Today about 450 people from South Korea will be allowed into the North for an emotional family renunion, writes DAVID McNEILLin Tokyo
MORE THAN 60 years ago, Kim Dong-yul said goodbye to his two-year-old daughter and walked out the door, intending to return a week later.
That was the last time he ever saw her. After the Korean War of 1950-1953 erupted, the northerner found himself stranded in the South. When the conflict ended, his country was split into two bitterly opposed Cold War enemies.
This morning, Mr Kim (82) will embrace the child – now a pensioner herself – whom he last saw in 1949. He is one of about 450 people from South Korea to be allowed across the DMZ (demilitarised zone) for the first North-South family reunions in over a year. During that year, some people had thought the two sides might go to war again.
“I never thought it would take this long to see her again,” Mr Kim told South Korea’s Yonhap news agency before he left yesterday for Sokcho city, a stopover before the reunions at the North Korean resort of Mount Kumgang. “This is the greatest moment of my life.”
The reunions are wrenching, and controversial. Elderly and desperate to meet their loved ones again before they die, people like Mr Kim spend a few days at a purpose-built centre at Mount Kumgang, struggling in front of cameras to reacquaint themselves with family members they hardly know. When it is over, they are whisked back across the Cold War barrier, and never see each other again.
Still, Mr Kim considers himself fortunate to be selected. Over 90,000 South Koreans and an unknown number of people north of the border are waiting to see relatives lost to them during the war, according to the Korean Red Cross, which brokers these reunions. About 21,000, many selected by lottery, have met over the past decade since the meetings began as part of the so-called sunshine policy of rapprochement. The humanitarian group has fought hard to keep politics out of the meetings, with limited success.
In 2008, the reunions were scrapped after North Korean guards shot and killed a southern tourist at Mount Kumgang. Seoul furiously cancelled lucrative package tours to the resort, reportedly worth $30 million (€21.6 million) a year to Pyongyang, which retaliated by seizing the facility and demanding that the tours be resumed before more families could reunite.
The March sinking of a South Korean warship, allegedly by a torpedo fired from a Northern submarine, has again left stranded families watching helplessly from the sidelines.
The latest round of meetings, initiated by the North, is being seen as a sign of thawing relations, but it has also run into controversy. Pyongyang is demanding 500,000 tonnes of rice and 300,000 tonnes of fertiliser in return for a request that families be allowed to meet once a month. “We long for the trips to become regular but it is difficult because of the circumstances,” said Han Yun-kyeon of the Red Cross.
Seoul, which prefers to keep the reunions separate from aid issues, has reacted angrily to that demand. “The North seems to be under the impression that it has done the South a great favour by proposing family reunions,” a reunification ministry official told the daily Chosun Ilbo newspaper this week. “For 10 years under the Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun administrations, we gave the North 255,000 tonnes of rice on annual average. It’s nonsense to demand double the amount in return for family reunions.”
Like most of the participants, Mr Kim just wants the bickering to end. Now remarried, he left Young-Heung city in what is today North Korea all those years ago, hoping to pick up his wife and daughter later.
Instead, war between the US-backed South and China-backed North broke out, ending in the death of perhaps three million people and the permanent separation of millions of families. He has prepared a gift of underwear – scarce in North Korea – to bring with him on his trip to meet his daughter. He knows that many more will die waiting for the same opportunity.
“I feel so sorry for those people who can’t meet their loved ones,” he said. “I am so lucky.”