Joyful reunion
Meeting is first in three years as Seoul-Pyongyang relations thaw
Lee Keum-seom, 92, of the Republic of Korea, and her son, Ri Sungchol, 72, of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, hug at a DPRK resort on Monday. Ri was 4 when she last saw him.
Hundreds of family members torn apart by the 1950-53 Korean War met their relatives for the first time in more than six decades in a tearful, long-dreamed-of family reunion on Monday.
The three-day reunion is the first for three years and followed a diplomatic thaw on the peninsula.
Eighty-nine people from the Republic of Korea, mostly in their 70s and older, met about 180 long-separated relatives living in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, at Mount Kumgang, a scenic resort on the DPRK’s east coast.
The event was hailed by China’s Foreign Ministry, with spokesman Lu Kang saying on Monday that the reunion reflects that both leaders from the ROK and the DPRK are actively implementing the Panmunjom Declaration and continue to promote reconciliation and cooperation.
Lu said China will continue to fully support the improvement of relations between the two sides. He also said that China hopes the international community will continue to create a good atmosphere to consolidate the momentum of dialogue and promote denuclearization and the political settlement of issues of mutual concern in the peninsula.
The divided families are scheduled to meet on six occasions during the reunion event that will end on Wednesday.
Lee Keum-seom, 92, an ROK participant, met her son Ri Sung-chol on Monday for the first time since she was separated from him and her husband.
At the time the boy was aged just 4. He is now 72. “I never imagined this day would come,” Lee said earlier. “I didn’t even know if he was alive or not.”
Their meeting, arranged after decades of separation, will be painfully short. They will be granted permission to meet for only 11 hours in group and private gatherings during the reunion.
Since 2000, the two neighbors have held 20 rounds of reunions, but most of the more than 130,000 ROK participants who signed up for them since the events began have since died. The last such event was held in October 2015.
The oldest participant in the Monday event is the 101year-old Baik Sung-kyu from the ROK.
Baik, who was to meet his daughter-in-law and granddaughter, said he had packed clothes, underwear, 30 pairs of shoes, toothbrushes and toothpaste as gifts.
“I also brought 20 stainless spoons,” he added. “I bought everything because it’s my last time.”
Yonhap news agency said as many participants are elderly, reunions between parents and sons and daughters are rare. Most cases are meetings among cousins, nieces or nephews.
Seoul also dispatched around 30 medical staff to the venue to brace for any emergency cases among the participants.
The reunions are a follow-up on the agreement reached between Kim Jong-un, the DPRK top leader, and Moon Jae-in, the ROK president, during their first summit in April.
Wang Junsheng, an associate researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said inter-Korean relations have been improving in a dramatic way since this year’s Winter Olympics, which the ROK hosted in March.
He noted that the two sides have resumed cross-border talks ever since amid a growing sense of peace which culminated in the historic summits.
The two leaders are expected to meet again in Pyongyang next month.
As the separated families have been deemed major victims of the long-standing division and heightened tensions on the Korean Peninsula, Wang said, all sides concerned should cherish the peaceful momentum and create further opportunities for families to reunite and make substantive contributions to achieving permanent peace on the peninsula.