Korean War, 95, fails in an attempt to return north

On a bladder in the morning earlier this week, an unusually large crowd gathered at the Imjingang Station -the last stop on the Seoul metro metro, which is the fastest to North Korea.

There were dozens of activists and police officers, their attention was focused on one man: Anne Hack-Sop, a 95-year-old former North Korean prisoner of North Korean, who was going home, on the other side of the border dividing the Korean Peninsula.

It was what he called his last trip -he wanted to return north to be buried there after spending the greater part of his life in South Korea, much of him against his will.

He has never reached beyond: he was rejected as expected because the South Korean government said they did not have enough time to make the necessary reservations.

But G -N Ann approached as close as possible.

Weakened by pulmonary edema (fluid accumulation on the lungs), it could not control the 30 -minute walk from the station to the bridge – or tongl yes – one of the few pass connecting South Korea to the north.

And so he got out of the car about 200 meters from the bridge and left on the last section on foot, surrounded by two supporters who surprised him.

He returned, holding the North Korean flag, a view that was rarely visible and deeply bumped south, and turned to the reporters and 20 or more volunteers who appeared in support.

“I just want my body to rest in a truly independent land,” he said. “Earth, without imperialism.”

Anne Hack Sop was 23 when he was captured by the South Koreans.

Three years earlier, he was in high school when the then-Korean ruler Kim Il Sung attacked the south. Kim, who wanted to unite the two Koreas, collected his compatriots, claiming the South initiated the 1950 attack.

Anne was among those who believed in this. He joined the North Korean People’s Army in 1952 as a liaison officer and was then appointed a detachment in the south.

He was captured in April 1953, three months before the ceasefire and sentenced to life in prison that year. He was released more than 42 years later because of a special pardon on Korean Independence Day.

Like many other North Korean prisoners, he was also referred to as a “redhead”, a reference to his communist sympathies, and he struggles to find the right job.

It wasn’t easy, he told the BBC in an interview in July. At first, the government did not help much, he said, the agents followed him for years. He married and even encouraged a child, but he never felt he really belonged.

All the while he was coming to a small village in Gimpo, the closest civilian could live to the border with the north.

Still, in 2000, he refused the chance to be sent back north with dozens of other prisoners, who also wanted to return.

He was then optimistic that ties between the two countries would improve that their people would be able to travel back and forth freely.

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

“At that time, they demanded the US military government (south),” he said.

“If he returned north, he would feel that I was just passing on my own bedroom to the Americans – by releasing it for them. My conscience as a person just couldn’t allow it.”

It is unclear what it meant other than the growing connections between Seoul and Washington, which includes a strong military alliance that guarantees the protection of South Korea from any attack from the north.

This connection is deeply bothering the G -N Ann, who has never stopped believing in the Kim family’s propaganda – that the only thing that stops the unification of the Korean Peninsula is the Imperialist America and the South Korean government that was raised.

Born in 1930 In Gangva County, Giouga Province, during the colonial rule of Japan on the Korean Peninsula, d -Ann was the smallest of three brothers. He also had two smaller sisters.

Patriotism rooted early. His grandfather refused to let him attend school because he “didn’t want to make me Japanese,” he recalled. So he starts school later than usual after his grandfather died.

When Japan surrendered in 1945, putting an end to World War II and its colonization of Korea, and his smaller brother, who released the Japanese military, were hiding in their aunt’s house at the foot of Moni Mountain on the island of Gangva.

“It was not a liberation – it was just a colonial government transfer,” he said.

“A leaflet (we saw) said Korea was not released, but instead the US military government would be applied. It is even said that if one violates the US military law, it would be strictly punished under military law.”

As the Soviet Union and the United States slipped over the Korean Peninsula, they agreed to separate it. The Soviets took control of the North and the United States, South, where they set up a military administration until 1948.

When Kim attacked in 1950, there was a South Korean government – but G -N Ann, like so many North Koreans, believes that the south provoked the conflict and that its union with Washington prevented unification.

After being captured, he had several chance of avoiding prison – he was asked to sign documents that were giving up the North and his communist ideology, which was called “turn”. But he refused.

“As I refused to sign a written oath of conversion, I had to withstand endless humiliation, torture and violence – days filled with shame and pain. There is no way to fully describe this suffering with words,” he told the crowd that gathered near the border on Wednesday.

The South Korean government has never reacted directly to this accusation, although a special committee acknowledged the violence in prison in 2004. Direct charges of G -N Ann were investigated by the Commission on Truth and Conciliation in South Korea, an independent body that is interested in a manner, which has found it in 2009, which has established that it has established that For torture.

In South Korea, it has long been accepted that such prisoners often encounter violence behind bars.

“Every time I regained my mind, the first thing I checked was my hands – to see if there was red ink on them,” recalled G -N Ann in his interview in July.

This usually signaled that someone had imposed a fingerprint on a written oath of ideological conversion.

“If you didn’t, I would think,” No matter what they did, I won. “And I felt pleased.”

The North has changed remarkably since G -N Ann left. Kim Il Sung’s grandson now rules the country -the arousing dictatorship that is more rich than in 1950, but remains one of the most overwhelming countries in the world. D -en was not north because of the devastating hunger in the 90s, which killed hundreds of thousands. Tens of thousands of others escaped, making deadly trips to escape from their lives there.

However, he rejected the proposal for all humanitarian problems in the north, accusing the media of being prejudiced and only reporting the dark side of the country. He claims that North Korea prosper and defends Kim’s decision to send troops to help Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The south also changed during the time of the Ann Ann here – after a poor military dictatorship is now a rich, powerful democracy. His relationship with the North had its ups and falls, hesitating between the open hostility and the encouraging engagement.

But the beliefs of G -n Ann did not break down. He has dedicated the last 30 years of his life to a protest against a country that he believes still colonizes South Korea – the United States.

“They say that people, unlike animals, have two types of life. One is a major biological life – the species in which we talk, eat, defect, sleep, etc.

“I have lived under the Japanese colonial rule all these years. But I do not want to be buried under (American) colonialism even in death.”