Asia Times: PYONGYANG WATCH


	October 13, 2001	atimes.com

The Koreas

PYONGYANG WATCH
Reunions for the few: kind or cruel?
By Aidan Foster-Carter

They've done it again. On Friday North Korea abruptly postponed the reunions of separated families due to take place just four days later. The reason? Heightened security alerts due to the Afghan hostilities meant that South Korea was unsafe. It's a feeble excuse, whose real purpose is to press Seoul into further concessions.

Meanwhile, the dreams of 200 elderly people of seeing their loved ones have been dashed. But other official inter-Korean meetings scheduled for this month will still go ahead as planned.

In any case, the now postponed reunions were far from ideal from a humanitarian viewpoint. After three previous sessions, the formula has become familiar. One hundred select Koreans from each side, plus officials and press, fly to the capital of the other Korea; there to be briefly reunited with close kin that they haven't seen for half a century. After three days of an encounter more public than private, played out in hotels and at excursions and banquets, they fly home again - and that's it. No more visits, no phone calls, no e-mail (unavailable in North Korea). Not even a letter. Nothing more. Just memories.

The first time they did this - well, almost: there'd been a one-off, even more stage-managed reunion back in 1985 - it seemed like progress. In August last year, soon after the breakthrough North-South summit, the global media focused once more on Korea. Heartbreaking scenes - a mother not even recognizing the middle-aged son she last saw as a child; an old man prostrating himself before his even older father; tears flowing like rain - were flashed around the world. Reality TV? It doesn't get more real than this.

There was less coverage when they did it all again a few months later - the novelty had worn off - and less again the third time, last February. Then in March, 300 people on each side were allowed to write letters to family across the Demilitarized Zone - but with no reply. (No reply? What kind of communication is that?) But then North Korea froze even these limited exchanges, along with all other inter-Korean projects, until now.

Add it up. In 15 months a grand total of 600 aged Koreans have met, once. The same number again have written, once. Per year, that is just 240 from either side in each category - a drop in the ocean. True, the much quoted figure of 10 million separated families is way too high: that would be the entire population of South Korea. The North, as usual, releases no figures. But in the South, over 100,000 people - 117,311 to be exact, according to the ROK Red Cross - have applied for reunions. So at this rate, for them all to meet (just once) would take 489 years. Correction: only 435 years. 13,000 applicants have already died.

Does not so pathetic a program mock rather than advance humanitarianism? True, for the fortunate few it's better than nothing. Assuming - but can we? - that the latest reunion is postponed rather than cancelled, then be glad for Kwon Ji-eun, who at 87 will go North to see her son, now 60; and for Kil Young-jin, who at 80 will be reunited with his wife and their little boy, aged 55. Coming the other way, Kang Dae-jin will at last meet his 90-year old mother, brothers and sisters. North Korea selects its candidates by rank and loyalty, the South by lot: an interesting take on the fairness of capitalism as against communism.

Meanwhile, better reunions are happening with little fanfare elsewhere. Pro-North Koreans in Japan - most of whom hail from the South originally - are now free to visit their South Korean home towns. So this month saw Kim Man-yu back on Cheju island - now South Korea's holiday playground, but once a radical hotbed - after 55 years away. In 1931, aged 16, Kim spent five years in jail for agitating against Korea's then Japanese colonial masters. He didn't much care for Americans either, and in 1946 left for Japan where he prospered as a doctor. In 1982 he gave North Korea US $18 million to build a hospital, named after him. Now 87 and in a wheelchair, he was glad to come home - as he can. Unlike the North-South brief encounters, people like Dr Kim are free to visit their hometowns, meet all their relatives (30 in his case: must have been quite a party), and pay their respects at the family tombs so important to Koreans. Some 360 elderly pro-North Koreans have made the trip so far, on five trips organized over the past year.

A few South Koreans, at great expense and some risk, use private enterprise to forge their own reunions. For a fat fee (to cover all the bribes), brokers will try to locate northern relatives, and even spirit them out for brief meetings across the border in China. One middleman, with a a claimed success rate of one in three, in July told Reuters of a daughter who walked 20 days across North Korea, lugging bags of rice and corn, to elude border guards and meet her long-lost father in a Chinese hotel. She just wanted to cook him a meal; he just wanted to give her piggy-backs. They did both every day, for a precious week. She is 55; he is 84.

I thought of ending on that happy image, but it would be false. The vast majority (99 percent) don't, and at this rate won't, ever get to meet at all. Like Noh Yong-woon, who on October 8 was overjoyed to hear he'd been selected to meet the sister he last saw when she was 11 (she's now 61; he's 70). That night he didn't sleep. The very next day he learnt that his sister was in a coma - meaning his trip was off, probably forever. It's a special cruelty to exclude those too sick to make it to the two capitals. Why can't their kin visit them at home or in hospital? If China can let Taiwanese come and go freely, what is Pyongyang's problem?

For some, it is all too much. At 82, Chung In-kuk had never stopped pining for the son he left behind in North Korea in 1948. He applied for all four reunions, with no luck. Chusok, harvest festival, is the worst time. It's when Koreans visit their home towns - but those from the North can't. Some head for the border, to gaze longingly across. That's what Chung did - and never came back. He jumped off Freedom Bridge, and on October 4 his body was found in Unification Pond (oh bitter irony in those names). May his spirit haunt every flint-hearted cadre in Pyongyang until all Koreans are finally free to embrace their long-lost loved ones: wherever they like, for as long as they like, in private. And may that day not come too late.

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