South Korea: looking north through barbed wire ..

(Vatican Radio) The World Council of Churches 10^th Assembly continues in Busan, South Korea this week as representatives of all the different Christian denominations work to finalise common statements ahead of the closing session on Friday. Over the weekend, participants went on peace pilgrimages to the DMZ, or demilitarized zone, dividing the Republic of Korea in the south from the Democratic People’s Republic in the north. The heavily armed buffer zone was set up following a 1953 ceasefire in the war between the two sides, but a peace accord has never been signed, and as Philippa Hitchen found out, thousands of families are fast losing hope of peace and reconciliation in their homeland…

Listen to Philippa Hitchen's report from South Korea :

We'd barely turned off the motorway heading north out of Seoul before the barbed wire began. Miles and miles of it, winding along the road beside the banks of the Imjin river, punctuated by camouflage-coloured lookout posts with solitary South Korean soldiers inside. Overhead, large flocks of cranes and other migratory birds gracefully winged their way across the water that separates the two halves of this nation, still officially at war 60 years after the fighting ended.
Less than 500 metres apart at the nearest point, tensions still run high and sporadically end in tragedy. In 2010, guns from the north were fired onto an island near Seoul airport killing two civilians and two soldiers. Earlier this summer, a man tried to swim across from the south and was shot and killed by scores of North Korean guards,
Under previous South Korean presidents, serious attempts have been made at reunification: an industrial complex on both sides of the border provides jobs for 50.000 workers in the north, while a single road and rail link allows goods to be brought out for sale in the south and beyond.
On the thickly wooded hillside close to the lookout tower we visited, a new Catholic church has been built with a reconciliation centre under construction alongside. Each Saturday morning at 11o'clock, local people and visiting pilgrims gather to pray for peace beneath an elaborate mosaic of Christ and the Korean martyrs, made by craftsmen from both sides of the border.
On the ground floor of the observation tower there's an exhibition of photos showing views across the northern Gwansan peninsula and pictures of the crowds who gather at dawn each new year’s day to release balloons as a sign of solidarity with those on the other side.
Upstairs, curious visitors and elderly Koreans whose families were torn in two when the war broke out, gaze through a row of bright orange viewfinders, or sit silently in the gallery with just a few fading memories for company.
But quite soon that generation will be gone. Fewer families now come to the small shrine beside the tower to bring offerings and prayers for ancestors whose burial places they cannot visit, in villages or fields that are amongst the most heavily mined areas on earth.
Monica, my guide for the day, looked sadly across through the mist at the hills where her father's family came from. He died long ago and her last surviving uncle has just passed away too - and with him, her last direct link to relatives in the north. Like most of the younger generation here, she says softly, my two girls don't care much about problems of peace and reconciliation. They see north Korea as a separate country and one that holds no interest for them at all. As my brothers and I scattered my uncle's ashes across the water just a few months ago, I knew it was up to us now to keep working and praying for peace in my divided homeland.