In August I went to South Korea, since I had been invited
to participate in a conference on peace education by APCEIU and IIPE
& the Korean National
Commission for Unesco. I had been there in 1991 with Christina,
my wife, and Matilda, our daughter who had been adopted as an abandoned
child in South Korea and came to Sweden in 1976.
During two free days - and occasionally sneaking out of the conference
- I tried to breathe in the atmosphere in this dynamic and beautiful
society whose history tells you about centuries of occupation and
decades of division. I was very grateful to be given this chance to
learn about South Korea and about this conflict - one of the world's
most locked and hard. To me, the wish for re-unification was as obvious
as was the brutality and absurdity of the De-Militarised Zone, DMZ,
i.e. the border area between the two Koreas.
© 2003 Jan Oberg
Most of the them are merely tourist pictures, snapshots. I found the
DMZ, including its touristic character, both absurd and surreal. It's
a sad monument to the human folly and violence of an international
'community' that has not long ago decided to help the Koreans, all
of them, live together.
