Gloria Steinem, Nobel laureates to walk across Korean DMZ in push for peace

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The walk across the DMZ won't actually involve much walking. Late next month, 30 women, among them Gloria Steinem and two Nobel Peace laureates, plan to leave the North Korean capital of Pyongyang by bus and head toward South Korea. When they arrive, they will stride toward the most heavily guarded border on earth, between two countries still technically at war, and cross the tense demilitarized zone between them.

Their walk, now with a qualified authorization from governments on both sides after South Korea offered its support, has been pilloried as a stunt and worse – an attention-drawing march promoted by defenders of a North Korean regime that has visited horrifying atrocities on its own people.

But 2015 marks 70 years since division of the Korean peninsula and 62 years since the conclusion of an armistice that ended fighting but did not bring full peace, and organizers of the May 24 walk hope their presence can reinvigorate an effort to bring a more lasting agreement.

Their plan is a reflection of the frustration that has built as other pariah states – Iran, Cuba and Myanmar among them – shed their isolation while North Korea remains a Hermit Kingdom. Dissatisfied with governments' inability to reach some way forward, private citizens are trying on their own.

"The parties that signed the armistice need to come back to the table to finally reach a peaceful settlement, to officially end the war once and for all," said Suzy Kim, a Korean studies professor at Rutgers University, and one of the walk's principal organizers.

The planned walking team includes not only Ms. Steinem but Nobel laureates Mairead Corrigan Maguire and Leymah Gbowee, women who helped end violence in Northern Ireland and Liberia. They intend to travel first to Pyongyang to hold a symposium with North Korean women to "focus on sharing different women's experience of war and conflict," and what role women could play in calming hostilities.

As evidence that their intervention could prompt action, she holds up the approvals received from both North and South Korea, which suggest a willingness by governments to have the women raise the topic, she said. The Ministry of Unification in Seoul, in a letter sent late last week, said it "will render necessary cooperation," so long as all approvals are in order. Pyongyang had earlier given its ok, although further approvals, including from the United Nations body that controls the demilitarized zone, must still be secured before the walk can proceed.

The stakes, Ms. Kim argued, are high. "What is at the root of North Korea's weapons development? What is at the root of North Korea's human rights problems?" She answered by pointing to the lack of a proper peace treaty, saying bombs and tortured prisoners are, to Pyongyang, "justified" because "they consider their national security still at risk by being in a state of war with basically the greatest power in the world today, the United States."

Critics call that line of thinking Pollyannaish. If North Korea's human rights violations stems from the state of war, then "why isn't the human rights situation in South Korea as bad?" asked Sokeel Park, director of research and strategy at Liberty in North Korea, which works with refugees.

"North Korea has the extent of human rights violations they have because that's how the government has constructed itself and maintained power internally. That's not because of a threat from the U.S."

Besides, North Korea hasn't shown itself much interested in peace. It regularly conducts provocative nuclear tests, sunk a South Korean naval ship in 2010 and, in 2013, said it had scrapped the armistice agreement altogether. Mr. Park compared the challenge of peace between the Koreas to the recent Iran nuclear deal. "You have many of the same issues that you have with Iran, but times by about 1,000," he said.

If peace comes, he said, it will be if changes inside North Korea – which is taking halting steps toward internal economic reform – cause it to open up and become a country "that can be dealt with through more standard diplomacy."

Jae Ku, director of the U.S.-Korea Institute at The Johns Hopkins University, said the women's walk reminded him of visits to Pyongyang by former NBA player Dennis Rodman, who has conducted an eyebrow-raising form of diplomacy that involves flying in to meet leader Kim Jong-un and play basketball. More recently, Mr. Rodman has invited people like actor Seth Rogen to North Korea to see firsthand, he has said, that the country is not run by a tyrannical despot.

The women's march is "more comical than anything else," Mr. Ku said. "It's like the Dennis Rodman trip with some gravitas, that gravitas being Gloria Steinem and a few others."

Joshua Stanton, a lawyer who founded the One Free Korea blog, said "the organizers of this march seem intent on propagating misinformation that won't bring us closer to peace." But, he added, that's not to say high-profile figures like Gloria Steinem can't do good by speaking out "against Pyongyang's forced abortions, its infanticides, its rape and murder of female prisoners, and its petty prohibitions against women riding bicycles or wearing trousers."

For her part, Ms. Kim said her critics "don't want to see a peaceful resolution to this conflict," and denied excusing the regime's wrongdoings, or helping buttress its propaganda.

"We are aware when we're working with government that our message or the project can be coopted. There is always a possibility of that," she said. But, she added, "at the end of the day, you have to do the best you can do."