Koreans in emotional reunions after decades separated by war
● Families meet as North and South attempt to strike nuclear deal
Dozens of elderly South Koreans have crossed the fortified border into North Korea for heart-wrenching meetings with relatives that most have not seen since they were separated by the Korean War.
The week-long event at North Korea’s Diamond Mountain resort comes as the rival Koreas boost reconciliation efforts amid a diplomatic push to resolve a stand-off over North Korea’s drive for a nuclear weapons programme that can reliably target the United States.
The temporary reunions are highly emotional because most participants are elderly people eager to see their loved ones once more before they die.
Most of their families were driven apart during the 195053 Korean War, which ended in a ceasefire, not a peace treaty, leaving the Korean Peninsula still in a technical state of war.
Buses carrying about 90 elderly South Koreans and their relatives were moving into the Diamond Mountain resort yesterday after crossing into North Korea.
Earlier in the morning, the South Koreans – some in wheelchairs and helped by Red Cross workers – had left the buses briefly to enter the South Korean immigration office in the eastern border town of Goseong. They were to reunite with their long-lost North Korean relatives yesterday afternoon at the start of a three-day reunion.
A separate round of reunions from Friday to Sunday will involve more than 300 other South Koreans, according to Seoul’s Unification Ministry.
Past reunions have produced powerful images of elderly Koreans crying, embracing and caressing each other.
Nearly 20,000 people have participated in 20 rounds of face-to-face reunions since 2000. Another 3,700 exchanged video messages
with their North Korean relatives under a short-lived communication programme from 2005 to 2007.
No one has had a second chance to see their relatives.
Many of the South Korean participants are war refugees born in North Korea who will be meeting their siblings or the infant children they left behind, many of them now in their 70s.
Park Hong-seo, an 88-yearold Korean War veteran from the southern city of Daegu, said he always wondered
whether he had faced his older brother in battle.
After graduating from a Seoul university, Mr Hongseo’s brother settled in the North Korean coastal town of Wonsan as a dentist in 1946.
Mr Hong-seo fought for the South as a student soldier and was among the allied troops who took over Wonsan in October 1950. The Usled forces advanced further north in the following weeks before being driven back by a mass of Chinese forces after Beijing intervened in the con- flict. Mr Hong-seo learned his brother died in 1984. At Diamond Mountain, he will meet his North Korean nephew and niece, who are 74 and 69 respectively.
“I want to ask them what his dying wish was and what he said about me,” Mr Hong-seo said in a telephone interview. “I wonder whether there’s a chance he saw me when I was in Wonsan.”
During the three years since the reunions were last held, the North tested three nuclear weapons and multiple missiles that demonstrated they could strike the US.
North Korea has shifted to diplomacy in recent months. Leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean president Moon Jae-in – a son of North Korean war refugees – agreed to resume the reunions during the first of their two summits this year in April.
South Korea sees the separated families as the largest humanitarian issue created by the war, which killed and injured millions and cemented the division of the Korean Peninsula into the North and South.