Isolating North Korea not working, says activist

Pyongyang — Iconic women’s rights activist Gloria Steinem may be in North Korea, but she is as outspoken as ever.

In an interview with AP, the 81-year-old feminism pioneer said she decided to join a group of women in a rare and in some quarters highly controversial walk across the Demilitarised Zone dividing North and South Korea because she thinks efforts to force change by isolating the North have failed. But, she said, she has no intention of letting the North’s leadership off the hook for its own human rights record.

Steinem and a group of 29 other women from 15 countries are set to walk across the DMZ on Sunday after obtaining a rare green light from both governments. The permission didn’t come easily — they had to alter their plans to go through the symbolic truce village of Panmunjom, where the Korean War armistice was signed in 1953, because officials in Seoul and the United Nations Command responsible for security in the area said they could not guarantee the group’s safety.

Instead, the women will take a route that links the two Koreas to the Kaesong industrial complex, a joint North-South business venture near the border.

“We paid for tickets, we came here we had no idea whether we could actually cross the DMZ or not,” Steinem told AP in Pyongyang before the group set off for Kaesong. “Here we are doing this with the consent of two opposed governments. I think that is quite remarkable in itself. North and South Korean women can’t walk across the DMZ legally. We from other countries can. So I feel we are walking on their behalf.”

Steinem, a key figure in the women’s rights movement in the United States for decades, decided to join the walk after being approached by organiser Christine Ahn, a Korean-American peace activist. She said she is old enough to remember the 1950-53 Korean War, and she believes that women can play an important role in pushing governments to take more effective action to bring peace. — AP