By Jun Ji-hye
About 30 women activists from around the world marched from the North to the South across the heavily fortified Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), Sunday, anchoring their hope on helping establish everlasting peace on the divided Korean Peninsula.
Those who participated in the event dubbed “Women Cross DMZ,” designed to mark International Women’s Day for Disarmament, included U.S. activist Gloria Steinem and Nobel Peace Prize winners Mairead Maguire and Leymah Gbowee.
“We are feeling very positive (about) what we’ve accomplished ... which is a trip for peace, for reconciliation and for human rights and a trip to which both governments agreed,” Steinem told a press conference on arrival in the South. “We were able to be citizen diplomats.”
She expressed hope that their peace march could be the beginning of contact across the “artificial barrier” and promote peace and understanding between the two Koreas.
The DMZ is four kilometers wide and 250 kilometers long. It has kept the peninsula divided since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War that finished in a truce, not a peace treaty.
“We’ve come here to (help) end war. I think that it is the first step in a right direction,” said Gbowee, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 for her role in leading a Liberian women’s movement that helped bring an end to her country’s brutal civil war.
She said the activists felt “privileged” to be able to come across the DMZ, but they also felt sad because there were so many families separated by the Korean War.
Arriving at Pyongyang last Tuesday, the group met North Korean women to discuss international peace and unification between the two Koreas, before marching down to the South.
The activists said the purpose of the DMZ crossing was to express hope that Korean families separated by the war would be united some day and military tensions between the two sides reduced.
The peace march, however, faced criticism in the South as anti-North Korea activists claimed group members had pro-Pyongyang stances, citing a report by the North’s Rodong Sinmun.
The newspaper reported last week that the women “praised” the North’s late founder, Kim Il-sung, at his birthplace.
This led conservative activists here to hold a rally in front of Imjingak, a park near the border, to protest against Women Cross DMZ members.
They claimed the North was exploiting the activists for propaganda purposes.
Steinem denied the report, saying, “I would like to say unequivocally that those statements ... are absolutely not true.” She said that they had made a protest against the North for such a report.
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