"Long-term prisoner" Jeong Sun Taek returned to North Korea Sunday, but having already deceased. On September 30 the government sent the North a message in the name of the Korean National Red Cross asking that Jeong's family be allowed to visit him in the South, but he died before there was any answer. This is the first time that the body of a dead long-term prisoner has been sent North and that the South has ever invited a prisoner's family to visit.
Jeong was excluded from the repatriation of 63 "non-converted" long-term prisoners in September 2000 for having written a "statement of ideological conversion" renouncing communism. He spent 31 years and 5 months in prison before being paroled in 1989 after signing his conversion papers. But in 1999 he said he signed them only because of torture and coercion, and ever since had declared his "conversion" invalid and demand he be allowed to return to the North. Another prisoner, Jeong Sun Deok, was also excluded from the first round of repatriations and died without ever being able to walk among the living in the North. It's a sad story.
The "long-term prisoners" are human evidence of the pain and contradictions of intra-Korean relations over the years, which used to be entirely a confrontation between ideologies and political systems. These are people who have spent decades in prison. They are in their seventies or older, and they want to be able to spend their remaining days in their hometowns. In recent testimony before the National Assembly, Unification Minister Chung Dong Young said that an additional 29 long-term prisoners, including Jeong, wanted to be sent back to the North, and that the idea would be worth considering from the perspective of humanitarianism, civil rights, and human propriety.
Some say that repatriating the long-term prisoners should be linked to the North's return of Republic of Korea prisoners of war from the Korean War and the return of South Koreans kidnapped and taken to the North over the years. But that is not fitting, because when we take the initiative and act magnanimously that is a more honorable effective method of resolution than when the North and South each make their own demands and engage in a war of nerves. The Presidential Commission on Suspicious Deaths has issued a position saying that "ideological conversion" is unconstitutional and illegal, and indeed, dividing up long-term prisoners by whether they've "converted" or not goes against civil rights. The government should learn from this latest episode and give more expeditious and positive consideration to repatriating long-term prisoners.
The Hankyoreh, 3 October 2005.
[Translations by Seoul Selection (PMS)]
[Editorial] Repatriate the Remaining Long-Term Prisoners |
