Neutral 'village' a diplomatic portal and tourist attraction

PANMUNJOM, Korea -- Don't smile at the communist guards, never point toward the watch towers and forget about wearing blue jeans.

Even for the droves of tourists, strict Cold War rules prevail along the immaculately groomed paths of Panmunjom, the museum-like neutral "village" between the divided Koreas where officials signed an armistice that ended the 1950-1953 Korean War.

Now that the United States has opened the door for talks with North Korea over the communist country's nuclear weapons program, the no man's land border outpost once again is a reminder of how prickly talks with the North can be.

For a half-century, Panmunjom has been a diplomatic portal between opposing sides which technically still are at war, having a sealed border and little direct contact.

On Thursday, for example, it handled a North Korean phone call to the South agreeing to Cabinet-level meetings this month. But every week, the American-led U.N. Command and North Korea lock horns in the compound's meeting halls over a host of issues, from the mundane to the deadly.

The mystique makes the place as much a tourist trap as it is a potential flashpoint.

More than 100,000 sightseers ride up from Seoul every year for doses of Cold War nostalgia, such as the "Bridge of No Return" depicted in the latest James Bond film.

Panmunjom has sculpted evergreens, ornate street lamps, powder-blue U.N. buildings and a tile-roofed Korean pagoda. Tour buses stop at the gift shop.

Still, goose-stepping North Korean soldiers peer across a borderline literally etched into the concrete and gravel courtyard, and their South Korean counterparts stand poised in ceremonial tae-kwon-do positions.

Tourists from opposite sides of the frontier are prohibited from speaking, even as they stand just feet apart snapping photos of each other.

"It looks like Disneyland, but it's not," said Stephen Oertwig, the spokesman for U.S. military forces in South Korea. "It's Disneyland with armed guards."

Behind the tours, it's business as usual at Panmunjom, which is in the middle of the 2.5-mile-wide demilitarized zone dividing North and South.

The south side of the buffer is overseen by the U.N. Command, which signed the armistice with North Korea at the end of the Korean War.

Officers from the U.N. Command and the North Korean People's Army meet weekly in a room straddling the border. Half the negotiating table is in the North, half in the South, and the microphone cord runs down the boundary line.

The meetings resumed last year for the first time since 2000 as part of North Korea's push to improve relations with the United States, Japan and South Korea.

The talks mostly cover nuts-and-bolts, rather than geopolitical, issues.

They include, for example, protection for workers building an inter-Korean railway through the DMZ, protests over armistice violations and establishing a fax connection between North and South Panmunjom.

The results often are mixed. Initial meetings were stymied by the North's protests that U.N. chairs were nicer.

"It took them weeks of talks to figure that one out," said U.S. Army Lt. Col. Mark Margotta.

And when the U.N. Command requested permission to paint the rusting demarcation signs inside the DMZ, they were told work crews would be shot.

Past talks have broken down amid North Korean threats or when U.N. negotiators failed to refer to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il with the honorific title "Dear Leader."

At last week's meeting, the U.N. Command protested the North's alleged deployment of heavy machine guns in the DMZ in violation of the armistice. Discussions never got off the ground. The sides met again Wednesday, but U.N. officials said no agreements were reached.

The disputes only augment Panmunjom's reputation in the eyes of many tourists.

"Some people come on the trip because they want to feel the tension of the DMZ," said Jin Hye-kyung, manager of the Seoul-based tour company Panmunjom Co-op Center. "If they see a North Korean soldier, they feel lucky."

The tour's attractions include the outlook over a building on the North's side with a white dove painted under its eaves -- the Korean People's Peace Museum, where the 1953 cease-fire was signed.

It also proudly displays the axes that North Korean soldiers fatally wielded against two American officers in Panmunjom in a 1976 dispute over cutting down trees between guard posts.

The one-day jaunts mostly attract Japanese, Americans and Europeans. South Koreans need special government permission to join. The North caters to Russians, among others, although that has caused some controversy.

In 1984, a Russian tourist wanting to defect to the West sprinted across the Panmunjom compound, drawing gunfire from North soldiers. The tourist escaped, but an ensuing shootout with South troops killed three North Korean soldiers and a guard from the South.

Staying away from the borderline is one of the rules tourists must follow -- like not dressing casually or taunting the guards.

They are meant to keep things calm.