Korean war POW, 95, fails at attempt to return to North

On a blistering morning earlier this week, an unusually massive crowd had gathered at Imjingang Station – the final cease on Seoul’s metropolitan subway line that inches the closest to North Korea.

There have been dozens of activists and cops, their consideration fastened on one man: Ahn Hak-sop, a 95-year-old former North Korean prisoner of warfare who was making his approach dwelling, to the opposite aspect of the border that divides the Korean peninsula.

It was what Mr Ahn referred to as his last journey – he wished to return to the North to be buried there, after spending most of his life in South Korea, a lot of it towards his will.

He by no means made it throughout: he was turned away, as was anticipated as a result of the South Korean authorities had stated they didn’t have sufficient time to make the mandatory preparations.

However Mr Ahn got here as shut as he may.

Weakened by pulmonary oedema (a construct up of fluid on the lungs), he couldn’t handle the 30 minute stroll from the station to the Unification Bridge – or Tongil Dae-gyo – one of many few passageways connecting South Korea to the North.

So he stepped out of the automobile roughly 200 metres from the bridge and walked the ultimate stretch on foot, flanked by two supporters who steadied him.

He returned holding a North Korean flag, a sight not often seen and deeply jarring within the South, and addressed the reporters and 20 or so volunteers who had turned up in assist.

“I simply need my physique to relaxation in a very unbiased land,” he stated. “A land free from imperialism.”

Ahn Hak-sop was 23 when he was captured by the South Koreans.

Three years earlier, he had been in highschool when then-North Korean ruler Kim Il-sung attacked the South. Kim, who wished to reunify the 2 Koreas, rallied his countrymen by claiming that the South had initiated the 1950 assault.

Ahn was amongst those that believed this. He joined the North Korean Folks’s Military in 1952 as a liaison officer, and was then assigned a unit that was despatched to the South.

He was captured in April 1953, three months earlier than the armistice, and sentenced to life in jail the identical yr. He was launched greater than 42 years later due to a particular pardon on the Korean independence day.

Like many different North Korean prisoners, Mr Ahn too was labelled a “redhead”, a reference to his communist sympathies, and he struggled to discover a correct job.

It wasn’t simple, he advised the BBC in an earlier interview in July. The federal government did not assist a lot at first, he stated, brokers adopted him for years. He married, and even fostered a baby, however he by no means felt he actually belonged.

All through, he made his dwelling in a small village in Gimpo, the closest a civilian can reside to the border with the North.

But in 2000, he turned down the possibility to be despatched again to the North together with dozens of different prisoners who additionally wished to return.

He had been optimistic then that ties between the 2 sides would enhance, that their individuals would be capable to journey backwards and forwards freely.

However he selected to remain as a result of he feared leaving can be a win for the People.

“On the time, they have been pushing for US navy governance [in the South],” he stated.

“If I returned to the North, it could’ve felt like I used to be simply handing over my very own bed room to the People – vacating it for them. My conscience as a human being simply could not permit that.”

It isn’t clear what he was referring to aside from rising ties between Seoul and Washington, which features a robust navy alliance which ensures South Korea safety from any assault from the North.

That relationship deeply bothers Mr Ahn, who has by no means stopped believing the Kim household’s propaganda – that the one factor stopping the reunification of the Korean peninsula was an “imperialist America” and a South Korean authorities that was beholden to them.

Born in 1930 in Ganghwa County, Gyeonggi Province, throughout Japan’s colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula, Mr Ahn was the youngest of three brothers. He additionally had two youthful sisters.

Patriotism took root early. His grandfather refused to let him attend college as a result of he “did not need to make me Japanese”, he recalled. So he began college later than ordinary, after his grandfather died.

When Japan surrendered in 1945, bringing an finish to World Conflict Two and its colonisation of Korea, Mr Ahn and his youthful brother, who had abandoned the Japanese navy, have been hiding at their aunt’s home on the foot of Mount Mani on Ganghwa Island.

“That wasn’t liberation – it was only a switch of colonial rule,” he stated.

“A leaflet [we saw] stated that Korea wasn’t being liberated, however that US navy rule can be applied as an alternative. It even stated that if anybody violated US navy regulation, they’d be strictly punished below navy regulation.”

Because the Soviet Union and the US tussled over the Korean peninsula, they agreed to to divide it. The Soviets took management of the North and the US, the South, the place they arrange a navy administration till 1948.

When Kim attacked in 1950, a South Korean authorities was in place – however Mr Ahn, like so many North Koreans, believes the South provoked the battle and that its alliance with Washington prevented reunification.

As soon as he was captured, Mr Ahn had a number of possibilities to keep away from jail – he was requested to signal paperwork renouncing the North and its communist ideology, which was referred to as “conversion”. However he refused.

“As a result of I refused to signal a written oath of conversion, I needed to endure countless humiliation, torture, and violence – days full of disgrace and ache. There is not any option to absolutely describe that struggling in phrases,” he advised the group that had gathered close to the border on Wednesday.

The South Korean authorities by no means responded to this explicit cost straight, though a particular fee acknowledged violence on the jail in 2004. Mr Ahn’s direct allegations have been investigated by the Fact and Reconciliation Fee of South Korea, an unbiased physique investigating previous human rights abuses, in 2009, which discovered that there had been a deliberate effort to power his conversion, which included acts of torture.

It has lengthy been accepted in South Korea that such prisoners typically encountered violence behind bars.

“At any time when I regained consciousness, the very first thing I checked was my fingers – to see if there was any crimson ink on them,” Mr Ahn recalled in his July interview.

That often signalled that somebody had compelled a fingerprint onto a written oath of ideological conversion.

“If there wasn’t, I might suppose, ‘It doesn’t matter what they did, I received’. And I felt happy.”

The North has modified remarkably since Mr Ahn left. Kim Il-sung’s grandson now runs the nation – a reclusive dictatorship that’s richer than it was in 1950, however stays one of many poorest international locations on the earth. Mr Ahn was not within the North for the devastating famine within the Nineteen Nineties that killed a whole bunch of hundreds. Tens of hundreds of others fled, making lethal journeys to flee their lives there.

Mr Ahn, nonetheless, dismissed the suggestion of any humanitarian considerations within the North, blaming the media for being biased and solely reporting on the darkish aspect of the nation. He argues that North Korea is prospering and defends Kim’s resolution to ship troops to assist Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The South has additionally modified in Mr Ahn’s time right here – as soon as a poor navy dictatorship, it’s now a rich, highly effective democracy. Its relationship with the North has had its ups and downs, wavering between open hostility and hopeful engagement.

However Mr Ahn’s beliefs haven’t wavered. He has devoted the final 30 years of his life to protesting a rustic that he believes continues to be colonising South Korea – the US.

“They are saying people, in contrast to animals, have two sorts of life. One is fundamental organic life – the sort the place we discuss, eat, defecate, sleep, and so forth. The second is political life, additionally referred to as social life. For those who strip a human being of their political life, they’re no totally different from a robotic,” Mr Ahn advised the BBC in July.

“I lived below Japanese colonial rule all these years. However I do not need to be buried below [American] colonialism even in dying.”