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

Earlier this week, a blistering morning, an unusually large crowd gathered at the Imjinging station – the final stop on the metropolitan subway line of Seoul which is closest to North Korea.

There were dozens of activists and police officers, their focus was fixed to a person: the 95-year-old former North Korean prisoner of the war, Ahaan Haq-Sop, who was making a way to the house on the other side of the border dividing the Korean peninsula.

This was what Mr. Ahan called his last visit – he wanted to return to the north to be buried in the north after spending most of his lives in South Korea, it is against his wish.

They never made it: They were removed, as expected because the South Korean government said that they did not have enough time to make necessary arrangements.

But Mr. Ahan came as close.

Weak from pulmonary edema (construction of fluid on the lungs), he could not manage 30 minutes of walking from the station to the unification bridge -or Tongil da -D -D -D -D -Jovo -one of the few routes connecting South Korea to the north.

So he got out of the car, about 200 meters from the bridge and fired the last stretch on foot, two supporters stabilized him.

He was seen holding a North Korean flag, rarely seen in the south and shocking deeply, and addressed reporters and 20 either volunteers who turned into support.

“I just want my body to really relax in independent land,” he said. “A land free from imperialism.”

When the South Korean people captured, Ahan Haq-Sop was 23 years old.

Three years ago, he was in high school when the then-north Korean ruler Kim Il-Sung attacked the south. Kim, who wanted to reunite two Korea, ralled his countrymen that South had started the 1950 attack.

AHN was one of those who believed it. He joined the North Korean People’s Army in 1952 as a contact officer, and then a unit was handed over to the south.

He was captured three months before Armistis in April 1953, and was sentenced to life in prison in the same year. He was released after over 42 years after a special forgiveness on Korean Independence Day.

Like many other North Korean prisoners, Mr. Ego was also called a “Redhead”, which is a reference to his communist sympathy, and he struggled to find a proper job.

It was not easy, he told the BBC in an earlier interview in July. The government did not help much earlier, he said, agents followed him for years. They married, and even promoted a child, but never felt that he was really.

Perform all over, he built his house in a small village in Jimpo, a citizen close to the north can live on the border with the north.

Nevertheless, in 2000, he turned down the chance to send back to the north with dozens of other prisoners, who wanted to return.

He was optimistic that the relationship between the two sides would improve, that their people would be able to travel back and forth independently.

But he chose to live because he feared he would win a win for Americans.

“At that time, they were insisting on American military rule [in the South],” He said.

“If I returned to the north, I felt that I am just handing over Americans to my bedroom – emptying it for them. My conscience as a human being cannot just allow it.”

It is not clear that he was referring to other other than the growing ties between Seoul and Washington, including a strong military alliance that guarantees the safety of South Korea from any attack from the north.

This relationship harasses Shri Ego deeply, which has never stopped believing in the promotion of the Kim family – that the only thing to stop the reunion of the Korean peninsula was a “imperialist America” ​​and a South Korean government that was looking at them.

Born in 1930 During the colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula of Japan, Shri Ego was the youngest of three brothers, in Gighwa County in Gyanggi province. He also had two younger sisters.

Patriotism made roots quickly. His grandfather refused to let him go to school because he remembered “I did not want to make me Japanese”. So after the death of his grandfather, he later started the school.

When Japan surrendered in 1945, the World War two ended the colonialism of two more Korea, Sri Aham and his younger brother, who left the Japanese army, hid at his aunt’s house in Mount Mani’s leg on Ganghava Island.

“It was not liberation – it was just the transfer of colonial rule,” he said.

“A sheet [we saw] Said that Korea was not being liberated, but instead of American military rule will be implemented. It also said that if someone violated the US military law, they will be strictly punished under the military law. ,

After hitting the Soviet Union and the US over the Korean peninsula, they agreed to divide it. The Soviet Union controlled North and America, South, where they established a military administration until 1948.

When Kim attacked in 1950, a South Korean government was in place – but Mr. Ego, like so many North Koreans, South encouraged the struggle and its coalition with Washington stopped the reunion.

Once he was caught, Mr. Ego had several occasions to escape from jail – he was asked to sign the reply and its communist ideology, called “conversion”. But he refused.

“Because I refused to sign a written oath of conversion, I had to bear the shame and pain -filled endless humiliation, torture, and violence. There is no way to fully describe that pain in words,” he told the mob gathered near the border on Wednesday.

The South Korean government never responded to this special charge, although a special commission acknowledged violence in jail in 2004. The direct allegations of Mr. Aham were investigated by the South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an independent body, which was investigating the misuse of previous human rights in 2009, which found that a deliberate attempt was made to force their adaptation, including the tarter works.

It has long been accepted in South Korea that such prisoners often faced violence behind bars.

“Whenever I gained consciousness, the first thing I checked was my hand – to see if there was any red ink on him,” Mr. Aham remembered in his July interview.

It was usually indicated that someone forced a fingerprint at a written oath of conceptual conversion.

“If there was not there, I think, ‘no matter what they did, I won’. And I felt satisfied.”

The answer has changed significantly since the departure of Shri Ego. The grandson of Kim Il -Sung now runs the country – a repetition dictatorship that is rich in 1950, but it is one of the world’s poorest countries. Mr. Ahan was not in the north for the devastating famine in the 1990s, killing hundreds of thousands of people. Thousands of people fled, causing a deadly journey to avoid their lives.

However, Mr. Ego dismissed the suggestion of any human concerns in the north, blamed the media for biased and reported only on the dark side of the country. He argues that North Korea is enriching and defends Kim’s decision to send the soldiers to assist Russia’s Ukraine.

In the south too, it has changed even in the time of Shri ego – once a poor military dictatorship, it is now a rich, powerful democracy. Its relations with the answer had their own ups and downs, staggering between open enmity and optimistic engagement.

But the beliefs of Shri Ego have not forgiven. He dedicated the last 30 years of his life to oppose a country that he believes that South Korea is still a colony of America.

“They say that humans, unlike animals, have two types of life. There is a basic biological life – the way we talk, eat, defecate, sleep, and so. The other is a political life, also called social life. If you tell a human being about his political life, he is not separate from a robot,” Sri Ahan told BBC in July.

“I lived under Japanese colonial rule over all those years. But I don’t want me to be buried [American] Colonialism also in death. ,