Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
POW finally gets justice from NKorea
Court verdict for SKorean symbolic, but also historic
PYEONGTAEK, South Korea — He was 17 when Chinese troops backing North Korea overran a hill being defended by his South Korean army squad and took him prisoner early on Dec. 28, 1951.
He spent the next 40 years toiling in North Korean coal mines as a prisoner of the war between the Koreas. “We POWs lived inside a fenced-off camp guarded by armed sentries at four corners and were escorted to work by officers carrying pistols,” he said.
“We were nothing but slaves.”
Decades later, the former POW, now 86, scored a landmark legal victory when the Seoul Central District Court ordered North Korea and its leader, Kim Jong Un, to pay him the equivalent of $17,600 in damages for holding him against his will and forcing him to work in the mines.
The verdict marked the first time a court in the South recognized POWs who were illegally held in the North.
In its ruling, the court blocked part of the man’s name from the public, and fearing that North Korea might retaliate against his children still in that country, the former POW spoke only on the condition that he be identified by his last name, Han, and that his face be partly obscured.
There is little chance that North Korea or Kim will pay what’s owed to Han. And it could take years for his lawyers to find and confiscate any North Korean assets.
Still, for Han, the verdict was justice served, and justice long overdue.
“I could not understand the judge’s words in the courtroom,” Han said, referring to the unfamiliar legal
terms. “But when my lawyer held my hand and explained that we had won, tears came to my eyes,” he recalled in an interview at his two-room apartment in Pyeongtaek, a city south of Seoul, where he lives with his wife, who has Alzheimer’s disease.
Han was one of six children from a farming family in Jeongeup, South Korea, when he was taken prisoner. He and two friends from his village had volunteered for the South Korean army in
the spring of 1951, less than a year after North Korea invaded the South — setting off a war that has not officially ended.
He would spend the next half-century in the North, most of that time doing backbreaking work in its coal mines.
Over the years, North Korea officials allowed the POWs to form some semblance of a life, giving the miners citizenship in 1956 and allowing them to marry.
Han wed a North Korean woman that year, and together they had five children.
Six days a week, Han said, he rode up to half a mile underground into the dark tunnels, where he toiled 12 hours a day in sweltering heat, with methane gas a constant hazard. Prisoners who tried to escape were hunted down and never heard from again.
When an armistice was signed in 1953 to halt the fighting, 82,000 South Korean soldiers remained missing or were believed to have been taken prisoner. In 2014, the United Nations’ Commission of Inquiry estimated that at least 50,000 South Korean POWs were not repatriated. North Korea returned only 8,300, keeping many more for forced labor in postwar coal mines. Men were in such short supply that women — including Han’s North Korean mother-in-law — also worked in the mines.
North Korea has denied holding South Koreans against their will.
Then, in 1994, an emaciated refugee from North Korea named Cho Chang-ho was found adrift on a ramshackle wooden boat off South Korea. He turned out to be a South Korean lieutenant who had survived prison camps and coal mines in the North.
More aging POWs fled to the South in the following years, as a famine forced the North to ease control on its people. They all testified in government debriefings, memoirs, news conferences and interviews to forced labor, starvation and deaths in North Korean mines and identified hundreds of fellow war prisoners still alive in the North. Shocked that their long-lost sons and siblings were still alive, South Korean families wanted to help them flee the North. Soon, a cottage industry developed for human traffickers to smuggle refugees out.
So far, 80 POWs have made it to South Korea.
Han, who retired from the Hamyon coal mines at 60, was living in Kyongwon, in northeast North Korea, when a man showed up in August 2001, asking whether he wanted to meet his South Korean relatives. Han said he followed the man across the river border to China, his youngest son tagging along.
Around that time, Han Jae-eun, Han’s youngest brother in South Korea, got a call from a human trafficker.
“I first could not tell whether the man was telling the truth or it was a scam,” said his brother, a taxi driver in Incheon, west of Seoul. “The brother we all thought was dead more than a half century ago turned up alive.”
The brothers had a tearful reunion in Hunchun, China, across the border from Kyongwon. The younger brother gave Han what money he had brought with him — $8,000 — and asked him to decide whether to travel on to South Korea or return to the North with the money.
Han said he thought: “How could I live comfortably in the South while my children and grandchildren in the North did not even have enough corn to eat? With the money, I could buy tons of corn in the North, but I would never see my brothers again.”
He used the money in November 2001 to smuggle himself, his youngest son, the son’s wife and their two children to the South. There, Han’s old 7th Army Division promoted him to sergeant and formally discharged him. He received his unpaid salary, military pension and other subsidies that South Korea provides for returning POWs. He then smuggled his wife, another son and a daughter out of the North.
But his family is still divided. Two sons, a daughter and four grandchildren live in the South, and a son, a daughter and four grandchildren in the North.
The Koreas do not allow their citizens to meet or communicate with one another, except during occasional official family reunions.