Hard Border – Frank McNally on a visit to the Korean Demilitarised Zone

At about 250km, the Korean border is only half as long as Ireland’s meandering version. But in depth, density, and danger, it more than compensates for this inadequacy.

Stretching for 2km on either side of the actual boundary is the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), ironically named given that it is one of the most heavily militarised areas on earth.

Approaching this after the one-hour drive from Seoul last week, our coachful of journalists crossed a bridge that proclaimed itself the “Gateway to Unification”.

But this cheerful euphemism was belied by the accompanying checkpoint, ubiquitous barricades, and a warning from our charming Korean guide (improbably named “Sharon”) not to take pictures.

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A cement mixer and a tractor ahead of us in the queue hinted at normal life close to the border, from which we were still some way distant.

But the Military Police took our passports until we returned by the same route, and the people we couldn’t photograph included troops with American MI6 rifles (shortened, Sharon explained, to suit the more diminutive Korean frame).

At an auditorium in the hilltop Dora Observatory, we gazed towards North Korea through a glass wall behind a Korean army officer who, speaking in an English accent worthy of Sandhurst, reminded us of the madness underlying the bucolic scene.

It was a sunny day, but hazy. You could just about see the giant, competing flagpoles facing each other in the distance, across no man’s land.

During the “Flagpole War” of the 1980s, South Korea erected a 100-metre pole at Daesong-Dong, the only village in the southern DMZ. Then North Korea responded with a 160m version at Kijong-Dong, the DMZ’s sole northern settlement.

This held the world record for a time. But international flagpole height is a competitive marketplace, and thanks to developments in Azerbaijan and elsewhere, North Korea’s is down to sixth place now.

Kijong-Dong, also visible behind the flag – deliberately for the benefit of photographers – is a “Potemkin Village”.

It was designed as a model community, with attractively painted houses serving a 200-family collective farm, serviced by childcare facilities, schools, and a hospital.

As such, it was supposed to tempt defections from the oppressed masses across the border. Alas for that, South Korea (which has studied the village long and hard through telescopic lenses) insists Kijong-Dong is an uninhabited propaganda stunt.

From a row of fixed binoculars on a terrace beside the observatory, we too took turns to scrutinise the North Koreans. But after a while, it became almost as interesting to watch the people watching.

“I see them!” declared one excited American woman whose US-Korean companion had been advising her where to focus. “On bicycles! Five, six, seven, eight – who are they?” she asked, as if uncovering a plot. “Farmers, I guess,” her friend replied.

Speaking of farmers, we had seen near the Gateway to Unification a park containing the model of a cow, on which hangs a tale (and tail).

The story starts with Chung Yu-Tang (1915-2001), born the eldest son of a peasant family in what is now North Korea. Uninterested in farming, he made several attempts to escape it, including one at the age of 17, when he stole a family cow to finance a new life in Seoul.

He went on to set up Hyundai. And decades after that, his fortune made, he felt the need to atone for the bovine larceny while also advancing his cherished ambition for cross-border cooperation.

So in 1998, he sent a herd of cows (1,000 according to Sharon, although some versions say 500) across the bridge as a gift to the impoverished north. The statue commemorates his gesture.

There have been much larger-scale attempts at cooperation too. Also visible from Dora Observatory is Kaesong Industrial Park, where 123 South Korean factories used to employ 50,000 North Koreans. Cross-border tensions capsized the project a decade ago, however. The complex is abandoned now.

In keeping with the checkpoint euphemism, meanwhile, South Korea has a full-time Ministry of Unification. But that trimmed its 700-plus workforce last year in a restructuring plan. And for younger Koreans, at least, the imperative towards reunification is not what it once was.

North Korea is “no longer our number one problem”, Sharon told us. Population collapse has replaced it. On current birth trends, South Korea would cease to exist sometime next century. But looking toward Europe, while still scarred by the pandemic, many Koreans remain reluctant to embrace immigration as a solution.

The DMZ lives on for now and the foreseeable future, and in surprising ways. Landmines make it a perilous place for humans and hundreds have died in skirmishes there since the Korean War ended. But for some of the same reasons, it is also a haven for wildlife.

Photographic evidence suggests the strip is home to more than 6,000 species, including endangered mountain goats, golden eagles, and the Asiatic black bear. A spokesman for the DMZ Forum, a group campaigning to protect the area’s ecology, has called it “an accidental paradise”.