N Korea deal might solve MIA cases
NEW YORK: Air Force Lieutenant Hal Downes’ B-26 bomber was on a nighttime run over North Korea when it went down in 1952. Did he die in the crash? Was he captured? His family never knew.
They hoped they might at least be able to bring his body home when the fighting was over. But the war never formally ended.
This week, the Downeses and the families of thousands of other Americans still missing from the Korean conflict received a jolt of hope when President Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, signed a joint statement in Singapore that included a promise to recover and repatriate all American war dead in the North.
The two sides agreed to the same thing after the 1953 armistice but have only made sporadic progress to accomplish it since then, and almost none in the last 13 years of mounting tensions over the North’s nuclear program.
Now, the Singapore statement holds the prospect that the work might soon resume.
“It is a triumph, and I have to credit Mr Trump,” the lieutenant’s son, Richard Downes, said.
“But then you realise this is just the beginning. Now that we’ve done it, how do we actually do it? What happens next?
“We could get everything, and we could get nothing.”
Mr Downes, who was three when his father’s plane crashed, is now 69 and the head of the Coalition of Families of Korean and Cold War POW/MIAs. He has spent years negotiating with both governments to try to bring a measure of certainty to families like his own.
“My whole life, it has remained an open wound — we never knew what happened to him,” he said of his father. “I half expected him to walk through the door at any moment.”
The Korean conflict is often called the forgotten war, overshadowed by the global victory of World War II and the caustic defeat of Vietnam.
But it left an outsized number of troops missing in action: Some 7,800 Americans are unaccounted for — with 5,300 of them believed to be in North Korea, far more than are still missing from the much longer and more deadly Vietnam War.
Veterans groups welcomed the Singapore statement, which included a promise that some remains already recovered by North Korean authorities would be repatriated immediately.
“We must have hope that this agreement will finally bring peace to the peninsula and help bring closure to thousands of families,” Keith E Harman, national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, said in a statement.
“Now the hard work to bring the initiative to fruition begins.”