Which Korea are you from?
International peace activists and North Korean women leaders hold up a quilt during a meeting with North Korean women leaders in Pyongyang. A group of 30 female peace activists crossed the DMZ calling for an official end to the Korean War, whose unresolved hostility has been symbolized by the heavily armed border for six decades. Courtesy of David Guttenfelder
Women upholding peace through Women Cross DMZ campaign
Eighty years ago, the 38th parallel was a temporary arrangement. After the surrender of Imperial Japan, the United States and Soviet Union divvied up a home, a peninsula of strategic importance, among themselves. How they and we managed to convince generations and generations of soldiers to bury 2 million landmines in a demilitarized zone is both tragedy and farce. Their removal will take more than 450 years. I was not alive in 1945, but these intervening years have seen, by my count, the mass production of plastic, the invention of the internet and the Berlin Wall being constructed and felled.
Womens’ absence — or exclusion rather — from the peace and security process is glaringly obvious from one glance at the infinite security panels on the Koreas. As a “global movement of women mobilizing to end the Korean War,” Women Cross DMZ aims to end the division by bringing women into the process. The group's most famous action? A peace bus from North to South in 2015. Organized by Women Cross DMZ co-founder Christine Ahn, 30 female peace activists from around the world, including Gloria Steinem, crossed on a spring day with approval from the North and South Korean governments. It became the subject of the U.S. television documentary “Crossings," which aired on PBS in 2023.
Cathi Choi was a public interest lawyer in her hometown of Los Angeles when she saw the documentary and decided to volunteer with Women Cross DMZ. After studying at Columbia University and LSE and earning a degree from Harvard Law, she joined a white-shoe firm in New York City but chose to leave behind a conventional career.
With relatives from both the South and the North, Choi inherited an interest in buried histories. She published an article in the Asia Pacific American Law Journal titled “Patriotism, Rebuffed" on the little-known Supreme Court case of Diamond Kimm. Immigrating to the U.S. before 1924, Kimm lived and worked in LA, where he was a fierce advocate for Korea’s sovereignty from Japan, printing and managing Korean Independence news in his private shop. Despite serving in the U.S. military, an alleged offer of U.S. citizenship and continued residence for over 30 years, he was deported in 1962 for pleading the Fifth and refusing to answer one question: "Are you a member of the Communist Party?"
After Choi volunteered with Women Cross DMZ, she joined as policy director and co-coordinator for Korea Peace Now, a network of organizations calling to end the Korean War. After Ahn formally stepped down as executive director last year when the Yoon administration barred her from entering South Korea, Choi, now in her 30s, took on the role to lead the organization’s fight for peace on the peninsula into a new era.
Women Cross DMZ celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. “There’s a lot we want to honor in the legacy of the organization and decades of fighting for their rights,” Choi said.
At the United Nations Committee on the Status of Women, the organization launched the “Women’s Rights Under the Division System in Korea” report that highlights “the profound and persistent impact of division and militarism on Korean women’s lives and the urgency of developing a comprehensive approach to human rights.” The report covers three key issues: unexploded landmines, the ongoing U.S. presence and expanded military bases and separated families, with the cover showing grandmothers holding a candlelight vigil to protest U.S. military expansion in Pyeongtaek.
The Women Cross DMZ’s report argues that both Korean governments must accept legislation that addresses mine clearance and mine awareness programs in the DMZ, “the highest concentration of landmines in the world.” It also says the South Korean and U.S. militaries and governments must be held accountable to survivors of militarized violence for sexual exploitation and for the seizure of land for military expansion. They further argue that both Koreas and the U.S. government must create conditions that enable Koreans to reunite separated families without travel restrictions.
Cathi Choi speaking on Korea peace at the University of Pennsylvania in 2025. Courtesy of Joe Piette
“Sanctions on the regime in North Korea (are) ... at the level of nuclear bombs of sanctions because they are so extreme,” says Choi. The U.N. Human Rights Council framework has been used as a bludgeon and justifies draconian sanctions that hurt society, with the famines of the ‘90s as one of the most tragic results.
In Choi's estimation, Elizabeth Salmón of Peru, the current U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in North Korea, is doing a good job. The first woman in that role, Salmón released a report on human rights in the North with expanded language to include economic and social rights.
When we spoke over the phone in March, I asked Choi’s take on the global landscape. Between Yoon Suk Yeol and Donald Trump, “We are in a totally spun out political state … We’re also seeing a rise of a transnational far right that’s both new and old. A multipolar world is potentially emerging,” said Choi.
The old alliances are crumbling. Europe believes that it must arm itself. Israel has torched the Geneva Conventions, the international humanitarian laws that protect civilians, health workers and aid workers during war. As Asia faces heavy tariffs from the U.S., South Korea, China and Japan’s economies buckle and the U.S.-led world order is in disarray. Trump’s disturbingly chummy relationship with authoritarians and their naked attempts to redraw the map are clear. Still, the highest number of American active-duty troops outside the U.S. remains in Japan, concentrated in Tokyo and Okinawa — 50,000 to 60,000 troops from the Navy, Marines and Air Force — and the third highest is based in South Korea with 28,000.
Women Cross DMZ’s feminist peace philosophy flies in the face of the strongman’s logic that might makes right. “What we’re trying to make sure we do is stay true to the principles of our organization: always center the voices of Korean women, promote the leadership of Korean women and build a better world of us all,” Choi said, noting women are disproportionately harmed, abused and violated in and by militarized states. Ending chronic war would promote healthier gender relations, a safe and dignified society and benefit future generations.
Is peace achievable without defense? Now, of all times, seems a very bad time for troops to vacate. But their network is called Korea Peace Now, not Korea Peace Later. Calls to disarm, when sabers rattle (figuratively speaking, since sabers are nuclear now), seems either insane timing or perhaps meeting the moment at its most crucial. Weapons don’t quench wildfires. There’s no such thing as an environmentally-friendly war.
The role of Korean Americans is to pressure our government to act, Choi says, with a formal peace agreement signed by the U.S. as the first step. “Since Hanoi, there have been no relations. They are at an all-time low. To improve these (human) rights, you have to have engagement and have diplomacy,” Choi said, calling for an end to the Korean War with a peace agreement to allow the self-determination of the Korean people. Self-determination necessitates reunification and consensus-building. A sovereign Korea free from foreign powers? When rival militaries sit on the peninsula’s doorstep? It’s hard not to be skeptical.
But the alternative, arming oneself to the teeth, is not a real option. “Trump has indicated far more willingness to engage with DPRK,” Choi acknowledges. “It’s our responsibility to thread the needle. Yes, push for diplomacy and engagement because it leads to a better sustainable peace process, but no, we absolutely condemn his anti-China, anti-Asian policy and rhetoric. As (legal scholar and Palestinian activist) Noura Erakat notes, that always boomerangs to (the diaspora community). Whatever happens abroad manifests at home, too.”
Choi grew up as a second-generation immigrant in Los Angeles. She has hazy recollections, putting her family history together in a scattered, nonlinear fashion. “Always, growing up, they asked me, 'Which Korea are you from?’ I’d say it’s a temporary division. I have family living in North Korea, so the division and separation can’t be permanent. This was not a political statement for me. You just don’t know the history.”
Esther Kim is a writer from New York living in Taiwan. She is working on her first book.