Cold War Victims Seek Compensation


By Seo Dong-shin
Staff Reporter


Both the South and North Korean governments are being charged with human rights abuses as victims of the inter-Korean ideological confrontation during the Cold War era on each side lodge complaints against the opposing governments.

A group of four South Koreans who were abducted by the North filed complaints against the Pyongyang regime with the Seoul authorities Monday, calling for financial compensation for their suffering in the North. They demanded that the Seoul government deliver them to the North via the truce village of Panmunjom.

The move came after a group of former North Korean spies and communists who were repatriated to the North after decades of imprisonment in the South, sent a petition to Seoul, seeking compensation for their suffering under the South’s previous authoritarian governments.

The four South Korean returnees _ fishermen who after some three decades of forced stay in the North made it back to the South by way of China in recent years _ said they felt indignant at the ex-spies’ compensation demands and decided to counter it by lodging their own protest.

``We were imprisoned, physically tortured and worked as forced laborers during the decades we were held in the North after the abduction,’’ said the Southerners’ letter of complaints. They demanded $100 million for each returnee from North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and the communist country’s Workers’ Party.

Earlier on Friday, the Korea Central News Agency (KCNA), the North’s official news outlet, reported that a group of North Koreans filed a complaint with the Seoul government for an ``unprecedented vicious ideology conversion system.’’

In the complaints addressed to the South’s National Human Rights Commission and the Commission on the Review of History for Truth and Reconciliation, the North Koreans demanded some one billion U.S. dollars for suffering ``unbearable torture, persecution and mistreatment for 30 to 40 years behind bars’’ in the South.

The message was delivered to the South Korean Unification Ministry through liaison officers at the border village of Panmunjom.

Under the South’s authoritarian governments, North Korean spies or those with pro-communist belief and activities were arrested and served sentences of some 30 years on average when they refused to disavow their communist beliefs.

South Korea allowed 63 of those ``unconverted long-term prisoners’’ to be sent to the North in September 2000, as part of reconciliatory gestures following the inter-Korean summit in June the same year.

``The South Korean government repatriated the long-term prisoners to the North in a humanitarian gesture, but now they are demanding financial compensation,’’ said Choi Sung-young, representative of a Seoul civic group working with the families of those abducted to North Korea.

Choi said that his organization would seek approval from other families of the South Korean abductees to the North to raise the compensation. Currently, a total of 484 South Korean abductees, mostly fishermen, are believed to be held in the North.

Seoul’s Unification Ministry said it would review the South Koreans’ protests once they are submitted to the ministry.

But the ministry is not planning to hand over the North Koreans’ accusations to the addressed South Korean government agencies, Yang Chang-seok, spokesman of the ministry, told The Korea Times.

``We don’t feel it necessary to review the compensation demands,’’ Yang said. ` ``We’ll just ignore it.’’

The North Koreans’ compensation demands invited criticism from both the ruling and opposition parties in South Korea.

``This is just ridiculous, not even a comedy,’’ commented Rep. Lee Kye-jin, spokesman of the conservative opposition Grand National Party (GNP), on Sunday. ``If the repatriated long-term prisoners want to talk about human rights, they should have raised their voices for improvements in the human rights situation in the North.’’

Rep. Jun Byung-hun, spokesman of the ruling Uri Party, also said that the North Koreans’ accusation goes beyond common sense. ``We don’t feel the need to pay attention to or comment on this case that is so absurd.’’

saltwall@koreatimes.co.kr