[USFK Forums] SOUTH KOREA: Program aims to reunite Korean relatives [LA Times]

[C. Y. Lee]

Uploaded by C. Y. Lee on Monday, February 13, 2006

SOUTH KOREA: Program aims to reunite Korean relatives

Citizens of North and South Korea are able to apply to the U.S. program based in Washington and Seoul, which gathers family information of separated relatives.

Posted on Sun, Feb. 12, 2006
BY BARBARA DEMICK
Los Angeles Times Service

SEOUL, South Korea - If there is a black hole in the global communications network, it might be called North Korea. It is nearly impossible to get a letter, a phone call or even an e-mail through to an ordinary citizen in the isolate communist nation.

So five decades after war left the peninsula divided, many Koreans living outside the regime still do not know if family members in the North survived or perished. The uncertainty particularly affects Korean-Americans, who are largely excluded from programs to find lost relations.

One of the most active U.S. charities working in North Korea recently announced it will try to fill this void with a program it hopes will eventually lead to family reunions. The Eugene Bell Foundation, which operates out of Washington and Seoul supporting tuberculosis clinics inside the North, said it will start by collecting family information from Korean-Americans who belong to separated families.

`NEED OUR HELP'

''These people are in their 70s and 80s, and there are fewer and fewer of them every year. Many of them don't speak English well and don't understand the system well. They need our help if they will ever see their relative again,'' said Alice Jean Suh, Washington office director of the Eugene Bell Foundation and the head of the campaign.

After a historic summit in 2000 between North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and then-South Korean President Kim Dae Jung, periodic family reunions were set up under the auspices of the two governments. Since then, 11,788 Koreans have attended reunions. However, there is a long waiting list to participate, and only citizens of South and North Korea can apply.

''This is a glaring oversight,'' said Stephen Linton, chairman of the Eugene Bell Foundation and great-grandson of the Protestant missionary for whom the charity is named.

``The United States has a security dialogue with North Korea. We have official channels dealing with human rights, but nothing for our own citizens of ethnic Korean descent.''

Linton, who travels frequently inside North Korea, said he has not had official contacts with the regime about a reunion program but believed that they might be receptive.

He said that a few Korean Americans have met with family members in the North through an agency there called the Overseas Compatriot Protection Committee, but that such opportunities have been limited to people who are wealthy or well-connected.

''If you're a senior citizen without money to do a trip on your own, there is no place you can turn to,'' Linton said.

KOREAN AMERICANS

More than 2 million ethnic Koreans are living or working in the United States, according to figures supplied by the South Korean Foreign Ministry last year.

While some 10 percent of the population in South Korea are believed to have family members in the North, the percentage is thought be higher among the Korean-Americans because many who were displaced during World War II or the 1950-53 Korean War came to the United States.

Millions of families were wrenched apart in the chaos of the war years. ''This is a very painful and emotional issue for us,'' said Cha-hee Lee Stanfield, a 65-year-old librarian from Chicago who is working on the reunion project through the Korean-American Coalition of the Midwest. She has been trying for decades to meet a brother she has not seen since her family was separated near the Chinese-North Korean border at the end of World War II. ''There is no way to communicate,'' she said.



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