Korean Demilitarized Zone
The Korean Demilitarized Zone, also known as simply the Korean DMZ or KDMZ, is a strip of land running across the Korean Peninsula which intersects the 38th parallel north. The DMZ is a border barrier that divides the peninsula roughly in half. It was established to serve as a buffer zone between the sovereign states of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the Republic of Korea under the provisions of the Korean Armistice Agreement in 1953, an agreement between North Korea, China, and the United Nations Command.
The DMZ is long and about wide. On either side of the zone the border is heavily militarized. The zone is a frontline in the ongoing Korean conflict. There have been various incidents in and around the DMZ, with military and civilian casualties on both sides. Within the DMZ is a meeting point between the two Korean states, where negotiations take place: the small Joint Security Area near the western end of the zone, not far from the South Korean capital Seoul.
Location
The Korean Demilitarized Zone intersects but does not follow the 38th parallel north, which was the border before the Korean War. It crosses the parallel on an angle, with the west end of the DMZ lying south of the parallel and the east end lying north of it.The DMZ is long, approximately wide. Though the zone itself is demilitarized, the zone's borders on both sides are some of the most heavily militarized borders in the world. The Northern Limit Line, or NLL, is the disputed maritime demarcation line between North and South Korea in the Yellow Sea, not agreed in the armistice. The coastline and islands on both sides of the NLL are also heavily militarized.
History
The 38th parallel north—which divides the Korean Peninsula roughly in half—was the original boundary between the United States and Soviet Union's short-lived administration areas of Korea at the end of World War II. Upon the creation of North Korea and South Korea in 1948, it became a de facto international border and one of the most tense fronts in the Cold War.Both the North and the South remained dependent on their sponsor states from 1948 to the outbreak of the Korean War. That conflict, which claimed over three million lives and divided the Korean Peninsula along ideological lines, commenced on 25 June 1950, with a full-front DPRK invasion across the 38th parallel, and ended in 1953 after international intervention pushed the front of the war back to near the 38th parallel.
In the Armistice Agreement of 27 July 1953, the DMZ was created as each side agreed to move their troops back from the front line, creating a buffer zone wide. The Military Demarcation Line goes through the center of the DMZ and indicates where the front was when the agreement was signed.
Owing to this theoretical stalemate, and genuine hostility between the North and the South, large numbers of troops are stationed along both sides of the line, each side guarding against potential aggression from the other side, even years after its establishment. The armistice agreement explains exactly how many military personnel and what kind of weapons are allowed in the DMZ. Soldiers from both sides may patrol inside the DMZ, but they may not cross the MDL. Sporadic outbreaks of violence in and around the border have killed over 500 South Korean soldiers, 50 American soldiers and 250 North Korean soldiers along the DMZ between 1953 and 1999.
Daeseong-dong, in South Korea, and Kijŏng-dong, in North Korea, are the only settlements allowed by the armistice committee to remain within the boundaries of the DMZ. Residents of Tae Sung Dong are governed and protected by the United Nations Command and are generally required to spend at least 240 nights per year in the village to maintain their residency. In 2008, the village had a population of 218 people. The villagers of Tae Sung Dong are direct descendants of people who owned the land before the 1950–53 Korean War.
To continue to deter North Korean incursion, in 2014 the United States government exempted the Korean DMZ from its pledge to eliminate anti-personnel landmines. On 1 October 2018, however, a 20-day process began to remove landmines from both sides of the DMZ.
Joint Security Area
Inside the DMZ, near the western coast of the peninsula, Panmunjeom is the home of the Joint Security Area. Originally, it was the only connection between North and South Korea but that changed on 17 May 2007, when a Korail train went through the DMZ to the North on the new Donghae Bukbu Line built on the east coast of Korea. However, the resurrection of this line was short-lived, as it closed again in July 2008 following an incident in which a South Korean tourist was shot and killed.The JSA is the location of the famous Bridge of No Return, over which prisoner exchanges have taken place. There are several buildings on both the north and the south side of the MDL, and there have been some built on top of it. All negotiations since 1953 have been held in the JSA, including statements of Korean solidarity, which have generally amounted to little except a slight decline of tensions.
Within the JSA are a number of buildings for joint meetings called Conference Rooms. The MDL goes through the conference rooms and down the middle of the conference tables where the North Koreans and the United Nations Command meet face to face.
Facing the Conference Row buildings are the North Korean Panmungak and the South Korean Freedom House. In 1994, North Korea enlarged Panmungak by adding a third floor. In 1998, South Korea built a new Freedom House for its Red Cross staff and to possibly host reunions of families separated by the Korean War. The new building incorporated the old Freedom House Pagoda within its design.
Since 1953 there have been occasional confrontations and skirmishes within the JSA. The axe murder incident in August 1976 involved the attempted trimming of a tree which resulted in two deaths. Another incident occurred on 23 November 1984, when a Soviet tourist named Vasily Matuzok, who was part of an official trip to the JSA, ran across the MDL shouting that he wanted to defect to the South. As many as 30 North Korean soldiers pursued him across the border, opening fire.
Border guards on the South Korean side returned fire, eventually surrounding the North Koreans. One South Korean and three North Korean soldiers were killed in the action. Matuzok survived and was eventually resettled in the U.S.
In late 2009, South Korean forces in conjunction with the United Nations Command began renovation of its three guard posts and two checkpoint buildings within the JSA compound. Construction was designed to enlarge and modernize the structures. Work was undertaken a year after North Korea finished replacing four JSA guard posts on its side of the MDL. On 15 October, 2018, during the high-level talks in Panmunjeom, military officials of the rank of colonel from the two Koreas and Burke Hamilton, Secretary of the UNC Military Armistice Commission, announced measures to reduce conventional military threats, such as creating buffer zones along their land and sea boundaries and a no-fly zone above the border, removing 11 front-line guard posts by December, and demining sections of the Demilitarized Zone.
Villages
Both North and South Korea maintain peace villages in sight of each other's side of the DMZ. In the South, Daeseong-dong is administered under the terms of the DMZ. Villagers are classed as South Korean citizens, but are exempt from paying tax and other civic requirements such as military service. In the North, Kijŏng-dong features a number of brightly painted, poured-concrete multi-story buildings and apartments with electric lighting. These features represented an unheard-of level of luxury for rural Koreans, North or South, in the 1950s. The town was oriented so that the bright blue roofs and white sides of the buildings would be the most distinguishing features when viewed from the border. However, based on scrutiny with modern telescopic lenses, it has been confirmed that the buildings are mere concrete shells lacking window glass or even interior rooms, with the building lights turned on and off at set times and the empty sidewalks swept by a skeleton crew of caretakers in an effort to preserve the illusion of activity.Flagpoles
In the 1980s, the South Korean government built a flag pole in Daeseong-dong, which flies a South Korean flag weighing. The North Korean government responded by building the Panmunjeom flagpole in Kijŏng-dong, only west of the border with South Korea. It flies a flag of North Korea. In 2014, the Panmunjeom flagpole was the fourth tallest in the world, after the Jeddah Flagpole in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, at, the Dushanbe Flagpole in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, at and the pole at the National Flag Square in Baku, Azerbaijan, which is. It is currently the world's seventh largest flagpole.DMZ-related incidents and incursions
Since demarcation, the DMZ has had numerous cases of incidents and incursions by both sides, although the North Korean government typically never acknowledges direct responsibility for any of these incidents. This was particularly intense during the Korean DMZ Conflict when a series of skirmishes along the DMZ resulted in the deaths of 81 American, 299 South Korean and 397 North Korean soldiers. This included the Blue House Raid in 1968, an attempt to assassinate South Korean President Park Chung Hee at the Blue House.In 1976, in now-declassified meeting minutes, U.S. deputy secretary of defense William Clements told U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger that there had been 200 raids or incursions into North Korea from the south, though not by the U.S. military. Details of only a few of these incursions have become public, including raids by South Korean forces in 1967 that had sabotaged about 50 North Korean facilities.