Barriers, Real and Imagined, Still Divide the 2 Koreas : Asia: Amid talk of walls and tunnels, north and south look to their guns. Seoul worries that its American ally may be weakening.

Did South Korea build a secret concrete wall along the demilitarized zone that divides the peninsula, similar to the wall that separated West and East Berlin until late last year?

Kim Il Sung, the president of Communist North Korea, seems to think so. In his New Year’s speech in January, he proposed that this wall be dismantled to “remove the barrier of national division” and promote free travel between the two Koreas.

But the Seoul government vehemently denies having built any such thing. North Korea, officials here insist, is trying to trick a gullible world into seeing a Berlin-style wall where the south has erected scattered anti-tank barriers for its own defense.

“It is not a make-believe concrete wall, but an invisible wall of mistrust and hostility that separates the two halves of Korea,” South Korean publicists assert in a brochure on the controversy.

The propaganda barrage over the “Korean wall” is a reminder of how little has changed in this part of the world, despite dramatic upheaval in East Europe and remarkable progress toward German reunification.

Indeed, the southern side stepped up its public relations counterattack in March by showing reporters a “fourth North Korean invasion tunnel” in the eastern sector of the demilitarized zone, or DMZ. Three tunnels were discovered in previous years and displayed with similar fanfare. Officials could not say whether the new tunnel was dug recently, but they speculated that there are more than 20 tunnels altogether.

No thaw is in sight for Korea’s cold war, only geopolitical permafrost. The tunnels notwithstanding, the border here remains sealed on both sides with electrified barbed wire, land mines and patrolling soldiers. Even if there were a wall, no citizen could get close enough to touch it.

Looking north from the burgeoning capital of Seoul, South Koreans see the DMZ--perforated with invasion tunnels--at a harrowing distance of about 30 miles.

Just beyond that stretch of no-man’s land, the view from Seoul focuses on hordes of disciplined enemy troops bristling with missiles and tanks. About two-thirds of the 1 million men estimated to be under arms in North Korea are believed to be deployed menacingly close to the border. On the far horizon, across the Yalu River, lurks China. Up the coast of the Sea of Japan, formidable Soviet naval power is concentrated in the port of Vladivostok.

The map may be slightly distorted and outdated, but it charts the visceral fears of many South Koreans, 37 years after an armistice ended the fighting in the Korean War.

Now these fears are being churned up by the abrupt disclosure that Washington plans to start withdrawing some of the 43,800 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea.

“It was a blitzkrieg,” a South Korean defense analyst said of the initial proposal to withdraw about 2,000 U.S. Air Force support personnel, announced in late January by the Pentagon in a hasty attempt to meet budget-cutting targets. “People were very upset.”

The Seoul government was given one week’s notice--after months of speculation about possible troop cuts had been dismissed with the line that there would be no change without full consultation between the two governments.

When Defense Secretary Dick Cheney visited South Korea in mid-February, the United States raised the ante on withdrawal, proposing the removal of an additional 5,000 troops over three years. Similar reductions were put on the table for Japan and the Philippines, with the aim of paring overall U.S. troop strength in Asia by 10% to 12%.

The Defense Ministry announced April 4 that the South Korean government had approved a plan to reduce U.S. troop strength by 7,000 and to transfer peacetime operational command of the combined forces to a South Korean general after 1994.

Despite assurances that the United States is committed to guaranteeing peace on the peninsula, South Korean officials and defense analysts say thousands more U.S. troops may be at stake, including key ground combat units of the 2nd Infantry Division, which guards the main highway between Seoul and the border.

If these soldiers leave, South Korea will lose the “human tripwire” that serves as a crucial deterrent against invasion. In theory, the 2nd Infantry would suffer such heavy casualties in any onslaught by enemy armored divisions that the United States would have no choice but to go to war. That prospect has supposedly dissuaded North Korean adventurism for nearly four decades.

South Korea’s 650,000-man armed services are widely believed to be at least five years away from reaching parity with the North Korean military force in terms of war materiel, yet there is a grudging recognition here that it may soon be time for the country to shoulder its own defense burden.

South Korea has twice the population and, with a booming economy, five to seven times the per-capita gross national product of the Communist north. Still, the psychological dependency on the United States is hard to shake.

“If we can’t defend ourselves against North Korea, that’s laughable,” said Kim Jin Hyun, editor in chief of Dong-A Ilbo, South Korea’s leading daily newspaper. “But ordinary people think the United States is the richest country in the world, our big brother. It’s hard to understand that the U.S. is weakening, or that the U.S. has financial trouble and a trade deficit.”

But concerns over money appear to be the cause of the shrinking U.S. military posture in Asia. The recent proposals to reduce troops in South Korea and in neighboring Japan were paired with demands for increased “burden sharing,” or financial support from host governments for the U.S. military presence.

South Korea contributes about $300 million in direct payments toward the $2.4 billion a year it costs to keep the U.S. troops here. Washington would like to see that amount doubled, and this makes South Korean officials wince as they ponder the cost of building up their own defense capability.

But when the cuts do come, Seoul officials are hoping they will be linked to concessions on the part of North Korea, a rigid totalitarian state that demands total withdrawal of the U.S. military as a condition for relaxing tension.

If there is a lesson South Koreans can learn from recent events in Eastern Europe, “it’s that all this change was made possible by the U.S. military commitment to European security,” said Hyun Hong Choo, minister of legislation in President Roh Tae Woo’s Cabinet.

“If the United States can give a clear signal,” Hyun said, “that future troop reductions will be linked to change in North Korea, disarmament or improvement in north-south relations, then North Korea will feel pressure to make adjustments. They may dismiss it as propaganda, but eventually the message will get through.”

BACKGROUND The division of Korea is a legacy of colonialism and war. Annexed by Japan in 1910, it was temporarily divided along the 38th Parallel into Soviet and U.S. occupation zones at the end of World War II. Efforts to make a unified nation failed, and separate nations were established in the two parts. North Korea invaded the south in 1950, with the United States and other countries helping the south and China joining the side of the north. The Korean War ended in 1953 with an armistice establishing a cease-fire line and a 2.5-mile-wide demilitarized zone bisecting the Korean Peninsula. The DMZ, which still divides the two nations, dips south of the 38th Parallel in the west and runs well north of it at its eastern end.