Asia-Pacific
The Koreas
Ties That Bind
As 200 families separated by the Korean War came together across the politically divided peninsula for four days of public reunions in mid-August, stories full of decades of anguish that preceded the moments of happiness filled the South Korean press, as did editorials seeking practical improvements in state relations beyond the symbolic meetings.
On Aug. 17, Cho Kyong Je, reunited with his father, who defected to North Korea in 1950, told the independent Joong Ang Ilbo of Seoul, “I can now forgive my father.”
His father, Cho Yong Kwan—who, like all the North Koreans participating in the reunion, had demonstrated political fealty to the formerly isolated state—told his son and daughter, “I am so sorry.…I’m sure you have suffered greatly.” He then said he wanted them to come to Pyongyang as soon as reunification occurred.
The Korea Times, the English-language sister paper of the independent Hankook Ilbo of Seoul, mixed a degree of skepticism with acknowledgment of the growing acclaim for North Korea’s emergence from decades of isolation.
“Many experts believe that North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, a movie buff, had ‘directed’ all these dramatic scenes, establishing his image as a ‘charismatic’ leader to both North and South Koreans,” said an Aug. 17 article. “[South Korean] President Kim Dae Jung reiterated …that the North Korean leader is a ‘man of common sense’ who is well aware of the outside world.”
Expressing the official North Korean line on the reunion, the state-controlled Korean Central News Agency in Pyongyang—which has curbed its customary denunciations of South Korea since the two Kims met in June—stressed the common heritage of the reunited families. “These scenes proved that Koreans of the same blood and the same nation can never live separated,” said an Aug. 16 dispatch.
