Body
Peace rallies and marches are a dime a dozen. But this one is clearly more ambitious than most. A group of high-powered women—co-chaired by Nobel laureate Mairead Maguire and Gloria Steinem and organized by Christine Ahn and others—rolled out an initiative last week at the UN: a plan to walk across the DMZ (from North to South) on May 24, International Women’s Day for Peace and Disarmament. The website of the project has brief bios of the women, a multinational cast with strong histories in social justice and women’s issues. The project seeks to draw on other conflict settings—from Ireland to Liberia—in which women have played leading roles in peace settlements and reconciliation. There are plenty of gender issues that are salient in this case as well, from the tragedy of divided families to the trafficking of refugees. Christine Ahn’s Women Demilitarize the Zone site says the effort will include “international peace symposiums in Pyongyang and Seoul where we can listen to Korean women and share our experiences and ideas of mobilizing women to bring an end to violent conflict.”
The legal role of the U.N. Command may actually facilitate the march by giving it a multilateral imprimatur; the group has appealed directly to Ban Ki Moon to play a role. As of this writing, there has been no formal clearance from either North or South for the project although the chief of the North Korean mission has made vaguely positive noises.
Seoul and Pyongyang are both no doubt thinking how to spin the proposal to tactical advantage. The fault lines the march will create are predictable. If reaction to the knife attack on Ambassador Mark Lippert is any indication, the politics are likely to be highly divisive in the South. The left will buy in; the right will fume about treasonous naivite. Were it only divisive in the North. Does it take much imagination to think what a “peace symposium” in North Korea will look like? There is also the problem that none of the three crucial parties—the U.S., South and North Korea—are in the mood to negotiate a peace regime that would replace the armistice, one of the project’s stated goals. Any peace regime would need to address North Korea's nuclear program and obligations under the NPT, about which the website--and the North Koreans--are completely silent.
There is one statement on the project's website that I found deeply objectionable: "In North Korea, crippling sanctions against the government make it difficult for ordinary people to access the basics needed for survival." We need to be clear-eyed. The poverty, malnutrition and even starvation of the North Korean population are not the result of sanctions; they are attributable to the nuclear ambitions, bloated military and ideological absurdities of the regime. Want proof? Look at the rest of the region. It is extraordinarily hard work to lead a country in East Asia and move backward; nonetheless, the Kim dynasty has succeeded in doing just that.
Consider me soft and fuzzy, but I nonetheless sincerely hope the group can pull this off. The cast is strong, the gender issues are real, and the visuals would make compelling activist theater. There is nothing wrong with that.
