{"id":245663,"date":"2016-05-24T18:13:46","date_gmt":"2016-05-24T18:13:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/a-year-ago-i-crossed-the-dmz-in-korea-heres-why\/"},"modified":"2016-05-24T18:13:46","modified_gmt":"2016-05-24T18:13:46","slug":"a-year-ago-i-crossed-the-dmz-in-korea-heres-why","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/a-year-ago-i-crossed-the-dmz-in-korea-heres-why\/","title":{"rendered":"A Year Ago, I Crossed the DMZ in Korea. Here\u2019s Why."},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"women-cross-dmz-peace\"<\/p>\n

(Women Cross the DMZ)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

One year ago, I led a group of 30 women from 15 countries on a journey across the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) from North to South Korea.<\/p>\n

On\u00a0May 24, International Women\u2019s Day for Peace and Disarmament, we crossed the world\u2019s most militarized border calling for the reunification of Korean families divided by conflict and a peace treaty to end the Korean War. Our delegation included two Nobel Peace Prize laureates, a retired U.S. army colonel, and America\u2019s most revered feminist, Gloria Steinem.<\/p>\n

Together, we shined a light on the urgent need for a peaceful solution to the Korean conflict that\u2019s separated three generations of families and threatens nuclear war today.<\/p>\n

While we received support from world leaders such as U.S. President Jimmy Carter and UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, others called us \u201cna\u00efve handmaidens\u201d of the Kim Jong-Un regime and accused us of seeking to advance North Korea\u2019s agenda. As South Korean women plan another peace walk this May along the DMZ\u2019s southern border, detractors now allege that the idea came from the North Korean government.<\/p>\n

In fact, the idea of the women\u2019s peace walk emerged from a dream I had in 2009 after reading about the flooding of the Imjin River, which killed six South Koreans. To avert a catastrophe in North Korea, Pyongyang lifted the floodgates of the dam, but apparently didn\u2019t communicate with Seoul, as the inter-Korean hotline had been shut down.<\/p>\n

In 2013, my idea crystallized into action when five New Zealanders rode their motorbikes<\/a> across the DMZ. If they could do it, international women peacemakers could certainly do it, too. And we could call for an end to the Korean War while we were at it.<\/p>\n

With a colleague and my young daughter in tow, I traveled to Pyongyang in February 2014 to present my idea to a panel of skeptical North Korean officials. Whether out of shared belief in re-starting a long-stalled peace process or an undisclosed agenda of their own, they signed a memorandum agreeing, tentatively, to a women\u2019s peace march across the DMZ. With assistance from former U.S. Ambassador Bill Richardson, the UN Command Military Armistice Commission also agreed to cooperate once South Korea gave the green light, which finally arrived days before we boarded our planes to Beijing en route to North Korea.<\/p>\n

Over the course of four days, we exchanged ideas with North Korean women leaders and marched with 7,000 North Korean women through the streets of Pyongyang and Kaesong.<\/p>\n

\"dmz-women-peace\"<\/p>\n

(Women Cross the DMZ)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

As with any high-level foreign delegation in the country, our trip was highly planned and coordinated. What wasn\u2019t scripted, however, was a spontaneous interview a North Korean journalist from\u00a0Rodong Sinmun<\/em>\u00a0gave me as we toured Mangyongdae, the birthplace of Kim Il Sung. He wanted my opinion about the North Korean founder, so I gave an honest response referring to my late mother, who was born during the Japanese colonial period.<\/p>\n

Despite her sixth grade education and the overwhelming anti-North Korean propaganda she grew up with in Seoul, even she knew that Kim Il Sung was regarded as a guerrilla fighter who fought for Korea\u2019s independence from Japanese rule. Unfortunately, the reporter interpreted this too liberally, claiming I had praised the North Korean leader. The South Korean media later parroted this as fact, which is ironic since they view any news from North Korean state media as propaganda intended for their domestic audience.<\/p>\n

Sadly, the distortion continues. Because the Korean War has never formally ended, a deep ideological divide remains \u2014 not just across the DMZ, but also within South Korea, where those working for peace are often painted as North Korean sympathizers.<\/p>\n

Although Korean, American, and Chinese military leaders agreed over 60 years ago to hammer out a binding peace accord\u00a0within three months\u00a0of signing the Armistice Agreement that temporarily halted the Korean War in 1953, somehow when women take to the streets calling for its fulfillment, we\u2019re North Korean lackeys.<\/p>\n

Women must be at the peacemaking table, not just because we make up half the world\u2019s population, but also because our involvement leads to better outcomes.<\/p>\n

New research<\/a> from the Philippines and Colombia, on top of the experience from Liberia and Northern Ireland, shows that when women and men participate equally in the process, prospects for achieving a durable peace agreement are improved.<\/p>\n

Women\u2019s inclusion in peace building was enshrined into international law with the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 in 2001, which called on \u201call actors to increase the participation of women and incorporate gender perspectives in all United Nations peace and security efforts.\u201d\u00a0Yet\u00a015 years later, fewer than 10 percent of women are negotiators<\/a>, and even fewer at the Korean peace table.<\/p>\n

Ending the Korean War and finding a meaningful path to reunification won\u2019t be achieved overnight, but a revitalized process towards peaceful reconciliation on the Korean peninsula can begin with a simple step: Women should have a seat at the peacemaking table.<\/p>\n

Until then, we\u2019ll continue to take our calls for a peaceful resolution to this decades-old conflict to public squares and streets around the world, including the DMZ.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

This piece was reprinted from Foreign Policy In Focus<\/a> by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Women Cross the DMZ) One year ago, I led a group of 30 women from 15 countries on a journey across the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) from North to South Korea. On\u00a0May 24, International Women\u2019s Day for Peace and Disarmament, we crossed the world\u2019s most militarized border calling for the reunification of Korean families divided by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":245664,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-245663","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245663"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245663\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/245664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}