributions, 1945-1991’, in Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin (eds), Women and Social Movements, International 1840 to Present (Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street Press, October 2012) available at http://wasi.alexanderstreet.com.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/help/view/the_womens_international_democratic_federation_widf_history_main_agenda_and_contributions_19451991 (accessed September 14, 2014). See also Francisca de Haan, ‘Continuing Cold War Paradigms in the Western Historiography of Transnational Women’s Organisations: The Case of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF)’, Women’s History Review (Sept. 2010), 547-573. [22] Committee on Un-American Activities, U.S. House of Representatives, Report on the Congress of American Women (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1950, 23 October 1949) cited in de Haan, “The Women’s International Democratic Federation,” endnote 4. [23] Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney, “Fighting fascism and forging new political activism: The Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) in the Cold War,” in De-Centering Cold War History: Local and Global Change, eds. Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney and Fabio Lanza (New York: Routledge, 2013), 55-56 [52-72]. Mooney explains that some of the bias against WIDF was the result of conflating its activity with the Soviet “peace offensive,” a highly publicized worldwide campaign that contrasted US “warmongers” (for its use of nuclear weapons against Japan at the end of WWII) with “peace-loving” communists as part of Soviet policy. For the variety of women’s organizations that took part in WIDF, see 60-61.With the growth in membership, it was able to ensure financial independence through membership fees, sales of publications, and various fundraising campaigns that included large bazaars at the world congresses featuring handicrafts and artworks from its member organizations. See Melanie Ilic, “Soviet women, cultural exchange and the Women’s International Democratic Federation,” in Reassessing Cold War Europe, eds. Sari Autio-Sarasmo and Katalin Miklóssy (New York: Routledge, 2010), 160. [24]We Accuse! Report of the Commission of the Women’s International Democratic Federation in Korea, May 16 to 27, 1951 (Berlin: WIDF, 1951). [25]We Accuse, 2. [26]We Accuse, 6. [27]We Accuse, 48. [28] Christine Ahn, “Why Women Must End the Korean War,” Foreign Policy in Focus (March 8, 2013) available at http://fpif.org/why_women_must_end_the_korean_war/ (accessed July 5, 2015). [29]Deann Borshay Liem and her film crew have documented the trip in detail to produce the documentary film, Crossings, which will likely include the details of this debate. A description of the film is available at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/453281398/crossings-0/description (accessed July 28, 2015). [30] For an analyst’s assessment of similar kinds of institutional differences, see Patrick McEachern, Inside the Red Box: North Korea’s Post-totalitarian Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). [31]Jodie Evans, “Stitching Korea Back Together After 60 Years of Military Divide,” AlterNet (June 15, 2015) available athttp://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/stitching-korea-back-together-after-60-years-military-divide (accessed July 2, 2015); Gregory Elich Interviews Christine Ahn, “Opening the Door to Peace on the Korean Peninsula: Women Cross DMZ,”The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 28, No. 3, July 13, 2015 available at http://japanfocus.org/-Christine-Ahn/4342/article.html (accessed July 27, 2015); Mairead Maguire, “Opinion: Why Women Peacemakers Marched in Korea,” Inter Press Service News Agency (July 13, 2015) available at http://www.ipsnews.net/2015/07/opinion-why-women-peacemakers-marched-in-korea/ (accessed July 27, 2015); Ann Wright, “Coming Under ‘Fire’ at Korea’s DMZ,” Consortium News (July 15, 2015) available at https://consortiumnews.com/2015/07/15/coming-under-fire-at-koreas-dmz/ (accessed July 27, 2015). [32] “N. Korean economic conditions appear to be improving: CRS report,” The Korea Herald (July 27, 2015) available at http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20150727000190 (accessed July 28, 2015). [33]Dae-Sook Suh, Kim Il Sung: The North Korean Leader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) [34] For details of what happened in Christine’s own words, see Gregory Elich Interviews Christine Ahn, “Opening the Door to Peace on the Korean Peninsula: Women Cross DMZ,”The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 28, No. 3, July 13, 2015 available at http://japanfocus.org/-Christine-Ahn/4342/article.html (accessed July 27, 2015). Once we became aware of North Korean media distortions of our Mangyondae visit, we lodged sharply-worded criticisms with our North Korean hosts, and physically prevented the journalists from covering our visit to the International Friendship Exhibit in Myohyangsan, where gifts to the leaders are displayed. [35] For a comparative analysis of the way the Korean War has been memorialized in the two Koreas, China, and the US, see the special journal issue “(De)Memorializing the Korean War: A Critical Intervention,” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review (March 2015) available at https://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/e-journal/issue-14 (accessed July 5, 2015). [36]Christine Ahn and Suzy Kim, “Opinion: Improve North Korean Human Rights by Ending War,” Inter Press Service News Agency (December 2, 2014) available at http://www.ipsnews.net/2014/12/opinion-improve-north-korean-human-rights-by-ending-war/ (accessed July 28, 2015) [37] Gary Clyde Hufbauer, Jeffrey J. Schott, and Kimberly Ann Elliott, Economic Sanctions Reconsidered: History and Current Policy (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1990); Marc Bossuyt, The Adverse Consequences of Economic Sanctions on the Enjoyment of Human Rights (Geneva: United Nations Economic and Social Council, Commission on Human Rights, 2000). [38]Rudiger Frank, “Political economy of sanctions against North Korea,” Asian Perspective 30, no. 3 (2006), 8-9. Frank found that sanctions are only effective when they are quick and decisive with an average of three years duration imposed by friendly states before affected countries develop “sanctions immunity”. Otherwise, sanctions often serve to rally support for the regime, confirming the government’s rhetoric of foreign hostility (13-17). [39] For a detailed look at the devastating effects of sanctions on the general population in Iraq, see Joy Gordon, Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). [40]“Koryolink faces big problems with cash, competition,” North Korea Tech (June 25, 2015) available at http://www.northkoreatech.org/2015/06/25/koryolink-faces-big-problems-with-cash-competition/ (accessed July 13, 2015). [41] UN General Assembly Human Rights Council 25th Session, “Report of the commission of inquiry on human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” A/HRC/25/63 (February 7, 2014), 16, 19-20 available at http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/CoIDPRK/Pages/ReportoftheCommissionofInquiryDPRK.aspx (accessed August 4, 2015). [42]Emma Campbell, “‘Fieldwork’ North Korea: Observations of daily life on the ground inside the country,”The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 12, Issue 40, No. 2 (October 6, 2014) available at http://japanfocus.org/-Emma-Campbell/4196/article.html (accessed August 4, 2015). [43] I thank Steph Lee for our fruitful discussions on this in the summer of 2013. [44] Paik Nak-chung, Division System in Crisis: Essays on Contemporary Korea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 161-172. As he explains, Paik focuses on the role of South Korean civil society due to the lack of a civil society in North Korea or a supranational body like the European Union that can play a role in Korea. [45]In this regard, Women Cross DMZ can be differentiated from other border crossings carried out by South Korean activists, like the one by Im Sukyŏng in 1989 as a representative of the South Korean student movement. Comparing our Peace Walk to footage of Im’s reception in Pyongyang, there were many similarities from the rows of women dressed in traditional Korean dress, waving red flowers, to their slogans, which called for chajut’ongil (autonomous reunification). Despite such overlapping aesthetics, the two crossings are situated in different affective spaces as Im’s crossing performed “emotional citizenship” to challenge the state mandated citizenship that inscribed the division into its very formulation by designating the other side as illegitimate. Rather than relying on such ethno-nationalist appeal to the concept of minjok, Women Cross DMZ emphasized global citizen diplomacy led by women as key. For fuller discussion of emotional citizenship as related to Korean border crossings, see Suk-Young Kim,DMZ Crossing: Performing Emotional Citizenship along the Korean Border(New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). [46] Eric Talmadge, “Small steps: Kindergarten plan symbolizes novel attempt to empower North Korea’s isolated deaf,” Star Tribune (July 8, 2015) available at http://www.startribune.com/german-attempts-to-break-down-barriers-for-deaf-in-n-korea/312407101/ (accessed July 28, 2015) [47] Representative Charles Rangel’s Office Press Release, “Three Remaining Korean War Veterans In Congress Introduce Bill Calling for Formal End of Korean War,” (July 28, 2015) available at http://rangel.house.gov/press-release/three-remaining-korean-war-veterans-congress-introduce-bill-calling-formal-end-korean (accessed August 4, 2015). [48] For some concrete suggestions toward denuclearization, see Peter Hayes, “Ending Nuclear Threat via a Northeast Asia Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone,”NAPSNetSpecial Reports (January 06, 2015) available at http://nautilus.org/napsnet/napsnet-special-reports/ending-a-nuclear-threat-via-a-northeast-asia-nuclear-weapons-free-zone/(accessed August 4, 2015); Peter Hayes, “Nuclear Threat and Korean Reunification,” NAPSNet Policy Forum (June 01, 2015) available at http://nautilus.org/napsnet/napsnet-policy-forum/nuclear-threat-and-korean-reunification/ (accessed August 4, 2015).

Joint Security Zone, DMZ from Northern side. Wikimedia Commons August 21, 2015 Dear President Obama: We at the Korea Policy Institute urge you to act swiftly to seek a peaceful resolution to current hostilities on the Korean peninsula. Avenues exist to replace saber-rattling with diplomacy. The United States-led United Nations Command in Korea and the South Korean military have concluded that injuries suffered by two South Korean soldiers on August 4, 2015 were due to a mine planted by North Korea. North Korea, however, denies the allegation and has called for a joint investigation of the incident. The South Korean military fired artillery rounds into the northern side on August 20, 2015, alleging that North Korea had fired first at a propaganda loudspeaker in the southern side yet North Korea has denied firing the first shots. North Korea has set a deadline of 5:00 p.m., August 22, 2015 (KST) for South Korea to turn off its propaganda loudspeakers. Crucially, however, it has also offered to open a channel for the improvement of inter-Korean ties. North Korea has placed its military on a “quasi-war” status. Statements by North Korea indicate that it intends to direct its military strikes at South Korea’s loudspeakers if they are not silenced by the aforementioned deadline and will engage in all-out war, depending upon the nature of South Korea’s response. Opportunities to diffuse the crisis are available. Thus far, however, South Korea has announced that it will not silence its loudspeakers and that it will meet North Korean force with even greater force. And although ongoing U.S. –South Korea joint war exercises were momentarily placed on hold, they have resumed and U.S. troops are reportedly mobilizing near the DMZ. These responses are akin to throwing gasoline on a fire. Mr. President, we urge you to act swiftly to take advantage of all opportunities at hand to engage in dialogue with North Korea and work for peace in Korea, lest tragedy ensue. Sincerely, Paul Liem Chairperson, Board of Directors #KoreanWar #NorthKorea #peacetreaty #SouthKorea

Refugees during the Korean War (CKS-UH/Warren McDonald) By Ji-Yeon Yuh | September 24, 2015 In collaboration with the Korea Policy Institute, Legacies of the Korean War, an online oral-history project that documents the stories of Korean American survivors of the war and their descendants, is pleased to announce its new website. This article was published as part of special series to launch the Legacies of the Korean War website. The cost of the Korean War is commonly tallied in numbers: soldiers killed and wounded, civilians killed and wounded, villages destroyed, refugees evacuated, orphans created, families divided, napalm dropped, bombs exploded. Those numbers are worth repeating, for the sheer physical devastation of three years of war on a peninsula about the size of Idaho (roughly 85,000 square miles) is staggering. An estimated 5 million soldiers and civilians were killed during three years of warfare. Of these, just over 1.2 million were soldiers from 19 countries, including about 217,000 from South Korea, 406,000 from North Korea, 600,000 from China, 36,000 from the United States, and about 5,000 from the other UN nations. The remaining more than 3 million deaths were Korean civilians, including those killed in massacres such as the one at No Gun Ri, or executed as political prisoners by either the South or North Korean armies. The capital city of Seoul changed hands four times during the three years of war, with each change accompanied by massive political killings of civilians. In 1950, the population of Korea, north and south, was 30 million. A civilian death toll of 3 million represents 10 percent of the population.[1] Another estimated 3 million Korean civilians became refugees. An estimated 1 million fled south across the 38th parallel in the months before the war officially began on June 25, 1950.[2] Three months into the war, 57,000 South Koreans were listed as missing and more than 500,000 homes had been destroyed. In 1954, an international child welfare agency estimated that 2 million children under the age of 18 had been displaced by the war. Then there are the separated families. No one knows how many Koreans were separated by the war and national division, although about 130,000 are currently registered as such with South Korea’s Ministry of Unification. Virtually every Korean is either part of a separated family or knows someone who is, and most estimates hover around 2 million.[3] The United States subjected the northern half of Korea to an intense bombing campaign that destroyed virtually every substantial building and left a trail of completely destroyed villages. In just three years, the United States dropped 635,000 tons of bombs, including 32,557 tons of napalm. This tonnage is greater than that which was dropped during the entire Pacific campaign of World War II and more napalm than was used during the Vietnam War. Both journalists and American POWs reported that virtually the whole of North Korea had been reduced to rubble. In November of 1950, the bombing had decimated housing so severely that the North Korean government advised its citizens to dig into the earth for shelter.[4] But the true cost of the Korean War cannot be plumbed through numbers alone. It cannot be tidily limited to the peninsula and constrained between the dates June 25, 1950 and July 27, 1953. The suffering, the pain, and the consequences overwhelm those boundaries and spill into the immeasurable. It is the innumerable individual experiences of the Korean people themselves, the massive weight of their stories, that can help us begin to understand the full cost of the still unended Korean War, suspended in a ceasefire and lacking a peace treaty. Let us start with ordinary soldiers like Mr. Moon.[5] Growing up in a rice-farming family in northern Korea, he volunteered for the Japanese military because he was going to be drafted anyway and doing so would relieve his family of the burden of feeding him and sending him to school. He entered an air force school and became an airplane mechanic. Two months into his first post, the Pacific War ended. Back in his home village, he volunteered for the new North Korean military in order to preempt accusations of collaboration for his Japanese military past. Unable to endure military life, he faked mental illness, deserted, and escaped to the south. But there, he was drafted into the South Korean Army, and served in the Korean War as an ordnance man. He and his family were among the first post-1965 Korean immigrants to the United States. He never spoke to his family about his military experiences, and had reluctantly agreed to narrate his life history when I asked him to participate in my research on the Korean diaspora. As I was putting away the recording equipment after our interview, he thanked me for not pressing for details, saying that what he experienced in the war was too brutal to be remembered. Reverend Yoo, also part of that early post-1965 immigration, was an adolescent boy in North Korea when the war broke out. In his own words: Six-twenty-five [6.25, the war][6] erupted and in the middle of October [1950], when the People’s Army [the North Korean army] is retreating and the UN and South Korean forces are advancing, and it’s right before then, day and night, day and night. Now there’s the stealth bomber and the B-52, but then, it was the B-29. Night and day, bombing, innumerable bombs. So at night it’s Eunyule, Sariwon, Jinnampo; over there it’s bright, dropping bombs constantly. And the flares, because it’s dark, they’re dropping fire parachutes, flares. I don’t know what it is in English. Drop those and it’s so bright everywhere, for hundreds of meters around, just like daytime, and then they follow that with the bombs. And from the Yellow Sea comes military ships, they’re firing cannons. They’re dropping bombs. They’re firing cannons. So day and night, we’re hiding in holes in the ground. It’s unspeakable, unspeakable. It’s really unspeakable. Actually, Americans, the 9-11 incident—that’s nothing. I saw with my own eyes people hit by bombs and dropping to the ground. It’s unspeakable. His narrative continued with his recollection of killings. The North Korean army killed many people as they retreated, and the South Korean army did the same as they advanced. Between the two armies, he recalled, they managed to kill off entire families. He dug a hole by the side of an outhouse to hide from both armies, and noted with wry laughter that no one thought to look there. Eventually, he and his family were able to board a U.S. military ship and sail down the western coast of Korea. The ship hits something in the water and is forced to dock at Gunsan. There the family was stuck in a refugee camp and then eventually made their way to Gimpo, a small suburb on the west side of Seoul where many northerners, fleeing the war’s violence, settled. He left his family in the refugee camp and disappeared for several months. This was cause for great consternation, according to his sister, as he was the youngest and his family was accustomed to coddling him. In his sister’s story, the coddled child was transformed into a man who rescued the family from starvation. He showed up, she recounted, with sackfuls of stuff—cans of meat and other foods, packages of rice and noodles, chocolates, all kinds of edibles he had obtained from the PX. During his disappearance, he had worked for American soldiers in order to bring back to his family these goods. This is a familiar narrative that simultaneously highlights and contrasts American bounty with Korean poverty, but in the sister’s retelling, it is also a coming-of-age narrative colored by pride and love. The man himself told a different story. In fact, he never told me the story of his food-laden return to his family. Instead, he told me about the time he spent on base. The toadying up to soldiers to get work and the resulting tips. Getting a job on base manning the soldier’s lounge. Eating nothing but the sugar that fell off the donuts he sold at the lounge, because the donuts had to be accounted for but the sugar did not. The flicker of shame at the sight of camptown prostitutes. Constant hunger. Sheer amazement at the power and the waste of the Americans As he recalled, the contrast between well-fed Americans and starving Koreans, between bombed-out Korean villages and bustling U.S. military bases, between American might and Korean weakness, was sharply painful. His entire life, he said, from his ambitions to his outrage, from his accommodation to his resistance, were reactions to that contrast. Mrs. Ahn was a young wife and mother of two toddler boys when the war broke out. Her husband was among the thousands of young men forcibly taken by the North Korean army when it entered Seoul. He never came back, and she became a virtual widow, caring for her parents-in-law and raising her two sons. She and her sons became refugees, forced to flee south, and she remembered the hunger, the fatigue, the hordes of desperate people, and most of all the fear. Fear of soldiers because to the civilians all soldiers, regardless of affiliation, were dangerous. Fear of losing her remaining family. Fear of death. Fear of greater hunger. There was so much fear that eventually she felt numb. Without the children to keep her focused, she said, she might very well have given up. She never remarried, and she spoke about the deep loneliness of a lifetime as a widow caring for family members and wondering about her husband. Decades later, a discreet inquiry revealed that her husband was still alive in the north. She shook her head at the recollection. Too late, she said, and too much distance. Mrs. Lee was the mother of three young children, living in her hometown in the north with her parents, siblings, and husband, when the Korean War broke out. They were already suspect in the eyes of the North Korean government because of their Christianity and comparative wealth. Medium-sized landowners, they lost nearly all their land under land reform. Mrs. Lee was a nurse who spoke both Chinese and English. She landed a job as an interpreter for a U.S. military unit that camped out nearby when the United States was advancing north in late 1950. One day, the commander asked her to go with them back across the 38th parallel. It’ll be only a few days trip, he assured her; the border isn’t going to close. But the day after they crossed over to the south, heavy fighting ensued, the border closed, and Mrs. Lee was stuck. She has never been back since, and she never again saw her husband, three children, or other members of her family. Over the next two decades, she worked as a nurse in numerous places, including camptowns where she treated the women and witnessed their exploitation, and in orphanages where she cared for abandoned children. Every night, she had the same nightmare. She stands in front of a thick black river.  On the other side, stand her three children, crying out for their mother. She cannot go to them; something invisible holds her back as she strains to cross that thick black river. Every night, she woke up drenched in a cold sweat. On days when she had no work, she would go to the port city of Incheon and trail her hand in the waters of the Yellow Sea, thinking to herself, these waters flow to the shores of the north, where my children are. Eventually, she couldn’t tolerate the pain any longer, and she used her missionary connections to obtain a job as a nurse in a California hospital. She hoped that physical distance would end the nightmares, but she noted sadly that they followed her across the Pacific. She never dared to contact her children, she said, because she feared they might be punished for having a mother who had worked for the U.S. military. There are many more stories. There is the wholesale business owner in Philadelphia who as a young boy witnessed the execution of his father by the North Korean military and became virulently anti-communist. There is the pediatrician in Atlanta who nearly lost her family while fleeing to Busan, survived numerous bombings, and now abhors being alone in a dark house. There is the grandfather in northeastern China whose experience as a draftee in the Japanese military was so terrible that he hid for years to avoid being drafted into the Chinese army for service in the Korean War. There is the housewife in Osaka who starved as a child during the war and now must always have several months’ worth of rice in the home. There is the second-generation Korean American college student who declared that North Korea is the enemy of his homeland, only to discover that his grandfather is from the north and yearns for reunification.[7] There are the sons and daughters and grandchildren who do not understand the silences and dark spaces in their families because their elders cannot bring themselves to talk about the war.[8] Each story illustrates what Mrs. Ahn once told me: “The war is not only a national tragedy; it is also [her] personal tragedy.” What these stories tell us is that the cost of the Korean War lies not only in the direct devastation of war, but also in its long-term human consequences: the memories too searing to be remembered, the destruction of families, and the collective trauma of generations. Ji-Yeon Yuh is an associate professor of history at Northwestern University, and a KPI Board member.  She specializes in Asian American history and Asian diasporas and is the author of Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America (New York University Press, 2002). ================== [1] Casualty statistics for the Korean War vary among sources depending on how deaths are counted. The most accurate statistics are for U.S. soldier deaths and come from the Department of Defense. The figures used here are from “American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics,” a Jan. 2, 2015 report from the Congressional Research Service. Figures for both civilian casualties and soldier deaths for other countries are taken from Bethany Lacina and Nils Petter Gleditsch, “Monitoring Trends in Global Combat: A New Dataset of Battle Deaths,” European Journal of Population (2005) 21: 145-166; Davd Halberstam, The Coldest Winter: American and the Korean War (New York: Hyperion, 2007), p. 4, and Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2011). [2] Between 1945 and the official start of the war, there was much military fighting along the 38th parallel as both the northern and southern armies crossed over and engaged in battle. Any one of those battles could have been chosen as the official start of the war. It is worth noting that the Korean War has never been legally recognized as a war. The U.S. Congress defined it as a “police action,” and the UN defined it as a defensive action on behalf of South Korea. For a fuller discussion of how the Korean War is interpreted, remembered, and forgotten, see Cumings, The Korean War. [3] Statistics for refugees, orphans, and divided families vary widely. These figures are taken from Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2011). South Korean newspapers have reported that as many as 10 million Koreans were separated from their families by the end of the war. A recent household census, however, found that about 1.5% of South Koreans (just over 700,000) report that they have direct family members—parents, children, spouses, siblings—in the north. See “2005 South Korean Household Census—First Complete Survey of Separated Families” (2005 hanguk ingu jutaek chongjosa—cheot nambuk isan gajok hyeonhwang jeonsujosa irwojyeo),” accessed July 29, 2015 at http://www.voakorea.com/content/a-35-2006-06-12-voa16-91232844/1301462.html. [4] Charles Armstrong, “The Destruction and Reconstruction of North Korea, 1950-1960.” The Asia-Pacific Journal 8 (December 20, 2010), 51; Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2011). [5] All names are pseudonyms. Oral history interviews were conducted by the author in the United States, China, and Japan between 1999 and 2012 for an ongoing book project on the Korean diaspora. [6] Most South Koreans call the Korean War “Yook-ee-oh,” for 6/25, the commonly accepted start date for the war. The formal term is “hanguk jun-jaeng,” literally “Korean War,” and is used on the air and in print. [7] The individuals mentioned in this paragraph include oral history narrators, family members, colleagues, and students who spoke with the author. [8] The multimedia exhibit “Still Present Pasts: Korean Americans and the Forgotten War” explored the legacies of the war via oral history, film, visual and performing arts, and history. It is now accessible online at http://stillpresentpasts.org/. #Armistice #KoreanWar

Reverend Won who talks- after many years of silence – about the war and his family separation in a video on the Legacies of the Korean War oral history website. By Ramsay Liem |  October 2015 This article was published by both Korea Policy Institute and Legacies of the Korean War, an new online oral-history project that documents the stories of Korean American survivors of the war and their descendants. Silence is a common signature of profoundly traumatic events, not the least of which are wars. For survivors of armed conflict, it attests to unspeakable violence and unresolved wounds. For state actors, it shields the geopolitics of war from public scrutiny. The Korean War is a testament to both conditions—a horrific civil conflict bearing untold civilian and military casualties and also an interventionist war in which U.S. stakes in the emerging Cold War dictated the allied response. It is no wonder the Korean War is best known as the “forgotten war.” Little, if any, talk about the war has been recorded especially among noncombatants, including members of the Korean diaspora in the United States. However, well over a decade ago, in one of the earliest oral-history projects with civilian survivors living in the United States, Korean Americans began to offer their narratives of the war and, paradoxically, insights into the multiple impediments to speaking freely (Liem, 2003/2004). Their memory-sharing marked the beginning of a surge of interest in exploring the Korean War, as experienced by ordinary citizens, through innovative storytelling projects within the Korean diaspora in the United States. This essay addresses both the silencing of memory and recent community-led efforts to resist forgetting. I. The Korean War and the Formation of the (Silent) Korean Diaspora in the United States No period of the modern era has had more enduring significance for Koreans throughout the diaspora than the Korean War, perhaps with the exception of the Japanese colonial era, 1910-1945. The war sundered prospects for genuine Korean independence at the end of World War II, yoked nation-building to Cold War geopolitics, and caused the mass dispersion of the Korean people, both domestically and internationally (Cumings, 1997). At the conclusion of World War II in the Pacific Theater, the Soviet Union acquiesced to a U.S. proposal to divide Korea at the 38th parallel ostensibly to oversee the disarmament of Japanese military forces. The partition was to be temporary, leading to the establishment of a unified Korean provisional government and eventual independence. But U.S. and Soviet officials failed to reach agreement on a mechanism to achieve this objective. Shortly thereafter, the United States pushed through separate presidential elections in the south under United Nations auspices, despite the opposition of the majority of Koreans. The Republic of Korea (South Korea) was inaugurated on August 15, 1948, and a mere three weeks later, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) was founded in the north. The division of the Korean peninsula would be hardened by war two years later. While the politics and prosecution of the Korean War have been the subject of extensive academic research (Cumings, 1981; Merrill, 1989; Park, 1980), remarkably little has been done to record the human, personal meanings of the conflict for Koreans, especially those living in the United States. This is a striking omission in view of the extraordinary devastation inflicted on the Korean people by this war—more than three million civilian casualties (ten percent of the population overall and an estimated thirty percent of the population in North Korea where U.S. bombing campaigns were unrestrained), a decimated social and physical infrastructure throughout the peninsula, and ten million people separated from their families with no genuine prospects for reunion now more than six decades later (Halliday and Cumings, 1988). As with other wars of the twentieth century, the continuing significance of the Korean War resides in complex sociopolitical and psychological legacies. What is unique to the Korean conflict, however, is that it remains stalemated in an armistice agreement resulting in unresolved hostilities that exacerbate current conflict among the chief protagonists, the United States, North Korea, and South Korea. Thus, the Korean War not only endures in, political, social, and psychological legacies for Korean Americans but also persists as an active, military confrontation that periodically threatens to flare up into all-out war. Among the war’s defining legacies for Korean Americans is the very existence of the Korean diasporic community in the United States. At the start of the Cold War era when fewer than several thousand Koreans were resident in America and emigration from Korea was restricted to 100 people per year, thousands of Korean military brides began entering the United States, laying the foundation for rapid chain migration that would ensue when national quotas were lifted in 1965 (Yuh, 2002). The war also spawned a continuous wave of international adoptions to the United States, making Korea the primary source of transnational adoptees until 1991. For many others, especially those who migrated southward during the war, Cold War ideological fervor in South Korea created myriad economic and political hardships, motivating them to seek refuge in the United States once the pathway to immigration was opened. Korean America was born in the heat and wake of the Korean War. In spite of the Korean War’s central role in shaping their personal histories, early Korean immigrants and their descendants have had virtually no voice in shaping U.S. collective memory of the Korean conflict. Most Americans do not realize that their elderly Korean American neighbors are survivors of an unfinished war, and seldom is the topic broached spontaneously either within the Korean American community or across ethnic divides. If “containment” was the byword of the Cold War in the United States, it persists in the silence that shrouds this critical period in U.S. history, denies its survivors the opportunity to heal and reconcile, and obfuscates the origins of current tensions between the United States and North Korea. ll.  Koreans in the Diaspora Remember “the Forgotten War” An early meaningful crack in this wall of silence emerged, not coincidentally, during the period leading up to the first summit meeting between the leaders of North and South Korea in June 2000, more than four decades after the signing of the 1953 Korean War armistice.1 Prior to this moment, there was virtually no open talk about the Korean War among Koreans living in the United States and certainly no published accounts of their war memories and legacies. The historic opening between the north and south and the possibility of reconciling across entrenched ideological differences would have far-reaching effects, reverberating throughout the Korean diaspora. With the thawing of Cold War tensions, Korean Americans were, on a small yet significant scale, willing to speak out about the war, and more than three dozen first- and second-generation Korean Americans agreed to participate in the “Korean Americans Remember the Korean War” oral history project launched by this writer (Liem, 2003/2004). Having consented to be interviewed, people told detailed stories spontaneously and with considerable emotion, the power and intensity of which belied any notion that forgetting or disinterest could account for their prior silence. Paradoxically, while these oral histories were rich in detail and urgency, they also bore witness to the politics of silence that had, throughout the Cold War, relegated survivor accounts like theirs to the dustbin of history. Interviewees, this is to say, not only spoke about their wartime experiences, but also, grappled with the great difficulty they experienced in talking about their long-silenced memories of the war. As two survivors respectively stated: Very few people talk about it. I was a beggar for days. Sometimes I am so ashamed, I don’t tell about that. Oh, we hide, of course, always talking good things, and not what’s shameful. No, I never talked about it before. At church or with church groups we should talk about it but the politics always divide us. It merits asking: what prevents speaking out about the war in the face of an evident desire to tell and be heard? III. Official State Narratives and the Politics of Silence In Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s), T. Fujitani, Geoffrey White, and Lisa Yoneyama introduce the idea of “critical remembering” as an oppositional force to master narratives crafted by both Allied and Axis states about World War II in the Pacific Theater. They describe “official” remembering as a struggle to preserve “global, national, and masculinist narratives of the major warring powers” (2001, 3) in the face of marginalized memories—for example, gendered, ethnic, and local, that could subvert dominant historical accounts. The very investment of nations in preserving their accounts of history—“…the urgent and intense political stakes involved in remembering wars”—presupposes contested readings of the past, “perilous memories” that must be forgotten or otherwise silenced to preserve the claims of the state (Fujitani et. al., 2001, 2). In the case of the Korean War, the suppression of alternative voices in the United States has been fostered by pervasive state and popular narratives of the war as “forgotten,” “unknown,” a heroic victory over communism, an affirmation of the United States as savior of South Korea (Ehrhart, 2001; Levine, 2001).2 The reference to the Korean War as “forgotten” is probably the most familiar to Americans. This epitaph virtually erases the first hot war of the Cold War from the U.S. historical record. Recalling the Korean War as “forgotten” distances the United States from its interventionist role in the war’s origins and continuing aftermath, in particular, its role in the division of the Korean peninsula and the ever-present threat of renewed military conflict, as well as its geopolitical interests in South Korea as a strategic land base and launching pad on the Asian continent. More to the point, fixing the Korean War in collective consciousness as “forgettable” or ideologically framing it as the rescue of South Koreans from international communism significantly displaces firsthand recollections of the indiscriminate brutality of that conflict by civilian survivors of that war. In this regard, Korean American oral histories of the war, as “critical remembering,” bear “the potential to disrupt the dominant paradigms“ (Diaz, 2001,159) and challenge their veracity. lV. Korean American Critical Remembering Over six decades have passed since the end of active fighting in the Korean War, and many Korean American survivors of that war have gone on to establish new lives in the United States. One might reasonably expect these conditions, not to mention the pressure to “remember” the Korean War as “forgotten” in the United States, might have eroded Korean American memories of this conflict. Lisa Lowe contends that the naturalization of Asian immigrants in the United States requires “forgetting the history of war in Asia and adopting the national historical narrative that disavows the existence of the American imperial project…[and] acceding to a political fiction of equal rights that is generated through the denial of history…” (1996, 27). The pressure to adopt state narratives is experienced by all citizens, especially during periods of national crisis, as evident in the United States following September 11, 2001. But for immigrants, especially racial minorities whose political and social status is tenuous, the ideological authority of the state can be particularly insidious. For Korean Americans throughout the Cold War and even into the present, it has been a matter of self-preservation to foreclose any talk about the Korean War that might complicate the dominant U.S. “savior” narrative and call into question the past and continuing role of the United States in the un-ended Korean conflict. But the absence of talk by no means signifies the loss of memory as evident in this excerpt from Suntae Chun’s oral history. Chun was a first-year high school student when the war broke out. His hometown was Kaesong, a border town within the southern zone before the war that would be ceded to north according to the terms of the 1953 Armistice Agreement. Within six months of the outbreak of full-scale war, he was separated from his family and survived on his own until the war ended. He has been a resident of California for four decades. Because the Americans bombed the city every day, we moved away from Kaesong about eight or ten kilometers. One day, we remembered chickens we left at our home, so I went to Kaesong to get the chickens. Then there was an airplane sound, so I ran to the tunnel my father and I had dug. Then airplanes, about two, three, or four of them, with propellers, came and for the first time I saw, what do they call it, carpet-bombing. They just all the lined up, from the south to the north and they covered the whole area. Then the airplanes circled around and came back, east to west. I thought what they dropped was pamphlets…because white stuff kept falling down everywhere. No bombing sound, just a kind of dull thud each time…then I found out it was not pamphlets—it was a parachuted bomb. It goes five to ten meters into the ground. Then, all the airplanes left and a little bit later, there was one of the largest explosions I ever heard, right in the middle of the city, like an atomic bomb you see in the pictures, huge dust and smoke rising high up into the sky. I thought, what the hell was that? There’s no airplane and there’s a big explosion. We didn’t think about it as a time bomb because we never saw it before. That’s a ghost plane, a ghost bomber or something. Anyway, five minutes later, another bomb exploded again—then, every five minutes for hours…so scary. Now, there were people hiding downtown in the rich people’s basements, twenty, thirty, forty people, young kids and old people, you know, and wives. In many cases time bombs dropped right next to them but they didn’t know what it was. They only heard a thud and sometimes came out. So they are all buried alive. While memories like these rarely circulate in the Korean American community, much less American society, in general, it is evident that the proscription to forget has not purged the war from Chun’s memory. Nor are recollections like these without peril for Korean War master narratives. In his “critical remembering,” Chun humanizes the “collateral” damage sustained by ordinary Koreans from massive, indiscriminate U.S. aerial bombing campaigns—campaigns acknowledged by military historians as unprecedented in their elastic definition of what constituted a “military target,” stretched “to include every human-made structure” (Sahr Conway-Lanz, 2006, 20.). Other memories upset the received representation of the Korean War as the rescue of South Koreans from an alien, communist north. At the height of McCarthyism, in the face of huge military and civilian casualties and a war that ended in stalemate, it would have been untenable in the United States to portray the South Korean people as other than singularly anti-communist. Yet, the memories of some Korean Americans contest this Cold War political narrative. Lee Kyung-Hui was six years old when the war broke out. Her father was a member of the South Korean constabulary before, during, and after the war in the Mt. Jiri area, an important base for the South Korean resistance movement. South Korean guerilla forces sympathetic to the North’s call for national unity played a prominent role in the conflict before and during the hot war. Lee’s recollection of her parents’ activities during the war captures not only their political ambivalence, but also, a sense of common humanity across political differences not available in statist narratives. [M]y father was a police chief in the Chiri-san [Mt. Jiri] area. There were lots of guerrillas in the mountains, and he was constantly involved in combat. According to my mother, he was very ambivalent. I think in a way, he could understand where those people were coming from and was very much distraught with what he was doing. But I think that he was convinced that he had to do it to end the war. My mother used to tell me about feeding a young lady who was captured in the Chiri mountains. She probably was going to be tried and put in jail but she was very hungry and so my mother fed her and she felt really sorry for that young lady. She was captured and brought to my house because she was in bad shape, so starved—so my mother cared for her. After the war, in the seventies and eighties, famous novelists wrote a lot of stories about how these people died for Communism and their idealism. They were hoping that the communist or socialist country would be a utopia. But they didn’t know what they were getting into. My mother…genuinely understood their idealism, so it was very painful for her to reflect on how these young people died. Sung Eun Park was a teenager during the war. Her father was “taken north” by retreating North Korean soldiers following the U.S./UN recapture of Seoul early in the fighting. Most likely he died during flight. While no friend of communism, Mrs. Park offered a remarkably nuanced account of her feelings toward North Koreans during the war: My brother did not want to join the [South Korean] army. He said, “How can I fight? Two boys shoot each other; one is from the north, the other the south. But they are not our enemies. They are like brothers. What kind of people do that? My mother and I were the same way; that’s why we were always against this war, really. My mother was a strong complainer. She said, “So I have to fight my brother, this is my own brother! How can I do that?” These memories do not square with the image of America as singularly the champion of South Korea in a struggle against the onslaught of an alien, communist people to the north. They suggest a more complicated civil conflict in which the suffering of combatants and civilians alike may well have been intensified by familial or otherwise intimate identification with the “enemy.” The war as remembered by these Korean Americans resists and thus imperils a self-serving, Cold War narrative of “good vs. evil.” V. The Politics of Silence and the Korean American Community Ignacio Martín-Baró, a Salvadoran social psychologist assassinated for his vocal opposition to counterinsurgent state violence in El Salvador, proposed the concept of social polarization to capture the dehumanization of social relationships characteristic of extreme conflict situations: “People are…no longer valued in and of themselves but rather on the basis of whether they are ‘ours’ or ‘theirs’…for or against our side in the conflict” (1994, 113). This extreme distortion of social relations—in essence, “us or them”—fosters pervasive self-censorship and guardedness for everyone, imperiling the very social foundation of society. For Martín-Baró, this destruction of the basic social fabric constitutes one of the most devastating yet neglected consequences of war. The Korean American community still bears the imprint of a legacy of division from the immediate postwar era when ideological conformity was strictly enforced, in some cases by agents of South Korean intelligence agencies (Choy, 1979). With regard to anti-communist politics within the Korean American community, Edward Chang describes the disturbing long-arm of South Korean intelligence agents: “Anti-communist activities were generally organized, promoted and legitimized by so-called ‘front’ organizations of the [South Korean] consulate and thus contributed to the promotion of ‘fear’ in the [Korean American] community” (1988, 53). A pervasive legacy of the un-ended Korean War is political fear and anxiety. Koreans in the United States must negotiate continuing Cold War cleavages within the community that impede open discussion about still-sensitive issues. Historically censored from within and policed from without, this form of political silence surfaces in Korean American reflections about the war. Originally from the north, Min Yong Lee lived in Seoul, South Korea, with his mother and two sisters when the war broke out. During the war, several of his family members went north, making him vulnerable to accusations of being a communist sympathizer. After the war, he continued to live under a cloud of suspicion. Unable to envision a future for himself in South Korea, he immigrated to the United States to begin a new life. I had brothers and a sister who fled to the north. Actually, I don’t know if it was “fled” or not; I never asked. That was simply too painful for me. Even after the war, if people thought you had family in the north or worse, relatives who went to the north, it was really hard for you. If people asked me, “Did your family escape from the north?”-sort of an acceptable story, I just said, “Yes,” proving I’m affiliated to the south. Then I am without any family history, no personal story. Separated families don’t have any soul, any speech at all…. That is a kind of trauma for Koreans. I tried to be neutral but it’s impossible. The only thing is to hide my identity. But in the U.S., we’re still under the influence of ideology. We paint family stories with political issues and then we’re scared, and we hide it all. No chance to open ourselves. No personal history after fifty years, no real identity. (bold added) The politics of Cold War censorship and silencing persist beyond the immigrant generation. Born in Michigan and now living on the East Coast, Orson Moon was 32 years old when he offered his story, his parents having come to the United States in the sixties. His experience attests to the fact that even second-generation Korean Americans are not immune to community silencing. When I first learned the stories about my grandfather and father’s experiences during the war, a lot of things just fell right into place, and it was as though a weight had been lifted from me. My first reaction was not shame or denial; I felt a lot of joy and I felt a real strong sense of purpose. At the same time though, my dad told me to be careful and not to tell anyone else about this. So after all the years, my father was still very afraid. (bold added) The Cold War has not ended in the Korean American community because the Cold War still rages on the Korean peninsula. Sixty-two years following the end of active battle in Korea and more than two decades since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, a climate of uncertainty and ideological suspicion still mediates Korean American community relations. For some like Lee and Moon’s father, Cold War fear is manifested internally in the suppression of private memories of the war and outwardly in striking Korean American silence about the Korean War. Although overt ideological policing of the community has abated considerably in the wake of the movement toward democratization in South Korea, the fear of being politically stigmatized remains and is periodically exacerbated whenever state-level conflict on the Korean peninsula and between the United States and North Korea intensifies. One Korean American interviewee from the San Francisco area described conversations about the war as invariably explosive: This is the first time I will talk about the Korean War. I don’t like to talk because I don’t want to argue. Even when my friends talk about it, they get into arguments. Some say the north attacked first, others say no, it was the south. So every time—arguments. I will talk now, just about my own experience, just in the Seoul area. (bold added) Vl.  The Intergenerational Legacy of Cold War Fear The Korean War is enshrined as “forgotten” in U.S. collective memory, and fears of reigniting Cold War conflict linger in the Korean American community. Each condition contributes to silencing public discourse about the past and is a manifestation of the as-yet un-ended Korean War. Silence can also be nurtured in intimate family relationships, fostering a stifling atmosphere of foreboding for children that arises from sensed but unknown dangerous pasts. These troubling gaps in family history are often the only connection to the conflict for the postwar generation. Of her mother’s deep anxieties around the war, Chung Hong stated: “My mother had a lot of insecurity herself from the war…. Even though she didn’t talk about it, the fear she had was so imbedded in her mind that I could almost hear that fear.” Similarly, Orson Moon describes reverberations from the war as a climate of fear: “My life seemed a lot like lots of other kids around me but there always seemed to be this tension and anxiety, which was sort of blowing through my family like an unhappy wind, and there were silences….” Scholars and clinicians have proposed the concept of the “double wall” or “conspiracy of silence” to capture the interpersonal dynamics in families with legacies of historical trauma. (Danielli, 1998). Survivors do not talk about the past because of the pain of remembering and the wish to shield loved ones from the horrors of they experienced, and children and grandchildren hesitate to ask for fear of upsetting elders and what they might actually learn. Silence is the product of this protective collusion. A senior in college at the time of his interview, Charles Hong described the delicacy of inquiring about his mother’s experience of the war: “I feel uncomfortable asking my mother those kinds of questions, you know, about her life during the war…. You know, sometimes you just don’t want to know or hear about sad things.” Moon alluded to a similar source of family silences: The fear and terror of this time period have carried forward into my dad’s life. It is visible; if you ever met him, you’d understand what it meant. It’s carried forward to my sisters’ lives, my life, as a hole, a silence, and in order to move forward into my own life and everything that it means in the present and everything that it can mean in the future, I really feel I have to release the past from this prison of silence. Erased from public consciousness by self-serving official nationalist narratives, rendered unspeakable within a community fractured by Cold War ideological divisions, and absent from conversations at the dinner table, Korean American family histories of the Korean War have often been lost to newer generations. Silence around the Korean War has deprived them of a deeper understanding of their origins and place within a Korean diasporic community whose roots trace back to a still un-ended war. The result is an inheritance of silence. As Helen Kim stated: There’s a lot of what we don’t know, which was never passed down to us. Our parents complain that we don’t know anything about our history. But they never want to talk about that shameful part of history. How the hell were we supposed to know? If Americans don’t think it was a big deal, and if our parents don’t want to talk about it, where are we going to find this information? VII. The Limits of PTSD as a Discourse of War Trauma-related silence is implied in virtually all of the survivor comments in this essay—in, for example, the palpable fear of Chung Hong’s mother who never spoke of the war and the dark moods of Orson Moon’s father who warned against telling anyone about his wartime past. Told in the present tense, Suntae Chun’s description of the detonation of a bomb has the sensory dimensions typical of the flashbacks that accompany post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): Very close to me, a bomb exploded one time. You cannot hear anymore for a while and you think, you will die and you feel like all kinds of shrapnel are in your body. Since that time, almost everyday, both my eardrums just blocked and you cannot hear outside sounds. A minute and then it’s gone. That lasts for thirty, forty, fifty years. Yet, a note of caution: following its post-Vietnam War classification by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980, PTSD has become ubiquitous in U.S. popular culture as a shorthand explanation for the loss of voice that often accompanies severe trauma. Understood in psychological terms, silence can be construed as an intrapsychic response to unresolved, extreme threats to the self. Viewed in both popular and medical discourse as a component of PTSD, silence, as the outward expression of suppressed life-threatening experiences, can be regarded as a reflexive act of self-preservation in the face of overwhelming stressors. In its place, trauma is conveyed indirectly through flashbacks, irritability, dramatic mood swings, and erratic behavior. Attributing silence exclusively or principally to PTSD, however, is extremely problematic especially when there are powerful vested interests behind official accounts of traumatic events like war. Doing so medicalizes and pathologizes the loss of voice among survivors, attributing the origins of silence to an individual’s trauma-induced disorder and thereby obscuring broader, systemic forces that work to mute “perilous” memories of the past. VIII. Silent No More In the years since I first began collecting Korean American oral histories of the Korean War as part of the “Korean American Remember the Korean War” project, exciting new initiatives for gathering and sharing Korean War testimonials have begun to proliferate. They vary in method, format, and goals but promise wider participation by members of the Korean diaspora in the United States in shaping the collective memory of the war and its aftermath. The following outline of several recent projects illustrates this development and the potential for future growth. Still Present Pasts: Korean Americans and the “Forgotten War” (www.stillpresentpasts.org, 2005) is the work of a Korean and Korean American artist collective inspired by oral-history voices from the “Korean Americans Remember the Korean War” project (Kim, 2006). It includes installation, performance, and interactive art; documentary film; archival photographs; and historical context. “Bridge of Return” by Yul-san Liem and exhibit participants, Still Present Pasts (http://stillpresentpasts.org/sites/idesweb.bc.edu.stillpresentpasts/files/bridge10.jpg) As a space of public memory, the exhibit evokes individual, family, and community reflections about the past and simultaneously grapples with the erasure of the Korean War within the U.S. national narrative. On tour nationally and in Korea for nearly eight years, it reached large and diverse audiences. Comments of attendees ranged from “How could I have forgotten?” to “I wish I had known before my grandma died” to “I’ve never told this story before” to “For those who suffered, I apologize.” The power of art and storytelling to break silences is evident in this message from a second-generation Korean American woman: We went to the exhibit with my father…. The stories came pouring out almost immediately…. The art really opened him up so he was like freely associating all over the place…. The most enlightening moment for me was afterwards. My dad told us how they fled his mother’s hometown…the long walk with baby cousin Jae Hyun balanced on the top of a wheelbarrow full of belongings…no gimchi, no rice…. All they had was potatoes, potatoes, potatoes…. To this day my dad hates potatoes…and on and on and on…. Intergenerational Stories to Break the Silence: A Korean-American Oral History Project  (https://asianamoralhistory.wordpress.com/about/) is a new community-based initiative of the organization, Nodutdol for Korean Community Development, in New York City (www.nodutdol.org/). It was begun by second-generation Korean Americans with the aim of filling in missing parts of their personal, family, and community histories; bridging divides within the community; disrupting prevailing war and immigrant narratives; and creating new, collaborative work within and across Asian American communities. What stands out about this work is the use of a collaborative, oral-history method in which interviewers and interviewees and at times, audiences, all participate in the setting of goals, story-telling and interpretation, and creating programs for the wider public. This participatory process is key to an egalitarian approach to uncovering the past that also builds support for community organizing in pursuit of justice for war survivors and related community needs. Bridging Across Generations with Oral History: A Collaborative Theatre Project (https://asianamoralhistory.wordpress.com/projects/) The members of this project also created the Asian American Oral History Collective, a collaboration of oral history initiatives taking place in other Asian American communities in New York City. According to this collective, “The Asian American Oral History Collective is a group of Asian-American artists and organizers dedicated to the use of oral history to share the stories of Asian-American communities that are often untold or hidden. Our oral history projects are in support of and collaboration with social movements” (https://asianamoralhistory.wordpress.com/about/). The group is currently experimenting with creative visual and performance arts organizations like Theater of the Oppressed to convey the oral histories they have gathered and to engage new audiences in contributing their stories. Intergenerational Stories to Break the Silence: A Korean-American Oral History Project represents an innovative approach to uncovering the untold legacies of the Korean War. Beyond facilitating storytelling, it also mobilizes new constituencies for action within the U.S. Korean diaspora and works in collaboration with partners in other immigrant and low-income Asian American communities. As a community-based project, it aims to transform oral-history work and to empower Korean American communities relative to their own histories. Missing Pieces (http://www.missingpiecesusa.org/#!mission/cjg9) is entirely the product of second- and third-generation Korean American high school students. Created in 2013 by students participating in the K. W. Lee Center for Leadership (http://www.kwleecenter.org/) summer training program for youth in the Los Angeles area, this initiative was inspired by the desire “to learn the history of Los Angeles and the relations between us and the first generation Korean Americans.” As a leading member of this exciting, oral-history project has stated: “The heartbreaking stories of division and loss that we heard from the forgotten elders of our community moved us to initiate a change to give back to the elders in our community.” Insofar as it addresses the complexities of the Korean War from a community-based lens, including the war’s intergenerational impact within the Korean American community, Missing Pieces possesses unique prospects for reaching and galvanizing other youth in the U.S. Korean diaspora. The project seeks out and preserves elders’ memories of the war and family division, which may be unknown to many youth yet are vital to Korean American history. In addition to interviewing their own relatives, members of the Missing Pieces project discovered local associations of elders whose hometowns are located in different regions of North Korea. They attended monthly meetings of these groups and discovered animated elders willing to share their firsthand accounts of the war. Some of these oral histories are included in the Legacies of War online archive (http://www.legaciesofthekoreanwar.org/). They have also partnered with the National Coalition for the Divided Families (http://www.dfusa.org/) whose mission is to advocate for congressional support to enable Koreans residing in the United States to reunite with relatives in North Korea. Recently, they participated in a U.S. congressional hearing testifying to the urgent need for a pathway to family reunions for the thousands of elderly Korean Americans separated from relatives, many of whom are rapidly passing away. Members of the Missing Pieces Project (http://www.missingpiecesusa.org/#!mission/cjg9) Recent projects like Missing Pieces and Intergenerational Stories to Break the Silence: A Korean-American Oral History Project promise to play a critical role in breaking the silence about the Korean War by engaging a new generation of young people in speaking out about legacies of war that remain a specter in their elders’ lives but also, as they are discovering, their own. lX. Far from the Final Word ­The Korean War continues to haunt the lives of survivors and their descendants through memories and legacies silenced by trauma, Cold War divisions within the U.S. diasporic community, and the disciplinary authority of official state narratives. The invisibility of the war within the wider public bears another cost—ignorance of how today’s conflicted relations among the principle war combatants, South Korea and the United States, and North Korea and China, are exacerbated by unresolved hostilities from the un-ended Korean War. Critical public discussion about the vested interests behind the Cold War narrative of the origins, conduct, and aftermath of that war has, for the most part, been virtually taboo. Without an informed public, the Korean War and its geopolitical and human legacies are destined to endure—a Cold War bequest for the generations to come. The new voices that are beginning to be heard within the Korean diasporic community in the United States offer a modest prospect for breaking the silence, raising awareness of the continuing human costs of the un-ended Korean War, and rethinking U.S. policy regarding the Korean peninsula. Silent no more, Koreans in the U.S. diaspora are enabling and inviting each other to speak their own truths about the Korean War; in so doing, they are challenging the dominance of statist war narratives and laying the foundation for creating a collective consciousness and prospects for a meaningful voice in how the Korean War is to be remembered and resolved. Ramsay Liem is a professor emeritus of psychology, a visiting scholar at the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Boston College, and the president of the Channing and Popai Liem Education Foundation and KPI Advisor.  * An abridged version of this article, written with Christine Hong, was co-published by KPI and Foreign Policy in Focus. Notes 1. It is important to note that the historic 2000 summit meeting followed on the heels of what would in retrospect be something of a testimonial decade, with comfort women survivors speaking out in the early 1990s and the Korean War massacre at Nogunri exploding in the national media by the end of the decade. (“GIs Massacred Civilians in S. Korea, Veterans Say,” Associated Press, 1999; see also, Hanley, C., Choe, S., and Mendoza, M. 2002). This was the inter-Asian decade in which the prospects of reconciliation across Cold War divides loomed large with possibility all across Asia. 2. For a literary analysis of the Korean War as forgotten, see D. McCann (1998), Our Forgotten War: The Korean War in Korean and American Popular Culture. Works Cited Chang, E. (1988). Korean community politics in Los Angeles: The impact of the Kwangju Uprising. Amerasia Journal, 14, 51-67. Choy, B. Y. (1979). Koreans in America. Chicago: Nelson-Hall. Cumings, B. (1997). Korea’s place in the sun. New York: W. 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