Soldiers, Mines and Sounds of Children Playing
NYT
October 27, 2009
TAESUNG FREEDOM VILLAGE, THE KOREAN DEMILITARIZED ZONE — Kim Han-seul, a fifth-grader, attends a most unusual school. Each morning, his school bus picks him up at a bustling town outside the Demilitarized Zone that separates South and North Korea. It drives through wire fences, tank traps and military checkpoints along a road flanked by minefields.
After a 50-minute drive escorted by a military jeep with a blue United Nations flag, the bus unloads Han-seul and a score of other students at Taesung Elementary, the only school inside the Korean DMZ, a heavily armed no man’s land guarded on both sides by nearly two million troops facing off in an uneasy truce.
“People say that if a war broke out, I am going to be the first to be killed,” said Han-seul, an 11-year-old with horn-rimmed glasses. “But I say, if we haven’t had another war since the Korean War in the 1950s, why would you expect a war to happen now?
“I don’t have a worry in the world,” he said.
Then he hurried off to join friends on a trampoline in the schoolyard.
Nearby, armed South Korean soldiers stood guard behind the corners of school buildings.
This two-story island of childhood innocence is the proudest part of Taesung Freedom Village, the only pocket of land inhabited by South Korean civilians inside the 4-kilometer, or 2.5-mile, wide DMZ that bisects the Korean Peninsula.
For decades, the village and its school have symbolized the uneasy peace on the border. To keep them populated, South Korea has stocked the villagers here with incentives for staying, exempting them from taxes and mandatory military service. Taesung is one of South Korea’s richest villages, its farmers allotted 10 times as much farmland as their average counterpart elsewhere in the country.
Still, by 2007, Taesung was succumbing to the problem plaguing every other rural village in South Korea. Its population was shrinking and aging as young people left for college and jobs in cities. The number of Taesung Elementary’s students dwindled from around 25, decades ago, to a mere six in 2007, making itself a prime target for the educational authorities’ cost-cutting program that called for shutting down and merging rural schools depleted of students.
But Taesung is no ordinary school. Its presence gave a determined look of normalcy to a village where few things are normal.
So last year, South Korea and the U.N. Command, which oversees the southern side of the DMZ, came up with an idea: bringing outside children into the DMZ to go to Taesung Elementary.
Now the school has 30 students, the maximum number it is allowed under that agreement.
“There are 15 outside students waiting for a vacancy here,” said Joo Sung-hyun, 37, one of the school’s 18 teachers. “Our school gets special attention, and it’s better equipped and better staffed than most other schools in South Korea.”
When the armistice ending the Korean War in 1953 created the DMZ, the warring sides agreed to keep two villages inside the zone. Facing Taesung across the border is the North Korean village named Kijong.
Soon the two villages became scenes of a propaganda war, each side pouring money into their showcase model village. When South Korea erected a 100-meter, or 330-foot, tall flagpole here in the 1980s, North Korea built its own: the world’s tallest at 160 meters. The North Korean flag is so big that when it rains, it has to be taken down for fear the weight of the wet flag might break the pole.
Much of the lavish spending went to the school. Each classroom has a large flat-screen TV. The school has more computers than students. Corporate sponsors lined up. Each year, when one or two children graduate, national media, politicians and American and South Korean generals show up with gifts.
Last year, the U.S. military, which leads the U.N. Command, chipped in with an incentive that made outside parents reluctant to send kids here have second thoughts: It began sending American soldiers twice a week to teach English here. Learning English from native speakers is an obsession in the country.
“We thank you always because you are guardians of peace. Your presence here symbolizes peace and hope amid tension and pain of the divided nation,” Kim Moon-soo, governor of Gyeonggi Province, said last week, dedicating another benefit for the villagers: a 60-seat movie house. (Taesung students voted to have “Transformers” as the first movie to be screened here.)
To outsiders, Taesung looks like any other quiet and well-kept farming village in South Korea. Children’s paintings decorated the walls of classrooms. Old farmers strolled in nearly deserted alleys. Outside, golden fields of autumn rice swelled gently.
In this village, a mere 400 meters from the borderline, a garrison of 80 South Korean soldiers are on guard 24 hours a day. They follow villagers when they go to the fields and escort them back at sundown. Land mines are a constant threat for farmers. If they want a pizza delivered, they must pick it up at a military checkpoint outside the DMZ.
There is an 11 p.m. curfew and door-to-door head count. People invited by a villager must apply for a visit with the military two weeks in advance. Once they get here, they are trailed by soldiers.
“Travel is a main inconvenience,” said Bronwyn Witthoft, a South African who has been teaching English here since April. “But there are not many people who can say they were here. So I think I am lucky.”
Most villagers look bored when outsiders ask whether they feel danger living here.
“Look, we have lived here for generations. We have nowhere else to go. This is our home,” said Kim Dong-hyun, 54.
Mr. Kim seemed more worried about the village’s aging population than the North Koreans. The population has declined steadily, from about 250 two decades ago to 198 now.
For the villagers, the propaganda war was won by the South long ago. The North Korean “propaganda village” of Kijong stands empty today, shadowed by the rise of a modern industrial complex South Korea has built behind it in the North Korean town of Kaesong.
But years ago, North Korean commanders often infiltrated the border to attack South Korean and U.S. soldiers. In 1967, they killed three U.S. soldiers on a road just outside this village. The North also bombarded the villagers with propaganda music. “Come to the bosom of our Great General Kim Il-sung,” the North Korean loudspeakers used to say, referring to the late North Korean president. “It’s only five minutes on the run and 10 minutes on foot.”
Children are oblivious to such old memories.
“I was a bit scared being so close to North Korea when I first came here,” said Lee Kyong-eun, a 12-year-old girl. “But I am not now. Why should I, with so many soldiers working as my bodyguards?”
