Koreans reunited by video link
Published: August 15, 2005
Koreans separated by the border dividing the peninsula reunited Monday over the first-ever video link between the North and South as part of joint celebrations marking 60 years since their liberation from Japanese colonial rule.
President Roh Moo-hyun urged South Koreans to come together to help overcome common problems at a Liberation Day ceremony held before thousands of people gathered in front of a former palace in central Seoul.
Attending the event was a North Korean delegation of some 200 people led by Kim Ki Nam, vice chairman of North Korea’s Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Fatherland.
“It’s time for us to put an end to history of dissension, and open an era of national integration,” Roh said.
“This also means laying the grounds to surmount division, and to ring in a reunified era ruled by peace and prosperity.”
The North Koreans were expected to meet later in the week with Roh, possibly to deliver a message as envoys from North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.
The two Koreas remain technically at war because the Korean War launched in 1950 by the North ended in a 1953 cease-fire. But since a landmark 2000 summit between leaders of the divided countries, they have pursued a path of reconciliation.
Seoul has continued its engagement with the North despite the communist nation’s continuing quest to develop nuclear weapons that failed to be resolved earlier this month at international disarmament talks. Those six-nation negotiations are to resume the week of August 29 in Beijing.
The North said earlier this year it would join the joint Liberation Day celebrations in the South when high-level meetings between the countries were rejuvenated following a nearly yearlong pause, after Pyongyang was angered by mass defections of its citizens to South Korea.
On Sunday, the North Koreans paid an unprecedented gesture to the South by visiting its main cemetery where dead from the Korean War are buried along with independence fighters against Japanese rule, which lasted from 1910-45.
The two countries’ national soccer teams also played an exhibition match Sunday evening where the South easily defeated the North 3-0.
About 40 families were to meet Monday over the video links enabled by a fiber-optic cable laid across the heavily fortified inter-Korean border earlier this year.
Kim Mae-nyeo, 98, of South Korea was virtually reunited at a Red Cross center in Seoul with her two eldest daughters living in North Korea.
“Mom, can you speak? Can you call my name?” asked the daughters, Hwang Bo Pae and Hwang Hak Sil. But their mother, who suffered a stroke last year, was too ill to speak or completely recognize them.
The families at 11 Red Cross centers in the South were to meet for two hours via the video link connected to the Koryo Hotel in Pyongyang.
“Families are meeting over the cold screen, but it is touching to see parents, siblings naturally reunite,” said South Korean Unification Minister Chung Dong-young, who added that officials would seek to arrange more such reunions.
Ten face-to-face reunions have been held since 2000 bringing together some 10,000 families, and another such reunion is planned later this month at North Korea’s Diamond Mountain tourist resort.
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