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Koreans meet after half century to say goodbye
Wed Sep 23, 2009 10:57pm EDT
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By Jack Kim and Christine Kim
SEOUL (Reuters) - The South Korean soldier said he wanted Lee Sun-ok to leave her North Korean village near the border with China and come with him to be a medic in the South. Her father saw he had a gun and said she should go.
Lee, then 20, thought the separation would only be temporary but in that instant at the start of the 1950-53 Korean War, she was ripped from her family and fell victim to the Cold War hostilities that have kept the two Koreas apart ever since.
On Saturday, she will see brothers and sisters she left behind in North Korea 59 years ago in a fleeting three-day reunion at a mountain resort in the North that brings together long-lost relatives who have not seen each other since the war.
The two Koreas began reunions in 2000 for the hundreds of thousands of divided families but the events have been on hold for about two years due to political tension, denying many Koreans their dying wish to see relatives they left behind.
Destitute North Korea, stung by U.N. sanctions triggered by nuclear and missile tests, has in recent months reached out to the South, once a major aid donor, proposing renewed business ties and resuming the emotionally charged reunions.
Lee, 79 and ailing, never thought she would see her family again and is thrilled to be among the fortunate few taking part.
"I'll probably tell them, 'You are alive. How good it would have been if sister was alive'," Lee said in an interview at her home in Seoul, weeping as she remembered her older and now deceased sister.
"I thought maybe when the world gets turned upside down, I might get back to see them."
One hundred South Koreans will be traveling to the North on Saturday for the three-day reunion with family members from the North. Another three days of meetings will follow between 100 other families.
BURBERRY, MAKE-UP AND ASPIRIN
Hahm Ok-yeop, 74, who left North Korea for the South as a teenager, will also be going to the reunion and has packed a suitcase with gifts for her brother and sister that include designer clothes from the likes of Burberry, make-up and Aspirin.
Hahm crossed the border before the war and her family, facing persecution for being Catholics in the communist North, planned to send members one by one to the South. Then the war broke out and no more followed.
"I missed my family terribly," Hahm said in her spacious living room strewn with souvenirs she was packing for the trip. "Sometimes I thought that I had come in vain, because I felt so alone at first."
North Korea takes a cut of all the cash of gifts those from the South give to their relatives, and Hahm, who has become wealthy over the years, will be taking more than most.
"I heard that the North Korean government takes half of what you give the relatives, but what else can we do? I don't think anyone will take an old lady's clothes." Continued...
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