When U.S. President Barack Obama visited Camp Bonifas near the Panmunjeom truce village on his way to a guard post in the Korean Demilitarized Zone on Sunday, he must have been told whom the U.S. Army facility was named after. It was dedicated to Capt. Arthur Bonifas, one of the two U.S. officers who were killed by axe-wielding North Korean guards while on a work detail from the U.N. Command on Aug. 18, 1976.
Time has passed very slowly in the 36 years since the bloody incident and since the signing of the Armistice Agreement in 1953, at Panmunjeom, where uncomfortable elements of the Cold War still remain. Obama became the fourth U.S. president to set foot on “freedom’s frontier” where a visitor feels “the starkest contrast” between south and the north of the border, in terms of freedom and prosperity. Bill Clinton in 1993 said that he was standing in “the scariest place in the world.”
To remind the world that little had changed, North Koreans sank a South Korean Navy patrol craft just two years ago near the seaward extension of the border and bombarded a nearby island several months later. The meager changes that took place in the Panmunjeom area include the replacement of U.S. guards at GP Ouellette by Korean troops a few years back under a plan to relocate U.S. Army units south of Seoul from the old campsites established during the war. The Korean military will take over wartime operational control from the U.S. in 2015.
Watching the U.S. president express the same sentiment his predecessors had on their visits to the DMZ, Koreans of course are reassured of the unchanging commitment of the United States to the defense of its military ally. Yet, we also feel deeply sorry for our inability to change the confrontation across the heavily fortified border more than two decades after the end of the Cold War and for the aggravation of situation in recent years with the recurring naval incidents and the nuclear and missile threats from the North.
Obama’s visit to the DMZ should be more than an election year photo op. It should be an occasion for the U.S. leader to renew his resolve and share the responsibility of bringing change to the last vestige of the Cold War through diplomatic, political and military efforts.
