S. Koreans Watch Time Slip Away

The three-day family reunion between long-lost loved ones in the North and South that begins today is supposed to be a time of great hope and expectation for South Koreans. Instead, many here are watching this second round of emotional meetings with frustration and anger.

Although 100 lucky South Koreans won a reunion lottery that enables them to visit the land of their birth and meet with relatives they haven’t seen since war divided the peninsula half a century ago, 90,000 others applied and didn’t make the cut.

Despite efforts to make it as transparent as a plate-glass window, the South Korean system of choosing who gets to make the trip to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, has led to almost as much grumbling as the Florida recount.

Many in the South hold little hope of seeing the people they love and the places they yearn for in their lifetimes. In fact, some even say they feel more anguish now that there’s hope of a reunion--but no realistic chance of one--than they did during the decades when relations between the two countries were so bad that all communication was cut off.

Some have struggled to create a little bit of North Korea down south. Up five flights of dirty stairs in a nondescript building in Seoul, members of the Nampo Citizens Assn. meet daily to reminisce, exchange gossip, play cards and sing old North Korean songs.

On one of the gritty walls is a picture of their beloved harbor city--only 90 miles away, but it might as well be 900. Against another is a broken clock, its hands stuck permanently at five past 12. Most of the 15 or so men gathered are older than 70, with a few in their 80s.

“It’s very frustrating,” said Shim Myong Shik, 70, wiping tears from his eyes as he talked about the Nampo he left 50 years ago and the parents and six siblings he hasn’t heard from since. “These family visits are little more than symbolic. At this rate, it would take over 100 years for everyone to get a chance.”

Even the 90,000 who applied are a fraction of the several million North Koreans who settled in the South after the war and the more than 8 million Southerners today with Northern relatives. For those most worried about running out of time, the selection system has become a primary focus of their ire--particularly the small numbers, methodology and rigidity.

In an effort to avoid charges of regional or political favoritism that are never far below the surface in South Korea, the government and Red Cross made their selection based on a computerized lottery of older applicants with parents or siblings still alive. North Korea, on the other hand, makes few concessions to neutrality and reportedly chooses those with the best Communist Party credentials.

Here in the South, some applicants want separate lotteries for each province, to make sure every area is represented every time. Others want priority given to those who left all their relatives behind, because those who escaped with a brother or sister have at least had some comfort over the years.

For Kim Ji Soon, 85, even a simple registration system that lets people know whether family members are still alive would go a long way. Kim, born near the China-North Korea border, was forced to flee his hometown for a neighboring city in late 1950 when fighting grew heavy. That would be the last he ever saw of his wife and siblings.

On his return the following January, he found the road blocked by soldiers and a flood of refugees. Now he lives in Inchon, west of Seoul, and the hardest thing to deal with is the uncertainty.

“It’s just too painful to think about dying without even knowing if they’re alive,” he said.

Even some who made the cut this week have their differences with the system. “Machines may be fair, but they have no feelings,” said Yang Chol Young, 82, one of the few who will fly to Pyongyang today. Still, he added, “I feel very lucky.”

A secondary concern for many who have waited so long for so little is that the broader Korean public, particularly younger Koreans with more immediate worries, are gradually losing interest in the reunions agreed to at a historic summit in June. This, they fear, could weaken political pressure on both governments to hold reunions more often.

Already there are some signs of slippage. For this week’s meetings, the government in Seoul has earmarked just half the $1.7 million it spent on the first reunions in August, wary of criticism that it is spending too lavishly as the economy deteriorates. The time allotted for the meetings has been cut to three days from four. And the domestic media are sending fewer people and giving the event far less attention than they did 3 1/2 months ago.

“There are more concerns about economic hardship, and everything eventually succumbs to the law of diminishing returns,” said Chung In Moon, a political science professor at Yonsei University. “That said, I think this remains a very important political issue. The reunion of people is ultimately the most important part of inter-Korean relations.”

One idea with enormous appeal to most South Koreans is a permanent reunion center that would institutionalize the meetings and in theory make them less susceptible to the whims of the Communist leadership in Pyongyang.

Already, the three reunions planned for this year will almost certainly be reduced to two following a flap last month in which North Korea threatened to derail the meetings. The Pyongyang regime became incensed after a senior Red Cross official was quoted as saying the meetings allow participants to compare the relative merits of the two political systems.

Another idea espoused by people such as lawmaker Jang Sung Min is to use the Internet, thereby allowing tens of thousands of separated families to communicate every day.

The idea has appeal, but North Korea has almost no stable power or food, let alone computers. Pyong-yang has asked Seoul for several hundred computers, but they’re supposedly meant to track reunion applicants, not create some Communist Party version of an Internet cafe. And technological gifts to the North are subject to export-control regulations amid concerns that they could be diverted to military use.

But the biggest stumbling block in the expansion of ties ultimately is North Korea itself, which must approve any cooperative step--and which is moving very tepidly to open its society. One of the last things the dictatorship presumably wants is an Internet connection readily available to large segments of the population.

Back at the Nampo Citizens Assn., most of the 50 or members who show up regularly understand that a large dose of patience is needed. But taking the long view is difficult when you’ve already waited an entire generation.

“Twice as many of our people died this year as last,” said Lee Chang Kyu, the 70-year-old director, standing beside framed calligraphy that reads “Homesick.” “It’s human nature to hunger for the old faces and places of your youth as you age. But we can’t go back, and we’re only getting older. That is making us feel very desperate.”

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Chi Jung Nam of The Times’ Seoul Bureau contributed to this report.