On Sunday, Gloria Steinem, two Nobel Peace laureates, and 27 other women crossed the Demilitarized Zone from North Korea into South Korea in an attempt to bring peace to the long-divided and troubled peninsula.
We have received an enormous amount of support,” said Steinem, the 81-year-old women’s rights activist, on her arrival in the South. It is also true that she and her group, WomenCrossDMZ, also faced a chorus of sharp criticisms.
Much of the criticism centered on Steinem and the others not confronting the North Korean leadership over the horrific plight of women in that miserable state. Yet the group’s activities—both in Pyongyang, where they congregated before the crossing, and during the crossing itself—raised other issues. Among them is the most difficult Korea question faced by countries and international organizations, whether to isolate or engage the regime led by the Kim family.
The international community’s punishment of the North Korean state, in fact, was one of the matters that most interested Steinem. “The example of the isolation of the Soviet Union or other examples of isolation haven’t worked very well in my experience,” she told the Associated Press before heading to the DMZ. “Isolating North Korea clearly hasn’t worked.”
She’s right, of course. The US, after the 1953 armistice in the Korean War, has deterred three generations of Kim leaders from launching another large-scale invasion against the South, but apart from this achievement no American policy has worked to positively influence Pyongyang. Even the North’s longtime allies, Moscow and Beijing, have generally failed in this regard. “No one has found a way to persuade North Korea to move in sensible directions,” Stapleton Roy, the former American diplomat, told me in 2004, and there has been no appreciable success since then.
Steinem, unintentionally, highlighted the utter lack of progress. Her group wanted to walk across the four-kilometer-wide DMZ and enter South Korea at the village of Panmunjom, site of the signing of the 1953 truce, but were prevented from doing so because that activity would have been a violation of the armistice. Instead, the 30 “citizen diplomats” were bused across the zone at another crossing point, and they walked only after clearing the last South Korean checkpoint.
That checkpoint was at Paju, the southern end of the western land crossing. The Paju crossing is the one used by South Koreans to go to the Kaesong industrial zone, just north of the DMZ, where about 120 South Korean businesses employ about 53,000 North Korean workers. Kaesong, launched in 2004, is often held out as an example of the success of Seoul’s attempts to work with Pyongyang.
Ban Ki-moon would have used the Paju crossing to go to Kaesong last week. On Wednesday, the 20th, the North Koreans informed the UN secretary general that they had withdrawn permission for him to tour the industrial zone there, an event scheduled for the following day. “No explanation was given for this last-minute change,” Ban said. “This decision by Pyongyang is deeply regrettable.”
Steinem may be right that isolating North Korea is a bad idea, but as she should have known from the abrupt cancellation of Ban Ki-moon’s planned visit, it is North Korea that is isolating itself.