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

At the beginning of this week, an unusual crowd gathered at the Imjinging Station at the IMJİNGANG Station – the last stop in Seoul’s nearest inch metropolitan subway line to North Korea.

There were dozens of activists and police officers, their attention was fixed on a man: 95-year-old North Korean war prisoner Ahn Hak-Sop, who went home, divides the Korean Peninsula of the border.

This was what Mr. Ahn said his last journey – after spent most of his life in South Korea, most of them wanted to return to the north to be buried there against his will.

He never did it: he was rejected as expected because the South Korean government said they had no enough time to make the necessary arrangements.

But Mr. Ahn approached as much as possible.

Pulmonary edema (liquid accumulation in the lungs) weakened, the station can not manage the 30 -minute walk from the merger bridge – or one of the few passages connecting South Korea to the north tonic Dae -Gyo.

So he got out of the car about 200 meters from the bridge and walked the last tension surrounded by two supporters who fixed it.

He returned to a rarely seen North Korean flag in the south and deeply shaken, and addressed journalists and 20 volunteers supported.

He said, “I just want my body to rest in a really independent country.” “A land free of imperialism.”

Ahn Hak-Sop was 23 years old when he was caught by the South Koreans.

Three years ago, when the Korean ruler Kim Il-Sung attacked the south, he was in high school. Kim, who wants to bring together two Korea, gathered his citizens, claiming that South started the 1950 attack.

Ahn was among those who believed. In 1952, he joined the North Korean People’s Army as a liaison officer and then a unit sent to the south was appointed.

He was arrested in April 1953 three months before the Armistice and was mahkencedm for jail in the same year. He was released after more than 42 years due to a special amnesty on Korean Independence Day.

Like many other North Korean prisoners, Mr. Ahn was labeled as a “red” referring to the communist sympathy and fought to find a suitable job.

It wasn’t easy, he told BBC in an earlier interview in July. The government said it wasn’t too much help, the agents followed it for years. He married and even encouraged a child, but he never felt that he really belonged.

Throughout his house, he made his house in a small village in Gimpo, a civilian can live on the border with the north.

Nevertheless, in 2000, dozens of other prisoners who wanted to return turned their chances of being sent back to the north.

At that time, he was optimistic, that the ties between the two sides would heal, that his people could travel freely back and forth.

But he chose to stay because he was afraid that separation would be a gain for the Americans.

“They were pushing the US military governance then [in the South]”he said.

“If I get back to the north, he would feel like I was delivering my own bedroom to the Americans – he emptied for them. As a human being, my conscience could not allow it.”

Apart from the growing bonds between Seoul and Washington, it is not clear what he talks about a powerful military alliance that guarantees the protection of South Korea from any attack from the north.

This relationship deeply disturbs Mr. Ahn, who never stopped believing in the propaganda of his family – the only thing that stops the reunification of the Korean Peninsula is a “imperialist America” ​​and a South Korean government entering them.

Born in 1930 In the Gangwa district of Gyeonggi, Mr. Ahn was the youngest of the three brothers during the colonial administration of the Korean Peninsula of Japan. He also had two little sisters.

Patriotism released early root. His grandfather refused to let him go to school because he remembered, “Japanese did not want to make me.” Thus, after his grandfather died, he started school later.

When Japan surrendered in 1945, ended the Second World War and ended Korea’s colonization, Mr. Ahn and his younger brother, who left the Japanese army, were hiding in the house of his aunts at the bottom of the Mani Mountain on Ganghwa Island.

“This wasn’t salvation – it was just a transfer of the colonial rule,” he said.

“A brochure [we saw] He said that Korea was not saved, but the US military administration would be applied instead. Even if someone violated the US military laws, he said they would definitely be punished under military laws. “

While they were seized on the Soviet Union and the US Korean Peninsula, they agreed to divide it. The Soviets seized the control of the North and the United States, where they established military administration until 1948.

When Kim attacked in 1950, there was a South Korean government – but like many North Korean, Mr. Ahn believes that the South provoked the conflict and that his alliance with Washington prevented the reunification.

After his arrest, Mr. Ahn had a few chances to avoid prison – he was asked to sign documents that abandoned the so -called “transformation” communist ideology. But he refused.

I had to endure endless humiliation, torture and violence – embarrassment and pain, as I refused to sign a written transformation oath on Wednesday. ”

Although the South Korean government accepted violence in prison in 2004, he never responded directly to this special accusation. In 2009, Ahn’s direct claims were investigated by the Truth and the Reconciliation Commission of South Korea, an independent organ that found that there was deliberate efforts to force its transformation and investigates human rights abuse.

In South Korea, it has been accepted for a long time that such prisoners often face violence behind bars.

“Whenever I get the consciousness back, the first thing I control was to see if there’s a red ink,” Ahn remembered in his July interview.

This often pointed out that someone forced a fingerprint to a written ideological transformation oath.

“If not, I would think, ‘No matter what they did, I won.’ And I felt satisfied.”

Since Mr. Ahn left, the North has changed in a remarkable way. Kim Il -Sung’s grandson now rules the country – it continues to be one of the poorest countries in the world, which is richer than in 1950. Mr. Ahn was not in the north for the destructive famine who killed hundreds of thousands of people in the 1990s. Tens of thousands of people fled and made deadly journeys to escape from their lives.

However, Mr. Ahn rejected the proposal of humanitarian concerns in the north, blamed the media for being prejudiced and reports only on the dark side of the country. He argues that North Korea has developed and argues that Kim’s decision to send unity to help Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The Güney also changed in time of Mr. Ahn – once a poor military dictatorship, now a rich, powerful democracy. The relationship with the North had landing and explosions ranging from open hostility and hopeful participation.

But Mr. Ahn’s beliefs did not hesitate. He devoted the last 30 years of his life to protest a country he believed to have colonized South Korea – the United States.

“They say that people have two species of life, unlike animals.

“I’ve lived under the Japanese colonial administration all these years. But I don’t want to be buried under it [American] Even in death colonialism. “