Korean border troops check demolition of guard posts

Dozens of North and South Korean soldiers crossed over the world’s most heavily armed border Wednesday as they inspected the sites of their rival’s front-line guard posts to verify they’d been removed, part of inter-Korean engagement efforts that come amid stalled U.S.-North Korea nuclear disarmament talks.

Soldiers from the two Koreas exchanged cigarettes and chatted as they inspected the dismantlement or disarmament of 22 guard posts — 11 from each country — inside the Demilitarized Zone that forms their 248-kilometer-long, 4-kilometer-wide border.

The inspections Wednesday were mostly symbolic — the removals will leave South Korea with about 50 other DMZ posts and North Korea with 150, according to defense experts in South Korea — but they mark an extraordinary change in ties from last year, when North Korea tested a series of increasingly powerful weapons and threatened Seoul and Washington with war.

A small group of journalists was allowed to enter the zone to watch a South Korean team leave for a North Korean guard post Wednesday morning and a North Korean team come to a South Korean guard post later in the day.

Seven helmeted South Korean soldiers wearing backpacks, one carrying a camera and another a camcorder, approached the line separating the northern and southern sides of the DMZ. North Korean troops then walked in a row down a hill to meet them. The soldiers from the rival Koreas exchanged handshakes before moving up the hill together to go to the dismantled North Korean guard post.

Other groups of South Korean soldiers simultaneously visited 10 other North Korean guard posts. They inspected whether the guard posts and any underground structures have been completely dismantled and whether all troops, weapons and other equipment have been withdrawn, according to Seoul’s Defense Ministry.

Hours later, seven North Korean soldiers clad in olive-green uniforms crossed the same borderline and were then escorted by South Korean troops to the concrete and steel debris of a destroyed South Korean post. North Korean teams also visited 10 other South Korean sites.

South Korea’s liberal president, Moon Jae In, the driving force behind the current engagement effort, watched parts of the verification broadcast live at an underground bunker in Seoul. Moon called the work “a new milestone” in inter-Korean history that was “unimaginable in the past.”