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[Washington Post 99년1월18일] Death puts Focus on Bleak Frontier
| Death Puts Focus On Bleak Frontier
By Mary Jordan
OBSERVATION POST OUELLETTE, South Korea-in a cold, dark bunker hidden under camouflage just 25 yards form enemy lines, the South Korean army lieutenant died from a single gunshot wound in the head.
Military investigators called it a suicide; Kim Hoon's family insist the former altar boy and star marathoner was murdered -- by one of his own soldiers. Through an extraordinary order of the national parliament last month, a new investigation is now underway to determine why Kim, who left no note and few clues, died at age 25.
Whatever the inquiry's outcome, the soldier's death has become a notorious mystery, one that has trained a spotlight on the drudgery and danger of daily life along this hazardous border.It has also offered the public a rare glimpse into the off-limits world of soldiers and spies in this rugged no man's land, where U.S. and South Korean soldiers stand guard against the world's last stalinist military machine.
There has been a cease-fire for nearly half a century, the Cold War is over, and yet the casualties and the cost go on, "said Lee Jung Hoon, a political science professor at Yonsei University in seoul.
In the close Quarters of the Demilitarized Zone, South Korea bans its troops form all contacts with their North Korean adversaries. Seoul fears that fraternization could undermine troop discipline, lead to inadvertent leaks of important information, or, in the most extreme cases, tempt soldiers to succumb to incessant North Korean propaganda and betray their country as spies.
So it was shocking news last month when a sergeant in Kim Hoon's platoon, his number-two man, was arrested on charges of having "illegal contacts" with North Korean soldiers. The nature of those contacts has not been officially detailed, but the arrest has led to speculation that Kim Hoon may have been ready to report the punishable conduct.
"We are hearing stories of South Korean soldiers saying the are going to the bathroom and returning with watches or some other fifts form the North," Lee said.
American military officials in charge of the overall security of this border "truce village," which has camera surveillance and human patrols around the clock, said they knew nothing of any improper contacts with North Korean soldiers.
But others here say it is inevitable that soldiers who speak the same langugae sometimes talk to eack across a border drawn long before they were born.
The cost of peninsula's division can be measured not just in the billions spent on tanks and fighter jets, but also in the price paid by soldiers such as Kim Hoon and their families. Every South Korean male must spend 26 months in military service, and every year dozens are killed in accidents and suicides. More than 1,000 south Koreans have been killed or wounded in skirmishes with North Koreans since the 1953 armistice, as have 90 Americans.
United states forces never left after the Korean War, and today 37,000 U.S. soldiers are stationed here. Many of them are 20-years-olds from such places as Gaithersburg and Woonsocket, R.I..
We had no alternative in 1953 but to create this system, but 46 years later it can't be justified," asid Masao Okonogi, a japanese specialist on North Korea. "We need a more stable peace system," he said, perhaps one in which the U.N. presence is not so dominated by the United States. "We need to imagine another scheme."
To that end, on-again, off-again talks with North korea reopened over the weekend in Geneva, but so far they have yielded little more than frustration. At the same time, the U.S. Congress is growing increasingly impatient with North Korea's refusal to allow independent verification of what is going on inside a large, well-quarded underground site suspected of being part of a North Korean nuclear weapons program.
this has helped put President Clinton's engagement policy with North Korea in the congressional cross hairs. Clinton continues to back a 1994 deal under which North Korea agreed to suspend its nuclear weapons program in exchange for two urgently needed civilian power plants and regular deliveries of fuel oil.
Many in Congress see that "framework accord" as too accommodating to the Pyongyang regime, especially as it threatens to ignore the agreement. Clinton has asked former defense secretary William J. Perry to review all policies toward North Korea, and last week Perry's successor, William S.Cohen, visited Tokyo and Seoul to discuss East Asia's chief security problem: North Korea.
"It is remarkable," Okonogi said "The Eastern European countries changed, China opened up, and still North Korea keeps going. "politically, the system has not cracked."
The dead lieutenant's father, Kim Chuck, a recently retired South Korean army general, has made investigating his son's death his full-time occupation. He said it is unthinkable to anyone who knew his son -- a man who talked of becoming an international lawyer and tried to improve his English with American soldiers -- that he killed himself. The father said he will prove his son was murdered, saying that suicide is dishonorable in his military and Catholic traditions. "Because of the lies [about suicide], i have died 1,000 times," he said.
The father hired an American forensic scientist whose review of the evidence says that the bullet's trajectory, the lack of fingerprintson the gun and other factors point to homicide. The father has even set up a Korean-language internet homepage detailing those finding and display his son's autopsy photos.
Kim Chuck said he believes it is part of the South Korean military culture to cover up killings within the ranks. He also believe that the timing of his son's death -- the day before last year's presidential inauguration -- added to the military's impulse to sweep what happened under the rug.
But two investgations, including one in which U.S military offcials were involved, insist there is no evidence of a murder.
"It's tragic that this young lieutenant lost his life," said U.S.Air Force Maj. Gen. Michael V Hayen, second in command of U.S. forces in Korea. "But we have been presented with no evidence to date to change the conclusion" of suicide.
As in the case of White House aide Vincent Foster, some observers here say may be an ordinary suicide that occurred in the kind of extraordinary circumstances in which conspiracy theories flourish.
Observation Post Ouellette, where Kim Hoon died, is anything but ordinary. Few civilian are permitted to visit this tiny cluster of concrete bunker covered with a skin of camouflage netting.
To reach it, visitors must drive about 30 miles north from Seoul along a highway lined with eight-foot-high fences topped with triple coils of razor wire. Approved traffic is then routed across a bridge into the southern half of the 2 1/2-mile-wide DMZ, the buffer between the two Koreas whose fields are full of ginseng and land mines.
On a remote hillside in the half the DMZ controlled by the South is the observation post where the flags of the United States, South Korea and the United Nations flutter in the wind. There is a tiny mess hall, where soldiers can drink hot chocolete or Coke and take turns at the lone computher to get e-mail messages from girlfriends back home. The place reeks of pine-scented disinfectant that seems to have seeped into the concreate floors and walls.
Underground, a frigid, dark tunnel leads from the barracks to Bunker No.3. Inside that silent, cramped space you are so close to North Korea you could toss a tennis ball into it. Through the slit of a window, soldiers assigned to stand watch there can see the barren hills of the North, where millions are suffering from disease and malnutrition.
However he died, that bleakness was the last thing Kim Hoon saw. |