S. Korean POW: “I still feel like I am dreaming,”

Original Post: “Seoul Asks Pyongyang to Confirm Fate of POWs.” Well, at least they’re finally asking.

Update: James Chen e-mails a link to this must-read James Brooke report in the NY Times.

Until recently, the former Southern soldiers, bent with age and hard labor in Northern coal mines, were forgotten human footnotes in a deeply divided peninsula. After the end of the Korea War, North Korea tried to ease a labor shortage by secretly holding back thousands of South Korean prisoners of war, historians and escaped prisoners say.

“We were hidden away, I did not even know there was an exchange of POWs,” Jang Moo Hwan, a Southern prisoner who escaped from the North in 1998, said in an interview at his apartment in Uljin, a coastal village a four hour drive southeast of here. Now, 79 years old, he lives with his wife, Park Soon Nam, who had waited for him in the South since his capture 1953.

“I never dared to say I wanted to send a letter to the South,” he said of life North Korea, a hard line Communist nation. “I feared that I would be taken as a political dissident and starved to death. A dictatorship is that scary.”

The report notes that the South Korean government estimates “that 542 South Korean prisoners of war are still alive in the North, cut off from virtually all contact with families and friends in the South,” and that “over the year the North has seized 486 Southern civilians, largely fishermen.” Thirty-eight POWs have escaped from the North. It’s not clear from the report whether that number includes those who didn’t make it home. Those that did missed what should have been the best years of their lives. A conspiracy of silence has kept the issue out of the public consciousness, suggests the Times:

[T]he issue rarely surfaces publicly here, partly because much of South Korea’s media seeks to avoid antagonizing the North and partly because the defectors shun publicity, fearing that the Communist government will take reprisals against wives and children left behind in the North.

“I still feel like I am dreaming,” Nam Tae-Kyo, 75 years old, said last January at a ceremony welcoming him back to his mountainous hometown of Juk Jang. On the edge of tears as he spoke in the town community center, he said he labored in underground coal mines, forbidden to even inform his family here that he was still alive.

Later in the story, Suzanne Scholte of the North Korea Freedom Coalition is quoted. She references a talk by two former POWs, which I attended and blogged here. Read the rest yourself.