An 84-year-old former POW, Kim, finally returned to his motherland yesterday after six months stranded in a third country.
Revealing the news, an official working in South Korean diplomatic circles explained, “The third country’s administration has allowed him to be repatriated to the South following negotiations with us. Accordingly, he entered the South at Incheon Airport on the 2nd.”
Kim escaped North Korea early in April with his daughter-in-law, but was effectively imprisoned in the South Korean consulate in an unnamed third country until yesterday because that country’s government would not allow him to leave for South Korea. This was Kim’s second attempt to get back to South Korea. The first was in 2008, but he had to return to North Korea for reasons which have not been revealed.
During the three-day Chuseok holiday this September, Kim sent a petition to the South Korean Minister of National Defense and a 20-page letter to the National Assembly through minority Liberty Forward Party lawmaker Park Sung Young. In the letter, Kim again appealed to be allowed to return to South Korea, saying, “Please, let me step on the soil of my hometown before I die.”
“I left my hometown when I was 24 years old, and now I am trying to go back there after 60 years as an 84-year-old man. It was a time of tears, one which those who have not experienced it cannot even imagine.”
According to his letter, Kim, who was born in Gwangju just outside Seoul in 1927, enlisted in the South Korean Army in 1950. He was shot in the head on May 18, 1951 during the Garibong Defense Battle. Thereafter, the army believed that he had died and sent notification of his death to his family. However, he was taken by North Korean soldiers and recuperated in the No. 39 Hospital in Pyongyang until the end of the war.
In 1953 when the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission began looking for POWs after concluding the Armistice Agreement, the North’s military authorities hid POWs including Kim in a mountain village, Maesan in South Pyongan Province. Thereafter, he was mobilized for the construction of Sunan Airport in Pyongyang and finally dispatched to an agricultural construction unit in 1962. However, he was not able to work properly due to the aftereffects of his wartime injuries.
In his petition to the South Korean authorities, Kim also wrote, “Please, make things well so that there will be no more tragic separated families,” after revealing, “In my hometown they held my funeral, and my wife, who married me at the outbreak of the war, wept bitterly before my grave.”
There are now a total of 80 former POWs in South Korea, all of whom have defected. The Ministry of National Defense estimates that around 500 POWs may still be alive in North Korea.
