Family Reunions

North Korea wants to resume the lucrative business of tours to Mount Geumgang, That's the message North Korea sent by hosting in late September the first visits by members of families divided by the Korean War in nearly two years. South Korean observers doubt, however, if the latest round guarantees regular visits in the near future.

"They won't institutionalize family visits," said Lee Sung-hoon, dean at prestigious Yonsei University. Rather, he believes, North Korea might want to reopen Geumgang to regular tourism, closed in July of last year after a North Korean soldier shot and killed a middle-aged South Korean woman who had wandered outside the barbed-wire fringe of the tourist area to gaze at the sunrise over the sea. "They need the money," said Lee. "That's all they're after."  And then there's the obvious need to try to make ever more money from the Gaeseong Industrial Complex, on the west side, where the North has resolved to admit normal traffic after making life difficult for months by limiting access to South Koreans and their vehicles.

South Korea, meanwhile, is playing a waiting game. While South Koreans were visiting North Korea in late September for the first North-South family reunions in nearly two years, officials at the Blue House, the center of presidential power, said no one was thinking about renewing the South's shipments of food and fertilizer. President Lee Myung-bak stopped them after his inauguration in February of last year - a move that sent the North into a paroxysm of rage from which it only seemed to have recovered when former U.S. President Bill Clinton, went there on his "unofficial" mission in August.

For good measure, the Blue House also said the "grand bargain" that President Lee has broached definitely does not include resumption of the construction of twin light-water nuclear reactors to help fulfill the North's energy needs. That project came to a halt in early 2003 after the breakdown of the 1994 Geneva framework agreement that committed the South to 80 percent of the $5 billion cost of the reactors if only North Korea would stick to its promise to shut down the nuclear complex at Yongbyon.

Still, family visits may provide a real sign of where North and South Korea are going. Until the last week of September, there had been no visits since October 2007, shortly after Roh Moo-hyun, then president of South Korea, flew to Pyongyang for a summit with Dear Leader Kim Jong Il. They have provided hope for hundreds of thousands of still-living members of families divided by the Korean War - as well as heartache and frustration. As of now, scarcely more than 16,000 South Koreans have seen relatives in the North, and many of them come back saddened by the realization that they will never see their loved ones again after a few hours of monitored conversations. Like diplomatic negotiations, inter-Korean visits remain on at the mercy of the host, North Korea, depending on the need for aid and trade and the likelihood of acceptance of the North as a nuclear power.

All the while, the granite crags of Mount Geumgang gleam on the horizon like magnets drawing South Koreans to North Korea and the dream of reunification of their divided nation - or at least of reuniting with relatives whose faces remain etched in the memories of old men and women who last saw them amid the suffering of the Korean War. "We're lucky to have this occasion," said Lee Kyong-hee, a retired editor, after returning across the line between the two Koreas from a fleeting three days at the base of Mount Geumgang meeting a sister whom she hadn't seen since 1951. Lee was standing beside her 100-year-old mother, resting in a wheelchair, recovering from a meeting they fear will be the last, when she spoke to me. "My mother has suffered so much," she said. "She has been praying every day."

Lee Kyong-hee, 62, mingled bitterness with her memories of the ten hours that she, her mother and two other sisters and a brother were able to see their long-lost sister before crossing back to South Korea over the three-day period at the base of Mount Geumgang. "It's a humanitarian program," she said, "but it's inhuman and cruel because we don't know if we can meet again."

Moreover, she continued, the fact that the North Koreans selected her sister as one of 100 North Koreans to meet relatives from the South only deepens the realization that thousands of other families torn apart by the war were not so fortunate. For several hundred thousand South Koreans, in the final stages of their lives, the ultimate dream is to see fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, from whom they were separated in the desperate chaos of war. For most, the dream remains a chimera, wrapped up in the politics of confrontation between the two Koreas, even though the leaders of the North and South agreed in June 2000 on regular family visits as integral to inter-Korean reconciliation.

Lee's sister was 16 when she simply vanished in March 1951 after Chinese forces captured Seoul from the Americans, who had taken the capital from the invading North Koreans, but then retreated before the Chinese onslaught. Her father, she says, had already fled to escape capture and possible execution, and her mother was struggling to evacuate the entire family. When the sister disappeared, the family stayed, hoping in vain to find her. "We couldn't leave Seoul," she said. "We were waiting for my sister the whole time."

Unlike so many other stories from the Korean War, this one was not tragic. Years later, they learned her sister had been put to work caring for wounded North Korean soldiers. Taken to North Korea, she became a medical doctor, married a teacher and had three children. "We were lucky," said Lee. "There are so many people who have family members across the border. They don't know when they can meet their family members."

There's no telling if the latest round of family visits will be the last - or will go on, offering respite from despair for some, while many more go on wondering and waiting. Like a vast multi-act drama, the curtain has risen and fallen on visits with only 16,000 South Koreans actually selected to see relatives from the North before North Korea abruptly halted the program nearly two years ago.

Then, after a year and a half of mounting confrontation with the South, North Korea's leader Kim Jong Il just as abruptly shifted course and agreed on another round of visits. The curtain began to lift in early August when Bill Clinton flew to Pyongyang on an "unofficial visit," ostensibly to bring home two American women who had been held for 140 days since North Korean soldiers grabbed them while filming along the Tumen River border with China. Clinton met with Kim Jong Il for three hours and 17 minutes and briefed President Barack Obama when he returned to the U.S. The switch seemed to reflect the reality that North Korea needed to open its doors slightly while looking for dialogue with the U.S. - and aid and trade to halt the downward spiral of its dilapidated economy.

Many South Koreans doubt if North Korea will ever give up its nuclear program, as demanded by harsh sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council after the North's second underground nuclear test on May 25, but no one questioned the emotions captured in pooled television reports relayed by South Korea's networks as the visits resumed in late September with 97 old men and women gathering here for the ride on North Korean buses to the meeting area at the base of Geumgang. The format called first for 100 South Koreans who had fled from North Korea to see all the relatives the North Koreans said they could find, in this case more than 200, and then for the next three days of meetings in which more than 400 South Koreans crossed the border to see 100 North Koreans whom the North said had chosen to leave the South.

The sudden cries, the frantic efforts at recognition, the grasping at withered faces, epitomized the legacy of a war that cost more than 2 million lives and simmers on in a state of truce, not a peace treaty. A South Korean pool report from Mount Geumgang showed a 75-year-old woman weeping, asking her mother, in her 90s, "Are you all right," then wiping away her mother's tears, saying, "Mother, don't cry." After 58 years, the daughter, 16 when she fled south, told her mother, "I've been missing you even in my dreams." To which her mother responded, "I'm happy beyond words, it's so good I have lived to see my daughter."

For most, however, the dream will never come true. One third of the 120,000 South Koreans who applied to see relatives in the North have since died, and the death rate is increasing by several thousand a year. There has been no resumption of mail privileges, and telephone contact is not even up for discussion.

Nor is there any assurance that the visits will go on. U.S. President Barack Obama made clear in his maiden speech before the UN General Assembly that the U.S. remained firm on sanctions that have blocked North Korean arms exports as well as the import of military materiel and luxury goods for North Korea's elite. And South Korea's President Lee has been just as firm, insisting in his "grand bargain" that North Korea must give up its entire nuclear program. North Korea has warned the U.S. it will conduct more nuclear tests and has denounced Lee's plan as "ridiculous."

As expected, North Korea also rejected strengthened sanctions agreed on by the Security Council after Obama's speech and demanded the United States stop its policy of "confrontation" or face yet another, that is, a third, nuclear test. The demand for the U.S. to cease and desist was so familiar as to be hardly worth noting except that it came in a speech at the United Nations by a senior North Korean diplomat, several days after President Obama had, in the same forum, said North Korea and Iran must give up their nukes - or else.

The great political pronouncements worry Lee Kyong-bok and her sisters. They pray for both Koreas to stop the politicization of the family visits and make them routine events. "I want the authorities of the two sides to try to continue this humanitarian program for the people who have suffered too much," said Ms. Lee. "And for those of us who have met family members, I hope they will find a way to exchange correspondence."

Lee turned toward her mother, beside her in her wheelchair, and asked her for her impressions of the visit. "I never forgot her even for a single day," said Lee, relaying her mother's words. "I was pleased to meet my daughter, but feel sad in my heart." Slowly, the 100-year-old woman began counting the number of her grandchildren. "Fourteen here, and three in North Korea," she said. "That makes seventeen." But she appeared sadder still as she contemplated the separation that divides the family, the realization that she may have spent a few hours with the daughter she had not seen in 58 years, but will never see her daughter's three children. Nor is she likely to see her daughter's husband, who was also unable to accompany her.

Lee Kyong-hee made a final plea - a constructive suggestion for breaking down the barriers - though she doubted if anyone would take her up on the idea. "If free visits are impossible," she asked, "why don't they designate a certain area for people who are elderly and sick?" Given such a special visiting zone, she said, "they could allow family members to visit and look after them." An agreement on that much, she explained, on free visits, in a confined area, open to all, "will be a good beginning from which to expand."

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