`Forgotten' POWs focus of Korean talks
EASING THE DIVIDE: The Kumgansan meeting is part of a recent trend by the long-time foes to improve communications and interactions between themselves
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE, SEOUL
Missing men:
* Officials from the two Koreas are holding a three-day meeting to discuss some 1,000 POWs and civilian abductees believed to be held in the North
* The North is believed to have kept thousands of POWs after the end of the Korean War to use for labor.
* At least 38 POWs have escaped from the North over the past decade.
More than half a century after the end of the Korean War, Red Cross officials of North and South Korea yesterday began discussing the fate of about 1,000 prisoners of war and civilian abductees believed to be still alive in the North.
The three-day meeting in the Northern enclave of Kumgangsan comes as the two Koreas are oiling the rusted locks that have kept them divided for decades. In recent days, for the first time, North Korean officials paid their respects to the South Korean war dead and visited South Korea's Parliament. In upcoming days, South Koreans are to start crossing the demilitarized zone in buses to visit Kaesong, the Northern city closest to Seoul. In October, trains are to start running from Seoul to North Korea, restoring rail service halted during the 1950 to 1953 Korean War.
After the end of the war, the North tried to ease a labor shortage by secretly holding back thousands of South Korean prisoners of war (POWs), historians and escaped prisoners say. Until recently, the former soldiers, bent with age and hard labor in North Korean coal mines, were forgotten human footnotes in a deeply divided peninsula.
"We were hidden away -- I did not even know there was an exchange of POWs," Jang Moo-hwan, a prisoner who escaped from North Korea in 1998, said in an interview at his apartment in Uljin, a coastal village a four-hour drive southeast of the capital.
Now 79, he lives with his wife, Park Soon-nam, who had waited for him in South Korea since his capture in 1953.
"I never dared to say I wanted to send a letter to the South," he said of life in the North. "I feared that I would be taken as a political dissident and starved to death."
South Korea's Defense Minister Yoon Kwang-ung has reported to the National Assembly that 542 South Korean POWs are still alive in the North, cut off from virtually all contact with families and friends in the South.
Separately, South Korea's government has said that during the past year, North Korea has seized 486 civilians from the South, primarily fishermen.
Over the last decade, 38 POWs have escaped from the North. But the issue rarely surfaces publicly here, partly because much of South Korea's media seeks to avoid antagonizing the North, and partly because the defectors shun publicity, fearing reprisals against wives and children left behind.
"I still feel like I am dreaming," Nam Tae-kyo, 75, said last January at a ceremony welcoming him back to his mountainous hometown, Juk Jang.
On the edge of tears as he spoke in the town community center, he said he labored in underground coal mines, forbidden to even inform his family that he was still alive.
His escape through China in December had a happy ending, at a banquet with his family, who treated him like a Rip Van Winkle.
In another success story, Jang Pan-seon, now 74, last month became the first known South Korean POW to escape through China with his entire family, six people. Others have been caught in China and forcibly returned to North Korea.
Veterans groups charge that until recently Seoul's government ignored the lost soldiers.
Seo Jong-gap, president of South Korea's Army Retired Colonel's Association, said in a telephone interview: "I am embarrassed that there was not once an official attempt to bring back the POWs in half a century. The US government goes to the ends of the Earth to bring remains home. We should learn from this."
Copyright © 1999-2005 The Taipei Times