(Repeats items first carried on Wednesday)
By Josh Smith
SEOUL, Sept 28 (Reuters) - When U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris makes an expected visit to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) separating the two Koreas on Thursday, she will be the latest in a long list of dignitaries - and tourists - coming to gaze into secretive North Korea.
The DMZ is a relic of the 1950-1953 Korean War, which ended in an armistice rather than a peace treaty, and despite its name, is highly fortified from coast to coast with razor wire, heavy armaments and tank traps on either side of a 4 km-wide buffer.
It's a symbol of a divided peninsula, separated families, geopolitical tension, and bloody military clashes. The area has also become a surreal tourist destination, with outlet malls, theme parks, hiking trails, and other attractions, at least on the South Korean side.
U.S. presidents and numerous top officials have visited the zone, often wearing military-style jackets and usually arriving with messages of support for the alliance that keeps nearly 30,000 American troops in South Korea.
"It's symbolic in that these guys want to show that they are interested in the DMZ and the security of the peninsula, and it’s a bucket list item as well," Steve Tharp, a retired U.S. Army officer who spent years facilitating DMZ visits by everyone from politicians and generals to the American comedian Conan O'Brien, who filmed a skit on the North Korean side of the border.
Ronald Reagan was the first U.S. president to visit the DMZ, but Bill Clinton and Donald Trump are the only sitting presidents to have visited the Joint Security Area (JSA), a cluster of buildings that hosts talks, and the only spot where troops from both sides stand face to face, he said.
When Clinton visited in 1993, he walked to the Bridge of No Return, which spans the Military Demarcation Line (MDL) that forms the border, and got its name when prisoners of war marched across it.
Clinton - who once called the DMZ "the scariest place on Earth" - reportedly kept asking whether he'd gone further than any other president, Tharp said.
He had. At least until Trump became the first U.S. president to step briefly into North Korea, when he met leader Kim Jong Un on the border in 2019 for hastily arranged talks that ultimately failed to breath life into stalled denuclearisation talks.
"He tweeted from Japan on a Saturday about 8 a.m. and he arrived 24 hours later and was in the DMZ by 1:30 p.m. and walked across the MDL to meet Kim Jong Un," a former senior U.S. defence official said.