THE SHARP EDGE OF DIPLOMACY

Simon Winchester reports from

a forgotten war zone where tempers are fraying again

Panmunjom, South Korea IT CAN HARDLY be a barrel of laughs living right on the border between North and South Korea — particularly, these days, if you are from Poland. If one believes the more hysterical American newspapers, this is the most dangerous frontier on the planet, a borderline whose very existence could trigger a new world war at any moment, and across which half a million men, all armed to the teeth, glower at each other in embittered ferocity.

There are indeed an unimaginable num-

ber of very large guns — you see them lined up in their hundreds the moment you cross the Imjin river bridge going north, or, if you travel in from North Korea, on the road from Kaesong going south. All the paddy-fields that have not been cov- ered by barbed-wire entanglements seem to have been thickly sown with mines. Up close to the frontier, at the truce camp of Panmunjom, the North's propaganda loud- speakers burble interminably, night and day, with a Kim II Sungian version of Radio 2. And at this time of year every- thing is wretchedly cold and grey. The Korean frontier zone is not, in short, the best place in which to settle down and make a home.

And yet there are no fewer than 18 men and until recently no fewer than 24 - who have elected to live in these bleak purlieus. Six of them are Swiss, six Swedes and six Polish, and they live in two tiny vil- lages made up of elderly and patched-up corrugated iron huts that have been quite deliberately positioned within 20 feet of the line that snakes between the two halves of Korea.

The Swiss and the Swedes live on the southern side of the line, and the Poles on the northern side. It is for all of them a peculiarly knife-edged life — though for the six gentleman of Poland it has sudden- ly become much more so, and by all accounts it now verges on the positively dangerous. One might go so far as to say that the condition of the Poles on the North Korean border should be giving cause for considerable and widespread International concern, though currently

they are quite unable to get out and tell anybody so.

The 18 men are all members of a spec- tacularly unsung organisation, the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission, which was set up by the UN and North Korea at the time of the signing of the Korean armistice agreement over 40 years ago. `Neutral' in the context of 1953 referred only to countries that had not participated in the Korean war, and since countries as small as Luxembourg had sent soldiers to the front, the list of possible choices was rather narrower than one might have thought. In the end, though, the leader- ship in Pyongyang chose Poland and Czechoslovakia to supervise the armistice from their side of the line, and the UN chose the Swiss and the Swedes.

The delegates lived in tents to begin with; and then some time in the mid- Fifties, as the stand-off between North and South began to take on the appear- ance of permanence, they settled into hamlets made of the Quonset huts that remain there still. The Swiss painted theirs red, the Swedes did theirs up in a sort of turnip colour, the Poles and Czechs settled for a sludge-toned paint that the North Koreans then seemed to have in abun- dance.

Until recently the two dozen volunteers — some diplomats, some soldiers, but all given a military rank for the duration of their postings — enjoyed a fairly decent sort of life. They were unique in being the only people in the world who were permit- ted to travel freely between 'Seoul and Pyongyang, for instance; and I remember well a rather breathless Swiss general com- plaining of the rigours of his social calen- dar — a day might well bring him morning tea with the Chinese up in Pyongyang, a pinch down at the American Embassy in Seoul, cocktails of a sort with the North Koreans in Kaesong and then dinner at a South Korean firebase 50 miles along the demilitarised zone. For ordinary mortals, such journeying would be like taking a day off in Damascus to go water-skiing in Jaffa: a geographically simple expedition politics has rendered utterly impossible.

For the Swedes and the Swiss, the Pyongyang they were permitted to see held precious few attractions: there was nothing to buy, nothing to do, little to see. One has to remember that for the few diplomats

who are actually based in Kim Il Sung's workers' paradise — the Albanians and the Tanzanians particularly — life becomes so tedious that heaven is currently a weekend spent living it up in Peking .

The current Ethiopian ambassador to Pyongyang, a man who admits he is not exactly on the cutting edge of global diplo- macy, once confessed to me over a beer in the Koryo Hotel that he had not received a single message from Addis Ababa for three years. He had taken it upon himself to journey across the border for the refresh- ment of his soul to Shenyang, a vile Chi- nese industrial city that is rather like Grimsby, but without the nightlife and with the air full of iron filings. He came back saying that for him it might as well have been Tahiti.

If Pyongyang's attractions have long been somewhat limited for `our' neutrals, for the Czechs and the Poles — 'their' neu- trals — the city of Seoul has for years been a veritable wonderland. The communists would make the hour-long drive to the cap- ital every weekend. They could be spotted a mile off — a clutch of drably dressed enlisted men trying to persuade the wait- resses at the Lotte World to take their zlo- tys, or a group of suave cavalry officers from Prague busily breaking hearts in the discotheques in Itaewon. Business north of the line might mean grim food and harsh weather, but at the weekends it meant Seoul for those off duty, and with a vengeance.

Yet now — and as an unremarked conse- quence of the fast-evolving political situa- tion half a world away — everything has suddenly and drastically changed. It began last summer, when the North Koreans ordered the Czech delegation to leave their country altogether, claiming — perhaps not unreasonably — that the new Czech and Slovak republics that had been born were becoming 'unsound in their neutrali- ty'.

There was a murmured protest from the other members of the NNSC, but it had no effect on the imperturbable apparatchiks of North Korea. Within days the six men from Prague had packed their belongings into a pair of Toyotas, had hauled down their flag from where it had flown since July 1953, and had driven north through the razor-wire entanglements of the demil- itarised zone's northern perimeter. Under the baleful glare of a posse of North Kore- an sentries, the group had then driven up to Pyongyang's splendidly under-used international airport (the planes of Chosonminhang Airways flying only to and from Moscow, Peking, Sofia and Khabarovsk), and without a word of farewell from their hosts had left for their respective republics and homes.

In so doing they left their little Quonset camp pathetically and vulnerably half empty, inhabited now only by Major-Gen- eral Kristoff Owczarek of Warsaw and by his five junior colleagues from the Polish Foreign Service and the Polish army. It is the life of these six men that has turned rather grim, and possibly even dangerous.

The North Koreans, who have rounded

on those they see as representing a turn- coat regime, are currently making Poland's manifestly innocent members of the NNSC into scapegoats for a failure of the ideology that both once shared. They are now holding them, essentially, as hostages to fortune.

This winter, for instance, the North Koreans have been turning off the elec- tricity supply to the Polish camp for sever- al days at a time, forcing the general and his men to keep warm over paraffin stoves and log fires — and this during a winter that has been sweeping down from the Manchurian mountains with exceptional ferocity. Unexplained 'technical problems' have also dramatically reduced the food supplies that are supposed to be brought regularly into the camp from the Northern side. The telephone links have been inter- rupted from time to time as well, making the Poles feel even more isolated than their customary solitude entails.

And perhaps most demoralising and debilitating of all, the North Koreans are now forbidding the Poles to drive either up to Pyongyang or, more crucially, down to Seoul. They may not, in fact, step out of the half-mile-wide circle known as the Joint Security Area, not even to visit the warmth and comfort of a nearby US army base. (They never did find hospitality at the North Korean bases, even during the heydays of Marxist congeniality.)

General Kristoff, as he is known, could of course ignore the Korean instructions no one imagines any actual harm would come to him or his men (though of that, with the Northerners having so volatile a past, he cannot be entirely sure). But he is concerned that if his men did stray from within the neutral oasis the North Koreans would never allow them back.

An allied brigadier who feels sorry for the Polish general tries gamely to persuade him to come down to Seoul occasionally for dinner. 'Ride in the boot of the car,' he says. 'The commies'd never know.' But the wise old Pole shakes his head sadly, and declines. Neutrality is a matter of principle, he argues. If his delegation is thrown out along with the Czechs, then the armistice would become overnight wholly unpoliced and unprotected from one of the two sides: what is presently merely a dangerous place could then become perilous in the extreme.

All this has been taking place these last two weeks while Nato diplomats have been meeting in Brussels, discussing whether to bring Poland and her more worried eastern bloc neighbours into some kind of loose, or perhaps one day even intimate, association. The Partnership for Peace has been born: American troops may soon be protecting the citizenry as far east as the Vistula. Poland is fast becoming, in Allied eyes, one of us. And as she does, so in the eyes of Kim Il Sung she slips ever more deeply Into the enemy camp.

`I worry for the Poles, now that Brussels is over,' said the Allied brigadier. 'What is good for the people of Poland is not going to be so good for the six men in the camp at Panmunjom — make no mistake. You'd better cross your fingers for them now. They're already a pretty miserable bunch of people, their futures hanging by a thread. And course if they go, then what happens to the armistice? What will Kim II Sung do next? There's a great deal more at stake than six men who can't go shopping for a weekend. They are at the sharp edge, quite literally. The rest of the world should watch out for them.'