DMZ today

  The demilitarised zone is, ironically, one of the most phenomenal military edifices left on this planet after the end of the Cold War. Established with the armistice that ended the Korean war in 1953, it runs along a line 249 km long which zig zags across the middle of the Korean peninsula. The DMZ, as it is familiarly known, extends two kilometres on either side. Some two million men are estimated to be under arms in the area, 1.1 million of them on the northern side. Some 35,000 American troops are stationed alongside their South Korean allies. Fences three metres high were erected at each border of the DMZ and all civilian homes were removed. One of the first landmarks of any new U.S. presidency in recent decades has been to visit the DMZ to offer encouragement to the troops - and be photographed in a flack jacket at one of the world's most dangerous borders. More recently, as pressure to ban landmines worldwide has grown especially following publicity by the late Diana Princess of Wales, the DMZ has become the focal point of this new controversy. Washington says that while it is committed to banning landmines, it cannot do so for several years because the heavily-sown mine fields of the DMZ are one of the key factors that would hold back any North Korean invasion. So the DMZ, already the last real Cold War border, has begun to stick out even more like a sore thumb in the eyes of the world's idealists. There is only one crossing point in the DMZ: at what was the village of Panmunjon, which also lies on an old high road that linked north to south in the days before the Korean War. North and South Korea have sporadically exchanged delegations and officials through Panmunjon. But the border area bristles with tension and they more often exchange gunfire and ultimatums. In the 1970s, South Korea found several tunnels dug under the DMZ from the northern side that were wide enough to carry an invading force. The two sides have also built dams as military weapons. In the 1980s, South Korea built what is known as the Peace Dam whose main object would be to catch a flood of water unleashed from a dam in the north that is suspected to have been built for just this reason.