By Jon Herskovitz PANMUNJOM, South Korea, Jan 23 (Reuters) - Camped on one of the world's most militarised borders, a handful of Swedish and Swiss troops marked a milestone on Tuesday of monitoring half a century of peace on the Korean peninsula. The Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission (NNSC), set up as part of the armistice that halted the 1950-1953 Korean War, held its 3,000th meeting in a conference hut straddling the border -- and snubbed as usual by the North Koreans. "The armistice was not designed to last 53 years. Nevertheless it has," said Swiss Major General Gerhard Bruegger. The NNSC had several hundred troops on the peninsula in the years after the ceasefire went into effect. Now it has just a total of 10 resident Swedes and Swiss, with a rare visit from Poland, another member state. They meet because the armistice says they must meet. The formal weekly discussions take only a few minutes for soldiers who daily brush shoulders at their adjoining camps. "It is a demonstration on the part of the international community that the armistice is an important guarantee for quite a considerable level of peace and stability," said Bruegger. Until there is a peace treaty, the Swiss and Swedes are likely to stay at their tree-lined camp which ends abruptly at a fence marking the border along which North Korea stations most of its 1.2-million-strong army. South Korea's military of 670,000 is backed by some 30,000 U.S. troops. The commission, which originally included Poland and Czechoslovakia, once operated on both sides of the border, checking troop movements and investigating any claims the ceasefire agreement had been breached. In May 1991, as communism collapsed in eastern Europe, North Korea called the NNSC defunct, later evicting the Polish delegation from their camp in the North. If communist Pyongyang does finally agree to end its nuclear weapons programme, the subject of long-running diplomatic haggling, Washington has said it would consider drafting a peace treaty to end the Korean War, eventually making the NNSC obsolete. Among tasks for NNSC members now are to meet delegations to the truce village in the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) and interview North Korean border-crossers to see if they want to return. "Symbolically, it is important to be here," said Bruegger.
