AFP: Dozens of elderly and frail South Koreans met their Northern relatives Monday for the first time since the peninsula and their families were divided by war nearly seven decades ago.
The three-day reunion is the first for three years and follows a diplomatic thaw on the peninsula. The meetings began at Mount Kumgang, a scenic resort in North Korea, Seoul government officials said.
Millions of people were swept apart by the 1950-53 Korean War, which separated brothers and sisters, parents and children and husbands and wives.
Hostilities ceased with an armistice rather than a peace treaty, leaving the two Koreas technically still at war and the peninsula split by the impenetrable Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), with all direct civilian exchanges — even mundane family news — banned.
The 89 ageing South Koreans, dressed in their best suits in the scorching sun, hobbled one by one to 14 coaches in the South Korean port of Sokcho — wheelchairs alongside the vehicles — some excited and others in a state of disbelief. Then the convoy set off, escorted by police and medical personnel, and later crossed the DMZ into the North.
Among the group was Lee Keum-seom, now a tiny and frail 92, who was to see her son for the first time since she and her infant daughter were separated from him and her husband as they fled.
At the time the boy was aged just four. He is now 71.
“I never imagined this day would come,” Lee said in Sokcho. “I didn’t even know if he was alive or not.”
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