Re: Korea - Bring Them Home

Date: June 01, 2004

"Seoul Searcher - Bring them home

Quite a few South Koreans were impressed once again by the press report last Thursday that the remains of 19 U.S. soldiers killed in the Korean War were recovered in North Korea during a recent joint U.S.-North Korean recovery operation. The remains were brought to the South to be honored in a ceremony at a U.S. base here before being sent to Hawaii for identification testing, the report said.

Since 1996, the United States is said to have paid a considerable amount to North Korea to conduct some 32 joint searches and has recovered more than 200 sets of remains of U.S. soldiers in North Korea. They were among the 8,100 U.S. service members missing in action during the 1950-53 Korean War.

What moved some of us, of course, is the fact that the U.S. government has never given up its efforts to find its service members, even if they were believed killed more than 50 years ago. A U.S. military spokesman was quoted as saying it was most important that "we will be taking missing Americans from the Korean War back to American soil, so they are no longer lost in the hills in North Korea." What has our own government been doing in a similar situation?

In stark and shameful contrast, the Republic of Korea government has done practically nothing despite reliable reports that there are some 500 surviving South Korean prisoners of war still being detained in North Korea against their will. As for efforts to recover the remains of soldiers killed in action in North Korea, the government hasn't even begun to think about them.

Although the communist regime in Pyongyang, in its usual roguish way, has insisted there was not a single South Korean prisoner of war in the North, several prisoners have successfully escaped from there, crossed the Chinese border and returned to the South on their own. According to them, there were hundreds of South Korean prisoners of war living in concentration camps and doing forced labor in coalmines and other places.

Their testimony, however, fell on the deaf ears of South Korean leaders and government officials who are worried that their remarks - or, indeed, any official demand for repatriation - would irritate or upset North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il and his cronies in Pyongyang.

The report on the remains of the U.S. soldiers came one week after Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi visited North Korea, successfully negotiated with Kim Jong-il and brought to Japan the sons and daughters of two Japanese couples who had been abducted by North Korean agents and forced to live in the North for decades before being allowed to visit their native land 17 months ago. The abductees chose not to return to North Korea and the Japanese government, instead, worked hard to bring their children to Japan permanently.

Offering cynical comments on the Japanese development, some South Korean observers said Koizumi exerted efforts to bring the abductees and their families back to Japan to help boost his popularity among Japanese voters. Regardless of any possible political motive, however, the report was good enough to make many South Koreans green with envy; there is a nation where people can trust and count on their national leader to do his utmost to protect citizens, however small their number is.

Of course, it was with more than a feeling of envy that the families of some 486 fishermen and other South Koreans, who were abducted by the North Koreans, received the news from Japan. Frustrated by the apathy of South Korean leaders regarding their demand for government action to secure the return of their relatives, some families were reported considering going to Tokyo to ask the Japanese government to see if it could help resolve their predicament.

Japan said it had agreed with North Korea to provide the impoverished country with 250,000 tons of food and $10 million worth of medical supplies. But it insisted that there was no question of ransom but purely humanitarian aid. Nevertheless, we all know that in dealing with Kim Jong-il and his thugs in Pyongyang, nothing is free, even if they were the ones who perpetrated the international crime of abducting the citizens of another country in the first place.

The Japanese were lucky in that they could at least obtain the release of some abducted citizens and their families by offering that much "humanitarian" aid; South Korean President Kim Dae-jung paid far more money and sent far more material aid to North Korea and yet could not even hint at the issue of the South Korean prisoners of war and abductees in his much touted meeting with Kim Jong-il. Maybe, from the start, he wasn't interested in those issues.

Anyway, the South Korean money, which turned out to have been channeled to the North in a questionable manner, and other material aid, produced the meeting between Kim Dae-jung and Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang, which, in turn, helped the former South Korean president bask in personal glory when he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000. But there has been absolutely no change in the issue of South Korean prisoners of war and abducted fishermen who are still waiting the day when they can return to their families in the South.

One of the most important and fundamental duties of the president of a democratic nation is, without question, to safeguard the life of all citizens and honor the servicemen and women who sacrifice their lives for the country. If the president won't even try to carry out this duty, he isn't much of a national leader, no matter how successful he may be in other areas as chief executive.

For most of his career, the writer was a reporter working in Tokyo, New York and elsewhere for an American news agency. He returned to his native Korea in the early 1990s. His e-mail address is choseh@hotmail.com. - Ed.

©The Korea Herald
About the Columnist
Cho Se-hyon was a former reporter at the Associated Press. He has been contributing articles on political, economic and social issues in Korea to various publications."