Tears as Korean families reunite
With tears, dozens of elderly and frail South and North Korean family members met on Monday for the first time since the peninsula and their relationships were torn apart by war nearly 70 years ago.
Clasping one another, they tried to bridge the decades of separation through physical contact and by showing each other pictures of their relatives.
Many of the North Korean women were clad in traditional dresses, while the Southerners wore their best suits.
As soon as 99-year-old South Korean Han Shin-ja approached their table, her two daughters – aged 69 and 72 – bowed their heads deeply towards her and burst into tears.
Han also broke down, rubbing her cheeks against theirs and holding their hands tightly.
Millions of people were swept apart by the 1950-1953 Korean War, which separated brothers and sisters, parents and children and husbands and wives.
Hostilities ceased with an armistice rather than a peace treaty, leaving the two Koreas technically still at war and the peninsula split by the demilitarised zone, with all direct civilian exchanges banned.
The three-day reunion at Mount Kumgang, a scenic resort in the North, is the first in three years and follows a diplomatic thaw on the peninsula.
Lee Keum-seom, now tiny and frail at 92, met her son for the first time since she and her infant daughter were separated from him and her husband as they fled the war.
At the time, Ri Sang-chol was aged just four. Lee shouted his name when she saw the now 71-year-old, before hugging him as both were overcome with emotion.
Before leaving for the meeting, Lee said: “I never imagined this day would come. I didn’t even know if he was alive.”
Since 2000, the two nations have held 20 reunions but most of the more than 130,000 Southerners who signed up for the events have since died.
The 89 families will spend only a few hours together before they are separated once again on Wednesday, in all likelihood for the final time. –