Choi Sung-yong remembers his father as a war hero who became a successful fishing boat captain, a reserved man who helped at orphanages and once splurged to buy his music-loving teenage son a record player, a true luxury at the time.
But all the memories are tinged with loss. In 1967, when Choi was just 15, his father’s boat failed to return from sea. The family went into mourning, assuming the boat had sunk. But three months later they were shocked to learn that Choi’s father, Choi Won-mo, was alive, but lost to them. His vessel, it turned out, had been captured by North Korea, and when the North Koreans released the crew, they kept Choi’s father.
In the more than four decades since, Choi, 57, has devoted himself to trying to find his father and the hundreds of other missing South Koreans believed to have been snatched by North Korean agents.
He toils in a tiny Seoul office, where the walls are covered with sepia-toned photos of the missing.
“So far,” he said, “my work has been a lonely fight.”
Unlike in Japan — where the plight of fewer than 20 Japanese abductees has almost become a national obsession — the issue of the disappeared is a divisive one in South Korea, freighted with a tangle of conflicting emotions about the North and the collective suffering of South Koreans since the peninsula’s fratricidal war from 1950 to 1953.
In the early years, South Korea’s fervently anti-communist military rulers treated families like Choi’s with suspicion, fearful that those who had disappeared were defectors lured by the same ideology that helped cleave the country. But even a shift away from authoritarianism did not help. A succession of liberal presidents who gained power in democratic elections in the 1990s ignored the families’ cause in pursuit of reconciliation with the North.
While South Korea’s current conservative president, Lee Myung-bak, has taken a tougher line on the abduction issue, the South Korean public remains far less passionate on the subject than the Japanese, who helped drive their leaders not only to sever economic ties with the North, but also to continually urge the US not to forget the abductees in its drive to get the North to give up its nuclear weapons program.
Fed up with waiting, Choi decided years ago to take matters into his own hands. In the late 1990s, he began traveling to northern China, where he developed contacts among North Koreans to try to gather information about his father.
Over time, he built something of an underground railroad in the North by getting contacts to spirit money over the border to desperately poor families who agreed to help in his quest. And slowly, he began to achieve, in a small way, what the Seoul government has failed to do.
Since 2000, Choi says, Abductees’ Family Union, which he leads, has smuggled seven South Koreans back to their country via China, including one who later returned to the North because he had started a family there.
Officials at South Korea’s Ministry of Unification, which helps oversee inter-Korean relations, acknowledge that Choi has succeeded in bringing out abducted South Koreans, though they will not confirm the number.
DEATH THREATS
His efforts — and his role with Abductees’ Family Union, which lobbies for the families of 505 civilians thought by the South Korean government to have been kidnapped — have earned him wide attention in the South’s media. They have also, he says, led to death threats from the North.
As a result, he is now afraid to travel to China. But he says he will press on until he finds out what happened to his father, who would be 99 years old now if still alive, or at least retrieve his remains. His father’s former crew said his father had been kept in the North because of his war record, and Choi fears he may have been executed.
“I have been a headache for the South Korean government,” Choi said. “But I am finally carrying out my filial duty to my father.”
Like his father, most of the missing are fishermen who vanished when they ventured out to sea in the 1960s and 1970s. Based on South Korean intelligence and the tales of defectors, it appears that the North had several goals in mind when it captured South Koreans. Some were put to work as laborers. Others — like at least some of the Japanese — helped train spies who had little chance to learn about other nations given their reclusive leaders’ absolute control of news and penchant for propaganda.
The abductees, experts on the issue in the South say, were also tools for the North’s propaganda machine; Pyongyang still insists that South Koreans who left their country defected for a happier life.
One of those whom Choi’s group smuggled out of North Korea is Choi Wook-il, who is no relation to him. A shrimp fisherman, Choi Wook-il said his boat was seized by a North Korean gunboat in 1975. He was kept in the North until three years ago, when he was led at night across a frozen river into China and freedom, he said.
Now 69, he lives with his wife in a government-provided apartment in the city of Ansan, south of Seoul.
He said that without the efforts of Choi Sung-yong, he would never have been able to return to his life.
“He is the only one making efforts,” he said.
The fisherman’s wife, Yang Jeong-ja, 67, said she thought he was dead until Choi Sung-yong one day showed her a letter her husband had written to his brother, which was smuggled out via China. He also presented a picture of her husband taken in North Korea and said he could get her husband out. Yang was skeptical, but agreed to his plan.
KNOCK ON THE DOOR
Her husband said that one night almost a decade ago, he got a knock on the door from a North Korean who said he had been sent by Yang to lead him to China. At first, Choi — who had been working on a pear and corn farm because his middle-school education was deemed inadequate for spy training — said he did not believe his visitor. It took nine visits until he finally agreed to leave. Later, his guide defected to South Korea.
The other Choi said such successes help make up for the continued pushback from many South Koreans.
He has been criticized by government officials and ordinary people for threatening the South’s engagement with the North, which most South Koreans support in some form. That stance is somewhat pragmatic; those who want to unite with the North say peace will not only allow any abductees who are alive to return home, but also reunite the thousands of families split up during the war.
But experts say it is also difficult for the families of those who were kidnapped to gain sympathy because many of their countrymen feel some bitterness about them singling out their own suffering when so many families have been separated.
“This issue has been intertwined with all the national pain,” said Lee Keum-soon, a researcher on the abductions at the Korea Institute for National Unification, a government-financed research center.
Families of abductees say they are more hopeful now. President Lee, who took office two years ago, in November called addressing the abduction issue a precondition for holding future summit meetings with the North.
Choi has also been appointed to a group that advises the government as it continues to investigate missing person cases to determine if more of them are possible abductees. On his wall, he proudly displays a plaque that he received last year from the president proclaiming his father a patriot for piloting a boat that clandestinely dropped off guerrilla fighters behind enemy lines during the Korean War.
“Whenever I ask a North Korean for news of my father, my heart still beats wildly,” Choi said. “I have struggled to accept that I am a child whose father will never return.”
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