Pow of the Korean War, 95

On a grainless morning earlier this week, an unusually large crowd had gathered at Imjingang station – the last stop of the Metropolitan Seoul line which increases closest to North Korea.

There were dozens of activists and police, their attention resolved a man: Ahn Hak-Sop, a former 95-year-old North Korean prisoner who returned home, on the other side of the border which divides the Korean peninsula.

This is what Mr. Ahn called his last trip – he wanted to return to the North to be buried there, after spending most of his life in South Korea, largely against his will.

He never succeeded: he was repressed, as planned because the South Korean government had said that they did not have enough time to make the necessary arrangements.

But Mr. Ahn came as close as he could.

Weakened by pulmonary edema (an accumulation of liquid on the lungs), it could not manage the 30 -minute walk from the station to the unification bridge – or Tongil Dae -Gyo – one of the rare passages connecting South to North Korea.

He therefore left the car about 200 meters from the bridge and walked the last section on foot, flanked by two supporters who stabilized him.

He returned by holding a North Korean flag, a rarely seen and deeply shocking view in the South, and addressed journalists and around twenty volunteers who had presented themselves in support.

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

Ahn Hak-Sop was 23 years old when he was captured by the South Koreans.

Three years earlier, he was in high school when the sovereign of Korea at the time, Kim Il-Sung, had attacked the south. Kim, who wanted to bring the two Koreas together, rallied his compatriots by saying that the South had initiated the 1950 attack.

Ahn was one of those who believed him. He joined the North Korean People’s Army in 1952 as a liaison officer, then was assigned to a unit that was sent to the south.

He was captured in April 1953, three months before the armistice, and sentenced to life prison the same year. He was released more than 42 years later due to a special forgiveness on the day of Korean independence.

Like many other North Korean prisoners, Mr. Ahn has also been described as “red”, a reference to his communist sympathies, and he had trouble finding an appropriate job.

It was not easy, he told the BBC in a previous interview in July. The government has not helped much at the start, he said, the agents followed him for years. He got married and even favored a child, but he never felt that he really belonged.

Throughout, he made his house in a small village in Gimpo, the closest to a civilian can live from the border with the North.

However, in 2000, he refused the possibility of being returned to the north with dozens of other prisoners who also wanted to return.

It had then been optimistic that the links between the two parties would improve, that their people could travel freely.

But he chose to stay because he feared that leaving would be a victory for the Americans.

“At the time, they were pushing American military governance (in the South),” he said.

“If I returned to the North, I would have had the impression of handing over my own room to the Americans – leaving it for them. My conscience as a human being could simply not allow it.”

We do not know what he was referring to other than the growing ties between Seoul and Washington, which includes a strong military alliance which guarantees the protection of South Korea against any attack against the North.

This relationship deeply disturbs Mr. Ahn, who has never ceased to believe the propaganda of the Kim family – that the only thing that prevents the reunification of the Korean peninsula was a “imperialist America” ​​and a South Korean government which was indebted to them.

Born in 1930 In the county of Ganghwa, province of Gyeonggi, during the colonial rule of Japan of the Korean peninsula, Mr. Ahn was the youngest of the three brothers. He also had two younger sisters.

Patriotism took root early. His grandfather refused to let him go to school because he “didn’t want to make me Japanese,” he recalls. So he started at school later than usual, after the death of his grandfather.

When Japan went in 1945, ending the Second World War and his colonization of Korea, Mr. Ahn and his young brother, who had deserted the Japanese army, hid their aunt at the foot of Mount Man on the island of Ganghwa.

“It was not the release-it was only a transfer of colonial domination,” he said.

“A leaflet (we have seen) said that Korea was not released, but that the American military regime would be implemented in place. He even said that if someone violated US military law, they would be strictly punished by military law.”

While the Soviet Union and the United States were fighting on the Korean peninsula, they agreed to divide it. The Soviets took control of the North and the United States, in the South, where they set up a military administration until 1948.

When Kim attacked in 1950, a South Korean government was in place-but Mr. Ahn, like so many North Koreans, thinks that the South caused the conflict and that his alliance with Washington prevented reunification.

Once captured, Mr. Ahn had several chances of avoiding the prison – he was asked to sign documents renouncing the north and his communist ideology, which was called “conversion”. But he refused.

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

The South Korean government has never responded directly to this particular accusation, although a special commission recognized violence in prison in 2004. The direct allegations of Mr. Ahn were the subject of an investigation by the Commission of Truth and Reconciliation of South Korea, an independent organization investigating the previous abuses of human rights, in 2009, which revealed that there was a deliberate effort to force its acts of torture.

It has long been admitted to South Korea that these prisoners have often encountered violence behind bars.

“Whenever I regained consciousness, the first thing I checked was my hands – to see if there was red ink on them,” recalls Mr. Ahn in his July interview.

This usually pointed out that someone had forced a fingerprint on a written oath of ideological conversion.

“If it weren’t, I think:” No matter what they did, I won “. And I felt satisfied.”

The North has remarkably changed since the departure of Mr. Ahn. Kim Il-Sung’s grandson now directs the country-a recluse dictatorship which is richer than it was in 1950, but remains one of the poorest countries in the world. Mr. Ahn was not in the North for devastating famine in the 1990s which killed hundreds of thousands. Tens of thousands of others fled, making fatal trips to escape their lives.

Mr. Ahn, however, rejected the suggestion of any humanitarian concern in the North, accusing the media of being biased and of reporting only on the dark side of the country. He argues that North Korea thrives and defends Kim’s decision to send troops to facilitate the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

The South has also changed in Mr. Ahn’s time here – once a bad military dictatorship, it is now a rich and powerful democracy. His relationship with the North had his ups and downs, hesitating between open hostility and hopeful commitment.

But Mr. Ahn’s beliefs did not hesitate. He has devoted the last 30 years of his life to protest against a country which, according to him, still colonized South Korea – the United States.

“They say that humans, unlike animals, have two types of life. One is basic biological life – the genre where we are talking, eat, defeat, sleep, etc.

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