SOUTH KOREA: Still No Accounting of POWs in North Korea

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Ahn Mi-Young

SEOUL, May 4 1998 (IPS) - Every July 20 for the past 45 years, Park Og- gim and her relatives have held a memorial service for her husband, Yang Soon-young, an army private reported killed in 1953 during the Korean War.

But in October 1997, when Park received a letter from her 72- year-old husband, postmarked China. He had crossed the Tumen River, which divides China and North Korea, with two daughters in search of food that had become scarce in that Stalinist country.

A few weeks later, Park, also 72, and Yang’s two brothers had a tearful reunion with the former POW in China. On Apr. 23, the white-haired Yang was formally discharged from the army here in Seoul, with his wife and two daughters from his second wife in North Korea standing as witnesses.

Yang Soon-yong is among some 80 South Korean POWs listed as missing in action in the 1950-53 Korean War, but who are believed to be still alive in North Korea today.

“I still suspect he is the ghost of my real husband,” said Park.

Decades ago, she had received official notice that her then 27- year-old husband, a private with the 8th army division, died on July 20, 1953 during a battle at Kumsong in eastern Kangwon province in South Korea, near what is today’s truce line.

After last week’s retirement ceremony, fury erupted from Yang’s family over the hardship he endured and what they called the failure of the Seoul government to seek a fuller accounting of POWs with the North.

“What has the government done?” Yang’s younger brother, 63- year-old Byong-yong, asked in tears. “I will never accept my brother’s return this way. My brother was such a young, nice- looking man who loved me dearly when I was kid. Now how can he return this way, with one eye lost, such a fragile, limping, elderly man?”

Nearly five decades after the Korean War ended, the two Koreas remain technically at war because they have signed only a truce, not an armistice. An armistice is the goal of ongoing four-way talks, among the two Koreas, the United States and China, that have been proceeding at a snail’s pace.

In the national cemetery here, there is a list of 102,000 names of South Korean soldiers confirmed or presumed dead and missing in action during the Korean War.

South Korea’s ministry of defense has said there are 19,408 POWs confirmed as missing in action, though it cannot account for the fate of all of them. Lately, the ministry confirmed it has a list of 80 POWs alive in the North.

Immediately after the 1953 ceasefire, North Korea claimed that it had 65,000 South Korean soldiers in captivity. But only 8,333 of them returned to South Korea in 1953, in exchange for 80,000 North Korean POWs under an agreement between United Nations and Pyongyang in 1953.

Seoul has come under fire for having done virtually nothing about remaining POWs in the North. “The indifference and incompetence (of the government) is such an outrageous shame,” argued a recent editorial in the ‘Hankuk Ilbo’ newspaper.

“Seoul has done nothing about former POWs who staked their life for defense of our nation, had led and are still leading a miserable life in the North,” it added.

Critics add the government blew its chances of setting the record right when all it gave Yang was 1,500 U.S. dollars as his salary for the last 45 years, and consolation money of 45,000 dollars. On Apr. 29, Yang returned the money out of frustration with his homeland.

But Yang’s case has prodded Seoul to at least unveil a plan to press North Korea to return POWs at inter-Korean talks. “To help them return home, we will also raise this issue at international organisations like the United Nations or Red Cross,” said a Seoul official.

“The U.S. government does not spare any effort to recover its POWs who died during the Korean War. But Seoul is doing nothing for its own POWs who are still alive,” lamented Jung Duk-Sang, a local journalist.

Before Yang’s return to South Korea, army lieutenant Cho Chang- ho had escaped from North Korea and returned here via a third country in 1994.

Yang’s revelations since coming home has given hope to many South Koreans who never really knew what happened to their kin.

“As far as I know, at least 50 former POWs are still alive,” Yang said on the day he was officially discharged from the army. He named seven survivors who he says had been among about 600 POWs taken to the Aoji coal mine just before the 1953 ceasefire between North and South.

Kim Kyong-Ye, 74, thought her husband Kang Sok-yonh, who was among the seven Yang named, had long been dead. “Every June 12, the day he left home to go to the army, we offer a memorial service. Now it is my last wish to meet him,” said Kim, who lives in Chonju city in the south-west.

For relatives of POWs, knowing their kin is supposed to be alive but being unable to do anything about it increases the pain they have borne for decades. “I ask the government to do something for POWs who are still alive, like my father,” said Kang’s 53-year-old son, Kang Soon-gu.

Time is also running out for POWs like Lim Jong-Yong, another one of those Yang said was alive in the North. His 99-year-old mother, Lee Won-soon, said of her son, who would now be 70: “It is my last and only wish to hold my son in my arms.”

Kang and Lim had been listed as dead in the Seoul’s official list of POWs.

Yang Soon-Yong recalls that life as a North Korean prisoner was an ordeal. “We all as POWs were virtually isolated at a coal mine. We had to work hard to meet the target,” he said.

Added Yang: “Most painful was that all our children must bear the burden of being the children of South Korean POWs: they must work as coal miners and are branded as being of impure origin, and whom few people are willing to marry.”