50 Years Later, No Joy Over War’s Armistice

On today’s 50th anniversary of the Korean War armistice, Hae Soung Kim sees nothing to celebrate.

At age 73, the Koreatown minister despairs of ever seeing relatives in North Korea or his hometown near that country’s capital, Pyongyang.

“It is a fake peace,” he said Saturday in his Northridge home, surrounded by friends and relatives who were also refugees of the three-year war. “How can it be otherwise when one small nation is divided in two, when brothers and sisters cannot see each other, when children cannot say goodbye before parents die?”

Kim, a former president of the Southern California U.S. Federation Council of Northern Koreans, said his frustration and sadness mirror the emotions of millions of people on the Korean Peninsula and tens of thousands who fled to make new lives in the United States.

As a totalitarian state, North Korea is so politically and culturally isolated from the rest of the world that “my relatives do not even know I am here,” Kim said.

The emotional hardship has shown no sign of diminishing, despite South Korean President Kim Dae Jung’s summit meeting in 2000 with North Korea’s Kim Jung Il to proclaim a Sunshine Policy granting brief family reunions. “Very few people, only 150 families twice a year, are allowed to do this,” said Kim’s 67-year-old wife, Joung Sook Nahm, a South Korea native. “That is such a small number compared to the 10 million families in South Korea that we believe are affected by the separation.”

The Council of Northern Koreans, which Kim said has 150,000 Southern California members, is primarily a support group and news conduit for North Korean refugees. Nearly all of them belong to families separated by the Korean War. Kim acknowledged their activities outside the United States are limited, but many members have close ties with thousands of family members in South Korea. He sees their combined voices as a way of beating the drum for the downfall of the totalitarian regime in North Korea -- an event he admits does not seem imminent -- so that long-separated families can again embrace.

Much as it pains him, he discourages former residents of North Korea and their descendants from visiting or sending aid to relatives in that poor nation.

“Many North Korean people have correspondence or visits from the United States, but many others like me do not want that because it is helping the North Korean government,” he said, adding that he bears no animosity toward those who feel the overpowering tug of blood ties and make the trip anyway.

Following his own advice, Kim has not returned to North Korea since fleeing in 1952, when he saw that U.S. and United Nations soldiers were making little headway against Chinese-aided communist forces. With growing anger, he had watched communists repeatedly throw his father, a Presbyterian minister, in jail because of his Christian beliefs. Leaving siblings and parents behind, Kim escaped to South Korea by clambering onto a refugee-packed train.

“We tied ourselves together, so that no one would fall off,” he said. In 1958, he emigrated to the United States, where he began a career as a minister. He is pastor of Young Saeng Presbyterian Church.

Sending aid to relatives comes with a political price tag, he believes. A friend in Chicago received a request from the North Korean government to bring books along on a planned visit to North Korea. The man chose to comply, but “it was a long list of books and they were very expensive, some of them $60 or $70 each,” he said. “When people visit, we never know what they are going to ask us to do. If we comply, we are helping Kim Jong Il.”

Michael K. Park, president of the Korean American Federation of the San Fernando Valley, said he is skeptical that aid to North Korea will help resolve the impasse. Park believes aid such as money or food will only benefit the ruling family in North Korea. But he is not opposed to relatives visiting relatives. “North Korea’s people are very innocent. They cannot do anything. They just follow Kim Jong Il’s rules.”

Bong Keon Kim,president of the 12-state Western region of the Korean Veterans Assn., said he is not celebrating today’s armistice anniversary because the truce cut off families. Two hundred members of his group met Friday in Los Angeles, but the mood was “complete sadness” that the issue remains unresolved, he said through an interpreter.

The Rev. Kim said the only solution he sees, with reluctance, is for President Bush to follow up on his statement that North Korea is part of an “axis of evil” and militarily invade that nation as he did with Iraq. “I pray for it,” he said. “With the truce, we do not have peace.”