Watershed moment on Korean peninsula

North Korean soldiers stand guard at the Joint Security Area on the Demilitarized Zone in the border village of Panmunjom on April 26, 2018. PHOTO: EPA-EFE
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SEOUL - "I love Germany so much," the French writer Francois Mauriac once wrote, "that I am glad there are two of them."

The statement, from the Nobel Prize-winning author who lived through the German occupation, was layered with irony. Since World War II, a divided Germany had been both emblematic of the Cold War, and central to the hard and bitter peace that followed.

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