PANMUNJOM: Former US president Bill Clinton called this the “scariest place on earth”. The South-North Korean border — the planet’s most militarised frontier — also boasts the “World’s Scariest Golf Course.”

On Sunday this small land of superlatives will play host to more than 200 international dignitaries and 1,500 elderly veterans of the 1950-53 Korean War to mark the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Armistice Agreement on July 27, 1953.

Sunday’s ceremony at Panmunjom, at which New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark will be the keynote speaker, will be a “commemoration, not a celebration”, said a US Army officer.

“The event is about the solemnness of the signing of the Armistice and the peace and relative stability and security that it has given to this part of the world for over 50 years,” said US Brigadier-General Tom Kane.

Solemnity surely suits Panmunjom, about 55 kms northwest of the South Korean capital Seoul. It straddles the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), across which nearly two million soldiers from North and South Korea have faced off for decades.

The Joint Security Area is the only place along the 240-km long, four-km wide DMZ where crack troops from the opposing forces come into close contact with each other — on patrols and in periodic meetings.

US officials estimate 70 per cent of North Korea’s 1.1-million-strong army and 4,000 of its 13,000 hardened artillery sites are deployed in offensive postures close to the DMZ.

Sunday’s commemoration will take place a stone’s throw from North Korean guards, who often stay out of sight but sometimes glare at tourists or photograph visiting foreign delegations.

The armistice signed in 1953 halted fighting between US-led UN forces backing South Korea and Communist Chinese and North Korean troops. But the truce has never been converted into a peace treaty, leaving the two Koreas in a technical state of war.

The Cold War has never gone hot since, but DMZ incidents have claimed hundreds of lives, from US soldiers butchered by axe-wielding North Korean guards in 1976 to South Korean mushroom pickers who stepped on mines washed down by summer rains.

US soldiers who work with South Koreans guarding the Joint Security Area say tensions over North Korea’s efforts to build nuclear weapons are seldom felt in their daily work. But that is because security is already at hair trigger.

“Nothing really changes when you maintain vigilance at 100 per cent and prepare for the worst,” said Captain Lucas Braxton.

The United Nations Command, which signed and upholds the 50-year-old armistice, says there have been 1,436 major North Korean provocations along the entire DMZ since 1953, killing 90 US soldiers, 394 South Koreans and 889 North Koreans.

Many of the DMZ incidents occurred at the height of the US War in Vietnam. Between 1966 and 1969, North Korea carried out more than 280 armed attacks on US and South Korean forces.

Lately, provocations at the Joint Security Area have mostly been limited to vulgar racial slurs, hoots and rude gestures from a North Korean building Americans have dubbed the “Monkey House”, said Private Michael Choate, a US Army security escort.

“It’s mostly a lot of throat-slitting gestures,” said Choate who, like all his colleagues in the 550-member UNC Security Battalion at Panmunjom, has been trained to ignore the slights.

On a recent tour of Panmunjom, the skies and trees were filled with graceful white egrets scouring nearby rivers and rice paddies for fish and frogs. Biologists count dozens of rare animal species in the DMZ, where mines keep out humans.

Choate said he chafes at “being separated from the opposite sex” in the all-male DMZ camp, where the men get four days off a month. But the 24-year-old Texan said the isolated posting has brought him in contact with tourists from all over the world.

The countries that fought under the UN flag to halt North Korea’s invasion of the South in 1950 were Australia, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Colombia, Ethiopia, France, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the Philippines, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey and the United States.

The Armistice Agreement has been monitored for 50 years by the little-known Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission (NNSC), which now consists of five Swiss and four Swedish officers based at Panmunjom and two Warsaw-based Polish officers.—Reuters