 That's part of my imagination here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'd love to use my radio voice all the way through this episode, but that would wear me out. I'm excited about my time today with my favorite peacenick and new wingman, Kristine Ahn, to talk about peace in Korea. This is one of those strange parts of life where I should have met somebody long ago because we're so focused on a couple of things, one, peace in Korea and two, the involvement of women in security matters, what I call women in peace and security, and that was my top priority, but we didn't meet until about two months ago. Kristine Ahn, welcome to Big Men's The Power of Imagination, my personal webcast. Aloha, thank you, Dan, for having me. Yeah, you're a powerful person and I'm gonna do a little bit of your bio. Folks, just go Google Kristine Ahn, A-H-N, not like I misspelled it earlier today, A-H-N, and women cross DMZ, and you'll see she's the executive director, she's done remarkable things, led 30 women across the DMZ, we're gonna talk more about that. Upcoming soon on PBS, there'll be a film called Crossings. I've gotten the chance to preview it because I know Kristine. And so, but you're a force of nature, Kristine, that's what I think, what do you think? I think you're a force of nature, Dan. So we have that in common, that mutual admiration, and we have the same goal, but we come at it differently. So tell me a little about, even though I know the answer, the viewers don't, about your roots in being part of a big family, an immigrant family, so please share that with the audience if you don't mind. Absolutely. So I am the youngest of 10 children. We, I was born in Seoul, Korea, in South Korea, I'm actually from a family of nine girls and one boy, and actually my mother, please, not in a Korean patriarchal family, he's the prince, but my mother actually for 13 children and three died because after the Korean War, it was, there was so much poverty, it was really a difficult time for South Koreans, I mean Koreans throughout the whole peninsula. And so we immigrated to the US, my eldest sister actually married an American officer, military officer, I think he was an engineer. I don't know if he was serving, you know, at USFK, but I know that he was somehow involved with the military, as an engineer. And there's a funny story about my oldest sister who ended up becoming a very successful businesswoman in the US, but she, I guess when Pan Am first came to South Korea, they selected two stewardesses or flight attendants and she was one of the two that they selected because she could speak English, she was pretty, she was tall enough, not like me, but she turned it down because she said that she wanted to do more and that becoming a flight attendant was not going to be able to catapult her in doing the big vision that she had. And so she said, I'm marrying an American and I'm going to the United States. So that's basically our family story to immigrating here. But you were the youngest and- I am the youngest, yes. And you don't have the middle child excuse that I have being the middle of seven, so that is my get out of jail for your free card for all of my personal flaws. But you went to school and what were you doing before you became a peacenick and you are a peacenick. There is no doubt about that, not a bad thing, but. I have been an activist my whole life and I think it's my family's experience even though I think the immigrant experience my parents were born in the 1920s, my mom was born in 1929. And so if you know the history of Korea and what happened in the last century, yeah, she was born in a colonized Korea under Japanese occupation and lived a very impoverished life and very difficult life. Can I insert, please, and say that something that everybody who cares about Northeast Asia matters, if you think you're a student, you can't understand where we are now if you don't appreciate the harshness of the Japanese occupation of South Korea. Or the Korean Peninsula, yes. Yeah, you're right, the Korean Peninsula. You can't appreciate where we are now unless you look back honestly at that and that's not an indictment of the Japanese but it's a harsh history, really harsh history. Yeah, thanks so much, Dan. Yeah, so that's the Korea that my parents grew up. They couldn't speak Korean, they had to take Japanese names and then there was the war and then the life actually under dictatorship in South Korea. And so when they came here, they didn't speak English, they didn't really have formal education and so it was a challenging childhood, I have to say but they did the best that they could with the limited needs and I think that developed for me a deep sense of empathy for people and the kind of gross inequality that we see in this country. Yeah, so it began in this world. Thank you. But yeah, so that began my journey in sort of working for social justice and then it really wasn't until I was a graduate student at Georgetown. I believe you might have connected with Peter Hayes. He's the energy expert from Australia who won the MacArthur Genius Award for his work, Building the Windmills in North Korea and I connected with him and moved from Washington, DC to Berkeley where I worked with the Nautilus Institute. Where my daughter went to university, by the way. Oh, so she has some peace-knit groups in her too. I don't know, she was an Air Force officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and cut her in Gitmo, so she's a good human being but a different background. Yeah, exactly. So yes, that's my introduction to Korea and I just felt that once I started to learn that history that is not taught in this country, I felt this responsibility as a US citizen of Korean descent to help bring closure to this war. This war that has not yet ended. So where are we connected? Because I come at it differently from two tourists in Korea and 33 years in the military and facing a North Korean threat that was absolutely legitimate and a North Korean government that's done some really bad stuff. But knowing, I've gotten to this part where I think we absolutely have to make peace and recognize that it's more about peace between peoples than governments. And then we have to put people first and then get this done. But you've got strength, Fred. How did you come to that position as somebody that was the deputy commander of Pacific Command that served as the colonel of US forces Korea for five years? How, I mean, when you first sent the email to me, I could not believe it and then I did my own little Googling and then I actually wrote to Ann Wright to say, should I meet this guy? Is this guy for real? Is this legit? And she wrote, she called me right back and she said, Christine, this is no joke. He is for real. And then we quickly both proceeded to read your excellent paper that received the award from the Oslo peace process. Let me tout that. That would be an urgently practical approach to the Korean Peninsula. An Oslo forum, peace rate of prize winning paper. Yeah, I couldn't believe it. So how did you arrive at this position? It didn't start as a colonel or a general. It started as a lieutenant and going to Korea in 1978. And that was a very different hard scrabble. Lots of dirt roads, very few privately owned cars place but harsh existence. It was a harsh existence for South Koreans. It was not an easy existence for the American military. And I was there when Park Jung-hee was murdered and went through all that turmoil. There are many threads that connect me to Korea that I can't explain that just kind of happened but I built a sense of the place and an affection for the people in the culture that I wouldn't have expected. And then another thing happened, I read a book. Weird, right? For a fighter pilot, I actually read a book that I read the book, Nothing to Envy Ordinary Life in North Korea by Barbara Demek. And having seen the miracle that evolved in South Korea that was not easily accomplished in any manner, I just got this seed of what it's like to be a North Korean average citizen in my brain and a sense of tragedy that haunts me. I mean, it just haunts me. So I'd like to fix it, I can't fix it myself. And as I said during our initial discussion, I've been banging at the moon by myself for years and then I met you. And because you have the credibility of decades, almost I think, of activism on this matter, when you and I connected, you got me into in contact with the New York Times. And I was able to publish my, I have to throw in front page, thought piece in the New York Times, but that's because of your connection. So back at you, Christine, how did you get so credible? And I'm not asking you to brag, I'm asking you to explain because you have unique credibility on this matter, on peace in Korea. You've written a lot, you're interviewed a lot. You have connections in the media. You have a political standing. You've earned awards. Google folks, Christine on, how did that happen? How did you get such cash aid? I don't know if it's cash aid, Dan, but I have been at it for a really long time. I am a tourist. I feel very persistent and dogged in my determination. I am like you. I feel like once you see something that must be fixed that could impact millions of people, I'm gonna do what I can. And I would say that having visited North Korea during in 2004 was my first trip to North Korea, where that was during the axis of evil. And I think the Korean American community was very concerned that North Korea was potentially the next target for regime change. I have visited North Korea actually eight times. I've traveled pretty extensively throughout the country to cooperative farms, to really remote places. And I've seen the real hardship that the North Korean people endure. So I'm with you in terms of why does this have to be the case and what can we do to improve the situation? But I've also been to South Korea and this is maybe where you and I may be diverged in our understanding, but having, I would say one of the most formative experiences for me was in 2006 when I traveled to South Korea to Pyeongtaek, which is, as you know, the world's largest military base. It's the size of maybe three central parts. And as part of the US realignment on the Korean Peninsula, as the two Koreas were in their sunshine policy, there was a dramatic expansion of camp Humphreys. And I could see the impact of that on ordinary people, on the farmers, the elderly rice farmers who had cultivated that land for three generations. And they fought, they fought nonviolently to prevent that expansion. And so I could just see the ways in which the ongoing war, the unresolved war had continued to lead to more militarization of the Korean Peninsula and that led to such unnecessary suffering, not just of the North Korean people, but so many hundreds of thousands of Korean families that still remain divided, including Korean American families. And so I just, I feel that my experiences of going on the ground, having studied obviously US, South Korea and South Korea, I just, I can't close my eyes and I feel that there is another way forward than the way that the US has dealt with this issue. So the expansion of Young Tech was part of the move to relocate the headquarters from Yongsan. So the residents of Yongsan in metropolitan Seoul may have a different view than the farmers in Yongsan. Young Tech just south of Hotsan, where I spent two years as a young lieutenant captain. So let me ask quite a difficult prickly question that maybe can't be answered, but whose fault is this? Whose fault is this? Is this North Korea, South Korea, the US's that were still in this place? Or does the blame matter? Whose fault is this in your mind? I would say it doesn't matter. I would say that the more we dwell on that question, the more we are not getting to problem solving. And I think that we all have all three parties are to blame. There have been well documented instances of the US reneging, North Korea reneging. And I think the bottom line is we need a new approach. And I think some of the points that you laid out in your paper with the Oslo Forum is exactly what needs to happen. I think the points that you make in the New York Times op-ed about the need to have a genuine reconciliation process, that we can work on such difficult issues, such as, and maybe they're not so difficult. And I'd love to hear your perspective as a high ranking military, former high ranking military officer about something that would benefit everybody, which is some kind of military to military diplomacy, because there is none. And right now the US has depended on Sweden as it's liaison with the North Koreans. And I think the point that I found really interesting is that of the countries that participated in the UN command, all but the US and France have normalized relations with the DBRK. And so what are we doing? What are we waiting for? Why isn't it in American interest to bring an end to this war? Well, I think it is. I just don't think it's been the highest interest. As you and I have discussed, the preeminent goal during the first 40 years of the Armistice was containment in a Cold War sense. And the Cold War was real. It really did exist. And it really was a standoff between Soviet Union and everybody who might be affiliated with it and the West, US NATO. And so trying to keep a lid on the war that hadn't ended, that was the old. After the demise of the Soviet Union, it got more complicated and it shifted to denuclearization. Or rather, I should say, to stopping nuclear advancement. All of the other issues were viewed as ancillary. The human rights in the South, human rights in the North, the eventual starvation in North Korea, the provocations that there's a long list of 350 plus incidents from 1960 on. So with all of that on the table, the making of peace never became the priority. It should be. And I do think that military to military communication is part of it. I think, as I said in my article, and I've said on figments before, we get it, ending the war is really important. But the military to military communication is essential in a real sense, not in a transformational sense, not in a transactional sense. And one of my best friends in the world is formerly North Vietnamese, now Vietnamese fighter pilot, retired three stars, shot down six of our airplanes during the war, including a guy I flew a force with who some later worked for me. So there's this threat of humanity that goes through it. But the first time I met in the induct swap, when we were both three stars on active duty, my boss forced our admiral acknowledged his distinguished combat record when we greeted him at Camp Smith. And Swat said through his interpreter, thanks, but I'm here to talk about the future, not the past. That we can do both by talking about the past, by sharing our perspectives, honestly, as military men and women, we can move to the future. And if we don't do that, that is part of the solution. I agree. It's part of the humanity to it, because war can be fundamentally inhumane, but if the experience of combat doesn't make you more human, then that's a problem. So let me ask you, there's so much I wanna talk about and over the next five or 10 years when we're solving this problem together, there's so much I wanna ask you about, but do you think that rapid reunification is part of the solution? We haven't, I haven't asked you that before. So how do you feel about reunifying North Korea and South Korea in a rapid manner? Is that possible? Is it advisable? What's the dealio? My take is that the two Koreas are so different and that 70 years of being not just living separately, but they haven't even peacefully coexisted. And so to assume a rapid reintegration and reunification is not realistic. And I think ultimately in 2000, when Kim Dae-jung, the former president of South Korea and Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-un's father, signed the June 15th declaration. They said, we will begin the process of reunification and there are three core components of that. One is the economic integration, which they set up based on using South Korean capital and North Korean labor where they built that joint economic zone, which sadly today is no longer in existence, but the economic integration, the family reunions and civil society engagement. And I think during that decade of sunshine policy, over a million South Koreans actually visited North Korea. I mean, yes, it was often in very contained environments such as Mount Gunggwang, like a tourist site. But that's still meeting and that's still interacting. And unfortunately, we have progressed so far backwards and not just in terms of South and North Korea, but also on the US side. I mean, unfortunately, well, yes, the last three years of the pandemic, North Korea has definitely sealed off its borders, but even preceding that in 2017, when we did the DMZ crossing, I didn't need to get permission from the US government to go to North Korea. We could go as we had to get the visa from the North Koreans, but now because Trump put in a travel ban on Americans in the wake of Otto Warmbier's death, it's really difficult. And people like you and I, Dan, we need to be able to go to North Korea to meet the North Korean people, to meet with such committees like the, for me, the Overseas Korean committees, but also the National Peace Committee of Korea, the Democratic Women's Union of North Korea. There's so many points where we actually just need to meet them and to hear their perspective. And, you know, I mean, that DMZ crossing in 2015, yes, it was very quick. We weren't in North Korea more than five days, but even the opportunities, Gloria Steinem, having frank discussions with her counterpart, me having very intense debates with my quote, unquote, minder, when would you have that opportunity otherwise? It's so important to have the people-to-people connection. And I can be angry about Otto Warmbier's death and still think that we have to interact with North Korea. The two are not exclusive. I mean, we can still protest and regret and everything else about the young man's death and recognize that there's a higher calling here and the higher calling involves millions of lives. The millions of lives affected by ordinary life in North Korea, that Barbara Demak wrote about, and the potentially millions and millions of lives affected by the possible threat of nuclear war in North Korea. So we're going to run out of time long before I'm done, so maybe you'll come back and join me, Christine, but watching crossings, and I hope when it makes it to PBS soon that all of you will watch it. It's a powerful piece in a variety of ways. First of all, as I mentioned to you earlier, I was really impressed with Gloria Steinem about whom I knew almost nothing because I didn't need her to tell me to respect the role of women in society and in life and all that. So I'd never paid attention. Remarkable life. Don't have to agree with much or anything or everything. So folks do a little research and learn about a remarkable human, but okay, how can I say this? It's a pedophile. As the leader of a very diverse group of 30 Asian, American, Caucasian, African women in this remarkably sensitive environment, as a leader you kept ass. Sorry, I have to say you, I mean, when I watched that, but you kept a purposeful endeavor on track by leading people, well, what do you say to that? Thank you, it'd be fine, but how did you do that? Was it your sense of purpose or? I just, I think that when you bring together seasoned women who understand the need to build consensus to hear each other out, but much easier there's less ego involved. It wasn't easy, but I think my being the youngest of 10 kids and having nine girls in my family, I got on the ground training. And so I think somehow allowing everybody to express their wishes and hopes and desires, but just remembering, why are we here? Why are we doing this? And what we do is not just for ourselves, but it's for the Korean people. It's for American people. It's for world peace. And I would, I'd suggest that big families as a veteran of one of those build life skills. And I don't know how you, they do. We have got zero seconds left, but we're gonna go over just a bit. So I can ask you to answer two questions then give you time for one question for me. What did you learn from your interaction in your visits to North Korea with, I'll say average North Koreans, not the government. I would say that they have curiosity about the rest of the world and that they are just like you and me. They have the same hopes and wishes to raise their children and live a life of dignity. They're like human beings. So I was gonna ask about the government in North Korea, but Ash, our erstwhile engineer is saying we got a hard stuff. So what would you ask me before we go? Cause we're gonna do this again, and we're gonna work together and make a difference is unindicted co-conspirators. One more question over to you. What would you ask? Well, I mean, Dan, I'm curious having served in the US military, having represented the US Pacific command. I mean, it's so wild to me because I am a peace activist and I feel like because I'm a peace activist and because I'm a woman and because I'm kind of, you know, not affiliated with the academic institution or whatever. I have, it's so funny that you were like, oh, you have all this cachet and I'm like, you have all this cachet. No, you have all this cachet. Three star general, but it's like, how do you drill into the minds of somebody like Ed Case who represents us and I think Hawaiians and people in Hawaii feel the most urgency of the need to get to peace with North Korea given the false missile alert and how that so freaks us out. Ed Case being our congressman. Yeah, so he's a great guy. Yeah, so what will it take? I mean, how do you prevent somebody like that? It takes boiling it down to the most simple basic questions and those are, are you for or against nuclear war? I'm against it. I've yet to find somebody would say they're for it and North Korea is the most dangerous case. Are you for or against the unnecessary suffering of millions of North Koreans? I'm against it. Haven't heard anybody say, oh, that's great. And when you get to that, now you figure out what's the way to do that? Is to get a peace treaty and this then start everything else. And it is that simple and it's hard work but it's not as hard as nuclear war and it's not as hard as being in North Korea right now. So let's get after it. Let's not make, let's stop making excuses or putting it off to Frank as we don't have time. And I am sure that Ash wants us to wrap up the great folks here at ThinkDec Hawaii make it this possible. Christine, I'll see you again soon in many ways and we'll work together and fix it as I said. Folks, please remember that ThinkDec Hawaii is an awesome nonprofit that enables citizen journalists like me to try to make a difference in our own way. Mahalo and Aloha. Thank you so much for watching ThinkDec Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn and donate to us at ThinkDecHawaii.com. Mahalo.