With Plan to Walk Across DMZ, Women Aim for Peace in Korea

By Rick Gladstone, published in The New York Times, March 11, 2015. 

UNITED NATIONS — It was the women who helped end the bitter political and ethnic strife that ravaged Northern Ireland in the 1970s. It was the women who said enough to the atrocities in Liberia, peacefully resolving a civil conflict there more than a decade ago. Now, women are turning their attention to the divided Korean Peninsula, where a technical state of war has endured for more than 62 years.

On Wednesday at the United Nations in New York, using a conference on the status of women as a backdrop, leading female advocates of disarmament formally announced their intent to walk across the Demilitarized Zone, the two-mile-wide swath of land, ringed by barbed wire and booby traps, that separates North and South.

Their goal, organizers of the walk said, was to punctuate their desire for a permanent peace treaty to replace the 1953 armistice that halted, but technically did not end, the Korean War, a conflict that claimed an estimated four million lives, mostly Koreans, and separated millions of families.

The organizers, a broad array of international peace activists, also see their plan as a catalyst for other steps that could revive the North-South reconciliation process, which has essentially been paralyzed by hostility, suspicion and occasional eruptions of violence.

“We are walking to invite all concerned to imagine a new chapter in Korean history, marked by dialogue, understanding, and — ultimately — forgiveness,” Christine Ahn, a Korean-American activist who is the leading organizer of the group, said at a news conference.

Read the full article here.