S Koreans arrive in North for emotional family reunions

The emotions stemmed partly from the elderly reuniting after decades spent apart, and partly from the knowledge that this would nearly certainly be their only chance. Additional reporting came from Youmi Kim in Seoul.

Oh Cheol-hwan, a 77-year-old South Korean will be reunited with her older brother. She still lives in the house her husband, also now 88, built and that the couple shared as newlyweds.

The departure from the resort marked the end of the first stage of the six-day reunion with another group of families from both sides scheduled to meet from Saturday to Tuesday.

Shim and other advocates from the Inter-Korean Separated Family Association hope this event will lead to more information sharing and inter-Korean family contact, not just these small, orchestrated family reunions.

“I feel hopeless because the communists in the North want to have reunification their way and, of course, South Korea wants to have it its way”, Kim, who met his younger brother previous year, told The Guardian.

This is reportedly the first reunion for separated families since February of previous year. The rivals have a history of failing to follow through with cooperation agreements.

In the South, participants are picked at random by a computer that takes into account their age and family history. Even if they hold more family reunions, there are tens of thousands of people who still haven’t met their families.

Lee Min-hee, who was meeting her 85-year-old North Korean uncle also testified to a warmer, more genuine atmosphere during the private sit-downs.

On Tuesday, two elderly South Korean women had to be taken across the border in ambulances so they could reunite with brothers from the North.

“I had a lot of things I wanted to ask, like about how my father and mother had lived before they died, but I couldn’t because I had to be sensitive about everything”, Jeon said.

“I’m so excited, I can’t even sleep these days”, he says.

Seoul has long called for drastically increasing the number of people taking part in reunions and holding them more regularly. “It’s time now to expand that history of miracles to all of the peninsula”, she continued.?The strategy described by Park marks a step farther from remarks made on September 4, when she said that “peaceful unification” was the “ultimate and fastest way of solving the [North Korean] nuclear problem”.

South Korean officials had warned in advance that a substantial slice of any money handed over would be “appropriated” by the authorities in the North.

South Korean participants brought thick coats, medicine, underclothes, toothpaste and other basic commodities, thinking those items would be hard to get in the impoverished state under long-standing sanctions over its nuclear and missile development. That all ended when a DPRK soldier shot a South Korean tourist to death in 2008.

North Korea said in September that its atomic fuel plants had been restarted and upgraded its fuel plants.

But after three rounds the North abruptly insisted the reunions be moved to Mt. Kumgang.