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DMZ: President Bush to Visit Troops Along Demilitarized Zone
Aired February 19, 2002 - 20:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MIKE CHINOY, CNN SENIOR ASIA CORRESPONDENT: I'm Mike Chinoy at the Korean Demilitarized Zone. President Bush will be visiting U.S. troops here along this last frontline of the Cold War within a couple of hours. A look at all of the issues raised by the confrontation possibly emerging with North Korea coming up on LIVE FROM THE DMZ.
ANNOUNCER: The world's most heavily armed border, a last hot spot from the Cold War, dividing Korea into a communist north and democratic south. Along the lines, tens of thousands of U.S. troops.
President Bush is on his way there, but not everyone welcomes his visit. The president's challenge -- to convince South Korea that his tough stand on North Korea will not prevent reunification.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We seek a region in which demilitarized zones and missile batteries no longer separate people with a common heritage and a common future.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ANNOUNCER: We'll gauge the divided opinions in the south and get a rare glimpse from north of the border at a country with its own devastating problems.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
KATHI ZELLWEGER, CARITAS: The combination of a very dismal health care system plus not enough food, of course, still makes people suffer and people who die.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ANNOUNCER: LIVE FROM KOREA, Mike Chinoy.
CHINOY: Hello, I'm Mike Chinoy at the Korean Demilitarized Zone. Behind me, just two miles away is communist North Korea. This is the last and still perhaps the most volatile frontline of the Cold War.
President Bush is in Seoul right now. He's meeting with South Korea's president Kim Dae-jung before coming up here to the DMZ to visit with U.S. troops. That meeting with President Kim a critical one ever since Mr. Bush, in his state of the union message, talked about North Korea as being part of an axis of evil along with Iran and Iraq, supporting terrorism. Tensions here on the peninsula have grown. The South Korean government has been deeply upset. President Kim Dae-jung, who pioneered the so-called Sunshine Policy of engaging North Korea has seen the political ground cut out from under him by Mr. Bush's harsh, new line. The two leaders will be trying to come to some sort of common ground, trying to agree on a way to move ahead in this still very, very dangerous area.
Mr. Bush arrived here in Seoul on Tuesday. He was greeted by demonstrations in the streets. Many South Koreans, too, very, very nervous about the possibility of heightened tension, angry protests for South Korea. This is not just an issue of broad strategy or counterterrorism, but it cuts very close to home in a divided country where many people have relatives in the north and of course, the South Korean capital, Seoul, as well within range of North Korean artillery and would suffer greatly should any hostilities break out. So there's a great deal riding on Mr. Bush's trip.
We will be discussing during this upcoming half hour with our senior White House correspondent John King, who's traveling with the president and with Seoul bureau chief Sohn Jie-Ae. Many of the issues raised by this change in the diplomatic environment here in South Korea.
Mr. Bush will be visiting a U.S. Army base right on the DMZ. It's named Camp Boniface after an American soldier who was killed by North Koreans wielding axes in 1976, a symbol of the enduring hostility between these two countries.
John King takes a look now at what President Bush's predecessor, Bill Clinton, called the scariest place on earth.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JOHN KING, CNN SR. WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): This is the Cold War's last frontier, the Demilitarized Zone separating North and South Korea for nearly 50 years now. South Korea is home to 37,000 U.S. troops, a symbolic line of force meant to deter the more than 1 million-man Army on the other side of the 38th parallel and across the Bridge of No Return. It was just 16 months ago that the Clinton administration sensed an opening and sent then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to Pyongyang. But President Bush takes a very different view, labeling North Korea part of an axis of evil, he says, threatens the United States and its allies.
His evidence -- North Korea's work on a long-range ballistic missile capable of reaching Alaska or Hawaii. It has enough weapons grade plutonium for at least one or perhaps two nuclear warheads, an active chemical and biological weapons program and sales of missile technology to Iran, Pakistan, Syria and Libya.
CONDOLEEZZA RICE, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: Let's just say that the North Koreans have been known to go around with glossy brochures about their ballistic missiles. They are stocking a lot of the world right now. KING: The Clinton administration was negotiating an agreement under which North Korea would halt missile sales and cut back its own missile program. But the Bush White House decided against trying to complete the negotiations, deciding it was a weak deal and that focusing only on missiles would do nothing to curb the North's chemical weapons program or reduce the conventional threat on the Korean peninsula. Mr. Bush says he is open to new negotiations, but the axis of evil line is seen by many as complicating an already difficult challenge.
SAMUEL BERGER, FORMER NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER TO PRESIDENT CLINTON: I think that we stand to gain more by pursuing the opportunity to negotiate down the threat than to simply threaten implicitly preemptive action against North Korea.
KING: The military options here are sobering, to say the least. The South Korean capital of Seoul, population 11 million, is well within reach of North Korean artillery.
MICHAEL O'HANLON, BROOKINGS INSTITUTION: They could start shelling immediately even if every two have only got three or four shots off before American air pourer could destroy those artillery tubes. That would still be a thousand rounds of artillery exploding inside one of the most densely populated cities in all of East Asia.
KING: South Korean President Kim Dae-jung says tensions with the North are at a post-war low. And his government says the benefits of that extends far beyond security matters.
YANG SUNG-CHUL, SOUTH KOREAN AMBASSADOR TO U.S.: Last year, despite the worldwide economic downturn, Korea has a positive growth of about three percent. This all related to lack of tension or lowest level of tensions.
KING: So labeling the North evil did not sit well with the South, a key U.S. ally that worries Washington's tough talk will undermine Seoul's Sunshine Policy.
SUNG-CHUL: It takes time. We are not setting aside these terrible weapons of mass destruction or threat of conventional forces or other problems, but you have to do it step-by-step, bit-by-bit, as we have learned from West Germany and East Germany. It's only four years, you know. In four years, we have a remarkable accomplishment in easing tensions, in human contacts.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
CHINOY: We'll be going live to talk with John King in another part of the DMZ a little bit later in this broadcast.
Trying to assess the nature of North Korean threat is not easy. The country is so secretive it's hard to really figure out just what's going on and what the North's intentions are.
On the question of terrorism, the issue is fairly clear-cut though. Since 1987, when North Korean agents blew up a South Korean airliner, there's no evidence that the North has itself engaged in terrorist activities. The sticking point here has been that North Korea has been harboring since 1970, some members of the Japanese Red Army who hijacked an airliner from Tokyo. The U.S. says the North has to turn those people over to the Japanese to show that it's not supporting terrorism, but the Japanese have never raised the issue in their normalization negotiations with the North, and so progress has not been made.
On the question of weapons of mass destruction, there's no doubt the North Koreans have been exporting missiles, as John mentioned in his report. But the North Koreans, at least since the early 1990s, have signaled a willingness to trade their weapons of mass destruction in return for better relations with the United States. That was at the heart of the agreed framework, the agreement in 1994 that stopped work on the North Korean nuclear weapons program in return for U.S. promises of help on the energy front and in 1999, when the North Koreans promised not to test fire any more long-range ballistic missiles in return for negotiations with the United States.
Many analysts note that the North Koreans, in the past, have been at their most dangerous when they felt threatened and cornered. And so, the debate now has been sparked by President Bush's use of the term axis of evil, as whether that kind of pressure will in fact prompt the North Koreans to negotiate or make them more dangerous and more truculent than ever.
Watching nervously as this process unfolds are the people of South Korea who would bear the brunt of any new conflict. I'm joined now by CNN's Seoul bureau chief Sohn Jie-Ae to talk more about this -- Jie-Ae.
SOHN JIE-AE, CNN SEOUL BUREAU CHIEF: Yes, Mike, here on the streets of Seoul, voices have been very loud both for people who agree and disagree with Mr. Bush's tough stance against North Korea. As you've just mentioned, many here are concerned that Mr. Bush could himself raise tensions here on the Korean peninsula. There have been voices on both sides, but when we went out on the streets of Seoul, we found that Mr. Bush was going to probably have a very tough sell.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JIE-AE (voice-over): Concerns that Mr. Bush is bringing the war against terrorism to the Korean peninsula run high in the streets of Seoul. Radical students battle riot police to voice their opposition to the U.S. president's visit and storm the American Chamber of Commerce office in Seoul.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): Bush's policy is very rash and his words imply he's willing to start a war and kill masses of people.
JIE-AE: Some are less critical, while Ye-e Yong (ph) is willing to buy a ticket to this Hollywood version of a terrorist attack, he isn't buying Mr. Bush's stance on North Korea.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): (UNINTELLIGIBLE) doing the beehive for his own political motives and so it's creates one getting it.
JIE-AE: Yet most South Koreans seem more worried about the impact of North Korea on their pocketbooks.
"Our economy's going through difficult times already," says this Pacson Yee (ph), who works for a construction company. "We cannot afford to help North Korea without getting anything in return."
Just 18 months ago, South Korea's president Kim Dae-jung made a historic first visit to the North to meet his counterpart Kim Jung Il. It was a crowning moment for the president and his Sunshine Policy. Now, the process is going nowhere.
PARK KWAN-YONG, SOUTH KOREAN NATIONAL ASSEMBLY (through translator): We are back to square one. If we are back to where we were before the summit, I personally believe the Sunshine Policy has failed.
JIE-AE: Despite three rounds of temporary reunions that brought together 300 families separated for nearly five decades, the two Koreas remain isolated from each other, no free travel, no letters, no phone calls. Even if the Sunshine Policy sees the light of a new dawn, North Korea's million-man Army remains the number one threat to the south.
Twenty-two-year-old Patin Jung (ph) begins his compulsory, three year military service in a few months. He says it's hard to imagine going to war with the North.
PATIN JUNG (ph) (through translator): I guess we have grown so used to living with the threats that we have become quite numb.
JIE-AE: But President Bush's tough stance against the North has shaken things up.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
JIE-AE: By including North Korea among the countries forming the axis of evil, Mr. Bush has obviously looked at North Korea as a threat to world peace, but as we have seen on Seoul's streets, many feel that it is Mr. Bush who is the one raising the tensions here on the Korean peninsula - Mike.
CHINOY: Jie-Ae, the South talks about the Sunshine Policy, the president talks about the axis of evil. What is President Kim Dae- jung likely to be saying to President Bush as they meet at this hour trying to resolve those differences?
JIE-AE: Well, we are -- the analysts here say that President Kim will say that he also supports President Bush's tough war against terrorism, but that he will call on Washington to start -- restart talks with North Korea. Now, Washington and Pyongyang were slated to start -- restart talks since last June, but North Korea has not really come to the negotiating table. President Kim is expected to emphasize that it is very, very important for the Korean peninsula, that Washington restart the talks with North Korea. The question will be whether Washington is willing or can actually offer anything to North Korea to entice it to come to the negotiating table and that will be what comes out of the summit today - Mike.
CHINOY: OK, Jie-Ae.
Coming up, we'll go to John King to talk about the president's positions and we'll take a look at inside North Korea. Stay with us.
ANNOUNCER: It's a war that's never ended. Now, more than 50 years after a troop stopped fighting in the Korean War, tens of thousands of U.S. troops still man the world's most heavily fortified border. We'll look at their mission when we return.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
ANNOUNCER: The DMZ stretches 151 miles along the Korean peninsula. It averages two-and-a-half miles in width. Untouched by human hands for decades, it's become a haven for hundreds of rare species of animals and plants despite that it is strewn with landmines.
CHINOY: Welcome back. I'm at Inchongak (ph) on the Korean Demilitarized Zone. This is as close as ordinary South Koreans can get to North Korea, which is just a couple of miles beyond me. I've managed, over the past decade, though, to visit North Korea a dozen times. And what I found was a society unlike any place else on earth.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
CHINOY (voice-over): A torchlight parade through the center of Pyongyang. Hundreds of thousands of people pledging their loyalty to the world's most extreme personality cult, a throwback to the China of Mao Tse-tung, Stalin's Soviet Union and the old powerful dynasties of ancient Korea.
This is the side of North Korea the government wants you to see, a place of stifling socialist conformity where the leader, Kim Jung Il is treated as a virtual god. On the rare occasions when he appears in public, at carefully choreographed mass rallies like this, the people are indoctrinated to go wild. Kim inherited the cult from his father, the late President Kim Il Sung, North Korea's founder, the man who started the Korean War, whose image is everywhere, who is also the object of intense veneration, from the giant bronze statue overlooking Pyongyang to the immaculate marble halls of the mausoleum that contains his embalmed body.
Visiting North Korea, I've always been struck by how the extravagance of the Kim Cult and the resources devoted to sustaining it stand in sharp contrast to the other side of North Korea, a country of economic catastrophe and desperate shortages of food, where the cities have almost no electricity, the hospitals no medicine, where over a million people are believed to have starved to death since the mid-1990s and many remain at risk today. Most pictures of the North Korean crisis have come from aid workers like Kathi Zellweger who's visited the country 36 times. ZELLWEGER: The combination of a very dismal health care system, plus not enough food, of course, still makes people suffer and people do die.
CHINOY: But the breakdown of North Korea's rigid socialist economy has spurred some other less evident but potentially significant changes.
HAZEL SMITH, U.S. INSTITUTE FOR PEACE: Well, there's been massive change. This country's inextricably, can't go back. It's irreversibly gone into a market economy.
CHINOY: Hazel Smith just finished a year based in Pyongyang for the World Food Program. She and other aid workers say that while political controls remain tight, free markets are springing up everywhere, along with a growing awareness that North Korea must change.
SMITH: There's much more acceptance that to survive, to move forward, the country and the people in it are going to have to interact with westerners and with the west.
CHINOY: For a fiercely independent nation, surviving on international handouts while seeking accommodation with longtime enemies has been a wrenching change.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
CHINOY: Let's go now to John King who's at Camp Boniface where U.S. troops are waiting for President Bush - John.
KING: ... just a few hours. We apologize for the technical glitches that have kept us from joining you earlier in the program -- mentioned, we are at Camp Boniface, just on the southern perimeter of the Demilitarized Zone. It is that behind me here. It's a little more than two miles from just down below this hill.
(AUDIO GAP)
CHINOY: I'm sorry, say again? I've got - OK. All right, when we come back, we'll take a look in more detail at the American troops here and their mission in defending South Korea. Stay with us.
ANNOUNCER: For more on the conflict in Korea, it's history, issues and major players, head to our special section, "The Two Koreas." It's all on our Web site, CNN.com. For AOL users, the keyword is CNN.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
ANNOUNCER: Korea was divided in 1945 at the end of World War II. A truce ended the 1950 to 1953 Korean War, but both the North and South technically remain at war. Eighty-nine U.S. troops have died at the DMZ since 1953.
CHINOY: Welcome back. We apologize for those technical problems. Broadcasting live from a place like the Korean Demilitarized Zone is no easy task.
There have been U.S. troops here in South Korea for more than half a century. Today, there are 37,000 American soldiers stationed here and they would bear the brunt of any renewed fighting with North Korea. CNN Pentagon correspondent Jamie McIntyre takes a look at the mission of the U.S. military here.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JAMIE MCINTYRE, CNN MILITARY AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It was called the Forgotten War, and it ended in truce, not triumph. Between 1950 and 1953, ill equipped and poorly trained U.S. troops battled North Korean and Chinese forces to a standstill. Now, half a century later, the Demilitarized Zone along the 38th parallel stands as a reminder that the armistice was never replaced with a peace treaty. It's been called the world's most dangerous border.
DONALD RUMSFELD, SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: They have one of the largest armies in the world. They have ballistic missiles. They have artillery pieces. They have chemical, biological weapons. They have been working hard to develop a nuclear weapon.
MCINTYRE: On one side of the DMZ, North Korea's million-man Army. On the other side, more than 600,000 South Korean troops along with 37,000 Americans. And behind that, the full might of the U.S. Armed Forces.
If the North Korean Army ever again invades the South, the U.S. is automatically at war. America is committed to defend the South under a treaty ratified by Congress in 1954 and backed by United Nations' resolutions.
In the wake of the September 11 attacks, Pentagon sources say the U.S. military is updating war plans for the defense of South Korea, known as Up Plan 5027. But it has always included a military calculation of the force needed to remove North Korean leader Kim Jung Il.
On paper, North Korea's military is no match for America's high tech forces, but with more than a million men in arms, and with a leader who remains isolated from most of the world, North Korea keeps Pentagon planners worried.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: North Korea is a volatile state, unpredictable. They are very cunning, very shrewd. They don't make big mistakes very often. They calculate. They use military threat to get economic concessions. They use it as bluff.
MCINTYRE (on-camera): In 1994, the U.S. military drew up plans to send cruise missiles and stealth fighters against a small reactor believed to be part of North Korea's nuclear weapons program, but a negotiated settlement averted war and prevented what the Pentagon estimated, at the time, could have as many as a million casualties on both sides.
Jamie McIntyre, CNN, the Pentagon. (END VIDEOTAPE)
CHINOY: Let's try and go back to John King now at Camp Boniface for an update -- John, if you can hear me.
KING: Mike, I can hear you just fine. My apologies again for the technical glitches as we stand by here trying to get our technology to work.
We can hear the propaganda music coming over from the north. The troops up here say it is a frequent occurrence. They also say even though it is a peaceful morning here in the DMZ today, that five or six times, it is not uncommon five or six times a month for them to end up in the ditches. There are trenches dug all around the camp here. Alarms go off from the DMZ and the troops are put on alert.
Mr. Bush calls this one of the most dangerous places on earth. He will join a succession of presidents. It is a tradition when U.S. presidents come to South Korea to make the pilgrimage up here to salute the U.S. troops on guard here and others as part of the United Nations contingent.
An especially delicate time though for Mr. Bush as you have been discussing throughout the past half hour. On the one hand, he is talking very tough toward the north, telling it it must end its missile program and the like. On the other hand, because of the sharp criticism from South Korea, the key U.S. ally, Mr. Bush will embrace the sunshine policy of President Kim Dae-Jung and visit that railway station that the south hopes to build back across the north. Construction not completed because of opposition, still the delicate negotiations with the north.
So a very delicate day for President Bush ahead. We are here. It's a beautiful day weatherwise at Camp Boniface. But just a few miles to the north here, again, the million-man army Jamie McIntyre just spoke about across the border. A delicate time for the president. A delicate time here for the troops here as well because of the new confrontation the president's talk of about expanding the war on terror beyond Afghanistan -- Mike.
CHINOY: OK. Thanks very much. John King at Camp Boniface waiting for President Bush.
Exactly 50 years ago, the Korean War was halfway through. Eighteen more months of bitter fighting lay ahead before an uneasy truce put an end to that conflict. But since then, there has never been a permanent peace. Today, as Mr. Bush talks about expanding the war on terror and including North Korea, a permanent peace here on this divided peninsula seem as far away as ever.
I'm Mike Chinoy. Thanks for joining us for LIVE FROM THE DMZ.
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