By James Brooke The New York Times
SEOUL Half a century after the end of the Korean War, Red Cross officials from North and South Korea are meeting this week to discuss the fate of 1,000 prisoners of war and civilian abductees from the South believed to be still alive in the North.
The meeting, Tuesday through Thursday in the North's tourist enclave of Geumgangsan, comes as the two Koreas are oiling the rusted locks that have kept them divided for decades.
Last week, for the first time, Northern officials paid their respects to South Korean war dead and visited South Korea's Parliament. Next week, South Koreans are scheduled to start crossing the demilitarized zone in buses to visit Gaeseong. In October, trains are scheduled to start running from here to the North, restoring rail service ruptured during the 1950-1953 war.
Until recently, the former soldiers from the South, bent from age and hard labor in coal mines in the North, were forgotten human footnotes in a deeply divided peninsula. After the fighting ended, North Korea tried to ease a labor shortage by secretly holding back thousands of South Korean prisoners of war, historians and escaped prisoners say.
"We were hidden away," Jang Moo Hwan said. "I did not even know there was an exchange of POWs."
Jang was a Southern prisoner who escaped from the North in 1998. Now 79 years old, he lives in Uljin, a coastal village a four-hour drive southeast of Seoul, with his wife, Park Soon Nam, who had waited for him in the South since his capture in 1953.
"I never dared to say I wanted to send a letter to the South," he said during an interview about his life in North Korea. "I feared that I would be taken as a political dissident and starved to death. A dictatorship is that scary."
The South Korean defense minister has reported to the National Assembly that 542 South Korean prisoners of war are still alive in the North, cut off from virtually all contact with families and friends in the South.
In addition, South Korea has said that the North over the years has seized 486 Southern civilians, largely fishermen.
Over the past decade, 38 Southern prisoners of war have escaped from the North. But the issue rarely surfaces publicly here, partly because South Korea's news organizations largely seek to avoid antagonizing the North and partly because the defectors shun publicity, fearing that the Communist government will take reprisals against wives and children left behind in the North.
"I still feel like I am dreaming," Nam Tae Kyo, 75, said last January at a ceremony welcoming him back to his mountainous hometown of Juk Jang. On the edge of tears as he spoke in the town community center, he said he had labored in underground coal mines, forbidden even to inform his family here that he was still alive.
His escape through China in December had a happy ending - a farm banquet with his family, which treated him like a Rip Van Winkle.
In another success story, Jang Pan Seon, now 74, became in July the first known South Korean prisoner of war to escape through China with his entire family, six people.
But other prisoners of war have been caught in China and forcibly repatriated to North Korea, despite their protests that they are from the South.
Last January, China deported to North Korea a 72-year-old former Southern soldier, Han Man Tack, who had been held in China for one month as an illegal alien. Believing that South Korean officials had not worked hard enough to protect the former prisoner of war, members of Han's family traveled to Seoul and angrily returned one of his war medals to government officials.
"The Chinese government knew the exact identity of this man," said Do Hee Yun, secretary general of the Coalition for Human Rights of North Korean Abductees and Refugees. "The South Korean government had officially notified China and requested his return, and yet they deported this man. I call this an inhumane act."
Veterans groups charge that the South Korean government ignored the lost soldiers until recently.
Seo Jong Gap, president of South Korea's Army Retired Colonels Association, said by telephone that he was "embarrassed that there was not once an official attempt to bring back the POWs in half a century." He added: "It is the government's responsibility to protect those who sacrificed themselves. The U.S. government goes to the ends of the earth to bring remains home. We should learn from this."
Since 1996, the United States has mounted annual missions in the North, seeking remains of the 8,000 American soldiers still missing from the 1950-1953 conflict. In May, as tension grew over the North's nuclear bomb program, the American military was withdrawn and the search program was suspended.
In response to charges that they are not doing enough, South Korean diplomats and military officials say that they work behind the scenes to win the soldiers' freedom. In mid-June, quiet diplomacy became public when officials from the North unexpectedly agreed to discuss with the South the prisoner of war and abductee problem, an issue they had never acknowledged.
Now, with a new round of nuclear talks expected to start in Beijing next week, the North seems to be working to solidify the support of the South.
Lee Su-Hyun contributed to this article from Seoul.
© 2005 the International Herald Tribune