------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the July 1, 2004 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
KOREANS FROM NORTH AND SOUTH MEET AT INCHON
By Deirdre Griswold New York
Over 100 people from North Korea were able to fly directly to South Korea on June 15. They went to Inchon, where they met with Koreans from the south as well as from overseas. The occasion was the fourth anniversary of the North-South Joint Declaration that pledged to increase contacts between the two halves of Korea. The Joint Declaration was signed by Kim Jong Il for the DPRK and then-president Kim Dae-jung for South Korea.
Yoomi Jeong of New York, Deputy Secretary General of the Korea Truth Com mission, attended the events. She described them as "very emotional" to a forum here organized by Workers World Party on June 18.
The events included a mini-marathon and a concert. Koreans from north, south and overseas drew applause as they ran through the streets of Inchon. Later, 20,000 South Koreans attended a concert with their compatriots from the north and cheered for reunification.
Jeong told Workers World that among the delegates from the north was the daughter of Ri In Mo, a journalist who was captured by the south during the Korean War and held in prison for nearly 40 years. In 1993, several years after being released, he was finally allowed to return to the north, where he received a hero's welcome from hundreds of thousands of Korean people and from the legendary liberation leader of the nation, Kim Il Sung.
Now in his late eighties, Ri In Mo has recovered his health, which deteriorated almost to the point of death during his prison ordeal.
On this trip, Ri's daughter was finally able to meet with his adopted son, who lives in South Korea. Former cellmates of Ri In Mo who still live in the south also attended the celebrations.
"The participation of many former long-time political prisoners in these events," said Jeong, "shows how much the political climate has changed in the south. Such a thing used to be impossible. Any contact between them and people from the north would have meant their immediate arrest."
The setting for this event has deep significance for the Korean people.
When the Korean War broke out in 1950, at the height of the Cold War, 70,000 U.S. Marines invaded at Inchon to keep the socialist north from reunifying the country. Even though the two states share the same peninsula and the Korean people have a 5,000-year history, they have been divided ever since the U.S. occupied the south at the end of World War II. To this day, the U.S. refuses to sign or even negotiate a peace treaty with the north, and maintains nearly 40,000 troops in South Korea, poised to attack the north at any moment.
It took more than half a century of struggle by the Korean people for reunification for such a simple thing as a direct flight between the two halves of Korea to take place.
For decades, a National Security Law in South Korea has made it illegal for southerners to visit the north--even to find members of their divided families--or even to possess the writings of Kim Il Sung. While still on the books, the effectiveness of the law is finally fading.
Kim Il Sung was the leader of the Korean struggle for liberation from Japan ese colonialism and founder of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Under his leadership, a revolutionary insurrection in the north at the end of World War II broke the power of the landlords and capitalists who had collaborated with Japanese rule, opening the road to socialist reconstruction. Every step of the way, however, has been made extremely difficult by the enforced division of the country and continued military occupation by the U.S.
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