By RICHARD LLOYD PARRY
SEOUL - For 50 years, since he vanished one day in the northern summer of 1950, Lee Duck-man's son, Soon-hwan, existed as nothing more than a collection of creased brown photographs glued to a piece of flaking card.
His five younger siblings were too young to remember very much about their big brother, and the boy's clothes, his toys, his school exercise books - all the other small mementos of him - were lost in the chaos of the Korean War. Decades passed: Lee grew old, her children became middle-aged and 10 years ago her husband died. Only young Soon-hwan remained as he had always been, all dressed up for school, a delicate-looking teenager in a dark uniform with shiny buttons.
The Lees were farmers; as the eldest of five children, Soon-hwan was the one destined to receive an education, at the Hanyong Middle School in the nearby city of Seoul. In June 1950, when the communist Army swept down from North Korea at the start of the three-year war, he and his schoolmates had fled back to their homes. But Soon-hwan decided to go back to the city to see what had become of his school and its teachers. It was July, a few weeks after the outbreak of war. Very simply, Soon-hwan never came back.
The family asked around, but nobody knew what had become of the boy. A civil war was being fought - anything might have happened.
"He went out that day without telling me," says Lee, a pale, quiet lady of 85. "I was out at the time, and he said to his brother, 'I'm going to take a look at the school. Tell Mum.' If I'd been there, I'd have told him not to go. He was 16 years old."
Lee's panic quickly turned to mourning, but with a tiny baby and four other children to look after in a land at war, there was much else to worry about. When her husband died in 1990, for legal reasons of inheritance, the family did what they had been putting off for so long, and officially registered Soon-hwan's death.
Then a month ago, a visitor came to Lee's house, a television reporter for a Korean channel, bearing a copy of an amazing document.
The first strange thing about it was its origin - North Korea, the fanatically secretive and repressive communist dictatorship which still covers one half of the peninsula, 11 years after the end of the Cold War. But strangest of all were its contents - a list, including names, ages and addresses, of Lee, her late husband, Ahn Byong-hong, and their children.
The form was an official request for a meeting, and at the top was a photograph of the man who had filled it out - a 65-year old North Korean citizen named Ahn Soon-hwan. The news was almost unbearable: Lee's son had not been killed by a stray shell in the ruins of Seoul - he was alive.
This week, he travelled to Seoul Airport on the first North Korean passenger plane ever to land in South Korea. The family was rejoined for the first time in 50 years. "I just couldn't believe it was true," Lee says. "I thought, 'Is this really happening, is it a dream?' I always thought that he was dead, because of the war and the North Koreans. I'm so glad that he's alive."
The story would be remarkable enough if it was unique, but there are countless people like Lee on both sides of the demilitarised zone which still divides the two Koreas.
The war separated parents and children, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters. In South Korea alone, there are 1.2 million people with close family members in the North - add the second and third generations and the number comes to almost eight million.
For most of a lifetime they have had nothing to do but wait, as relations between the two rival states have wavered between suspicion and outright hostility.
Then in 1997, a new President, Kim Dae-jung, was elected in Seoul with a promise to take a more conciliatory attitude to the North and do his best for the divided families.
Two months ago came the breakthrough for which everyone had been hoping. Kim flew to the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, at the invitation of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il.
If the two men had done nothing more than shake hands, it would have been a historic moment, but they went much further, agreeing to a list of practical measures intended to draw the old enemies closer together, with the goal of eventual reunification.
Last week, fibre optic cables were put in place linking Pyongyang with Seoul. This week, liaison offices were opened up at Panmunjom, the border village which represents the only crossing point in the razor wire and minefields of the DMZ.
But the most powerful, emotional and symbolic moment of all came on Tuesday, when one hundred people each, from the North and South, flew across the frontier, to greet their long-lost relatives on the other side.
Of all the great human displacements of the 20th Century, few have been so sudden, cruel or long-lasting as that of the separated Koreans. Between the two countries are no direct mail, telephone or transportation links. People like Lee have stared into a chasm of loss, with no facts, no clues, nothing on which to base hope or despair.
There were tiny tragedies through which people got trapped on the wrong side of the line. Some were committed communists who joined the North's volunteer army.
Some were South Korean soldiers who went missing with their units to become prisoners of war. Some had left their homes temporarily, planning to return to their husbands, wives or children when the war ended and the country was reunited. One man, 73-year old Lee Bok-yon, went out to buy a bicycle in Seoul one day, and never came back.
When the reunions began, as more and more pockets of wailing were opening up across a big banquet hall, one scene out of all of them caught the attention - a man and a woman, elderly like almost everyone in the room, facing one another with expressions of intense emotion.
The woman was Paek Bok-hwa, one of the South Koreans. The man was her brother, Paek Gi-taek, whom she last saw in 1950 as a boy of 18 and who had arrived from North Korea. The brother reached out his hands, and his sister grasped his shoulders, but what began as an embrace turned into something close to an assault.
"Your sister went to look for you," screamed Bok-hwa, grasping her brother's arms and face and pulling him on to the floor. "You don't know how long she's been looking for you. She climbed mountains and crossed rivers to look for you everywhere, but couldn't find you. Mother was so happy to have you - you were her only son.
"She was always looking for you, even in her dreams - when she died she didn't even close her eyes. How could you, how could you? Go and tell her to close her eyes." A Red Cross worker lifted the two from the ground where they had fallen, and as he pulled away, Paek Gi-taek had scratches on his face.
One old South Korean man died of cancer, two days before he was due to meet his long-lost brother. Every table had its load of photograph albums showing dead parents, brothers and children. "I'm not dead, I'm not dead - I was alive all this time," said 66-year old Kang Young-won. "Where's my little sister?" But his little sister died decades ago when she was still a child.
Then there were those in perhaps the most painful and awkward position of all - husbands who had become separated from their wives, many of them to remarry in their new country without any formal divorce proceedings.
Choi Pil-soon, 77, met his 49-year old daughter for the first time - his wife had been pregnant when he set out for the North "because I couldn't bear any more of this colonialism."
The party of 100 South Koreans was chosen at random by a computer, and contains nobody famous or distinguished.
But, to the irritation of the Seoul Government, the North Koreans have not adopted the same system. Many of their delegation were people of eminence and achievement - for all the warming of relations between the two sides, the North was presenting only its most articulate, presentable and ideologically sound face.
For similarly murky, political reasons, all the reunions took place in a hotel, and Soon-hwan and his northern compatriots were not allowed to visit their family homes. North Korea has seen too many of its people defect over the years to let them very far out of its sight.
- INDEPENDENT
Bittersweet reunion for South Korea's divided families
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