Painful good-bye
Korean relatives bid emotional farewell after reunions.
SEOUL: Hundreds of elderly Koreans tearfully said their final good-byes at the end of the first round of rare reunions between relatives separated by the 1950-53 Korean War.
About 200 South Koreans and their family members returned to the South later yesterday after the end of three days of meetings with North Korean relatives at the North’s Diamond Mountain resort.
Another 337 South Koreans will participate in a second round of reunions from tomorrow to Sunday.
The first set of reunions created heart-wrenching images of relatives weeping, embracing and caressing each other in a rush of emotions in what’s likely to be the last time they’ll see each other before they die.
Many of the South Korean participants were war refugees who reunited with the siblings or infant children they left behind, many of whom are now into their 70s.
At their final lunch meeting yesterday before the South Koreans were to return home, 91-year-old Lee Ki-soon seemed lost for words as he quietly drank a glass of soju with his 75-year-old North Korean son.
Nearby, Ri Chol, a 61-year-old North Korean, quietly wept as he grasped the hands of a 93-year-old South Korean grandmother he was only just getting to know.
“Don’t cry, Chol,” Kwon Seok, also in tears, told her grandson.
An Jong-sun, a 70-year-old North Korean,
carefully fed her 100-year-old South Korean father food.
Han Shin-ja, 99, told her two North Korean daughters to eat a lot of chap-ssal or sticky rice, for health.
The daughters cried as Han told them she would always pray for their happiness and also for the future of her North Korean great-grandchildren she never got to see.
Some relatives exchanged their phone numbers and home addresses, although the Koreas since the end of the war have banned ordinary citizens from visiting relatives on
the other side of the border or contacting them without permission.
Shin Jae-cheon, a 92-year-old from the South Korean town of Gimpo, not far from the border, lamented that his 70-year-old North Korean sister lived about an hour’s drive away all these years.
Nearly 20,000 people have participated in 20 rounds of face-to-face reunions held between the countries since 2000.
The latest reunions come after a three-year hiatus during which North Korea conducted nuclear tests and missile launches. — AP