17 May 2007
Running on Time
The train was rusting to the track, last time I saw it. It was a sunny day on the wrong side of the Imjun River, the awkward bulge north of the stream where the fighting stopped. It was pretty clear that if the Northerners decided to come south again, this was going to be uninhabitable territory.
We were touring the danger zone that day. We peered at the North Korean soldiers in the Joint Security Area at Panmunjong, and looked down at the Bridge of No Return from the observation post. The bus dropped us at the point where the Last Train waited, facing north, as if it had just pulled out of Munson. It was timeless.
End-of-track was marked by a big block of cement, permanent as a heart attack and blocking the way to the bridge over a rivulet. From some vantages there in the Demilitarized Zone you could see the gigantic statue of the Great Leader in Kaesong.
We clambered all over the black-and-white painted locomotive, which was slowly fusing its big steel parts together like a Sherman tank in front of the American Legion Post in a little town.
It was a steel metaphor, but that is life around the DMZ. It is mostly theater, with lots of land mines. So I had to pinch myself this morning. The trains are running again, sort of, for the first time since 1953.
The back-story is complex, as all things are on the Peninsula, where everything takes time, one step forward and two steps back. It is actually about regime survival, which is a mutated version of Peninsular Domination on the part of L'il Kim and his thugs up north. Along the way it gained nuclear legs. Six party talks, involving the regional players with a variety of dogs of varying sizes, had come to a stalemate.
The baseline position of the Americans was to deny the North direct talks with the United States, a strategy of the North that has been denied since the Armistice. That position has been violated when convenient; President Clinton used private emissaries to conduct sensitive business, which is one of the reasons then- Congressman Bill Richardson of New Mexico opened up his own State Department in the 1990s.
Bill is now a Democratic presidential hopeful, and I am going to vote for him if I get a chance. I have seen him operate under pressure in some very unpleasant places, Pyongyang being one of them. I trust him much farther than I can throw him, which is more than I can say about any of the others, Red or Blue.
Bill was just there to jump-start the negotiations, since the Northerners trust him, as much as they trust anyone. Last month, the men in Pyongyang agreed to shut down operations at the Yongbyon nuclear complex in exchange for the release of North Korean cash frozen in a Macao bank.
That is still a work in progress, but as I said, there are a lot of moving parts to this. Some of them are screeching like the frozen metal of the old locomotive.
The trains are moving a short distance- no more than thirty miles each. In the west, a locomotive is going to travel up the famed Kaeson-Munsan invasion corridor, on track paid for by the South Korean Government. In the east, the road constructed by the Hyundai Auto Company is now paralleled by a track constructed by the South Korean government, and a train will run to the resort at Kumgang Mountain. “Kumgang” means “diamond” in the Korean language, and it is a beautiful place, by report.
It is a logical step. The joint venture between L'il Kim's communist regime and the South Korean motorcar concern brings in $450 million dollars a year.
With the hotel and tour infrastructure that was constructed, all at Hyundai's expense, the complex is worth a cool billion to the North. 20,000 tourists visit every month, when tensions cool enough to permit it. That amounts to a cash flow in tourist fees alone of a million dollars a month. That pays for a lot of cognac.
One of the highlights of the trip is a hike up Nine Dragons Valley, which is decorated with stone monuments commemorating the rest stops taken by the Great Leader as he contemplated the unification of the Peninsula by force in 1947.
We never got over to the east side of the DMZ. In my time living there, it was sleepy hollow and landmines. The action happened out to sea, along the Northern Limit Line, which is the imaginary and often ignored extension of the DMZ into the Sea of Japan.
The North wants concessions of that, just like they want concessions on everything else you can imagine, and some that you can't. I have a perverse sort of admiration for L'il Kim's strategists. They must have a grand time in their planning meetings, and there is definitely a sense of grim dark humor in it.
They are the alternate universe version of the Fascists, who confiscated liberty in exchange for making the trains run on time. The North Koreans threaten to annihilate you, in exchange for making them run once in a while.
Still, it is progress, and this is a great day on the Peninsula. I never thought they would run at all.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com