If people want to go to North Korea, why not let them go?

When soldiers on Wednesday prevented a 95-year-old former prisoner of war from crossing no-man’s land and returning to North Korea, they were sticking to the law and to longstanding practice. We all know that.

But in denying an old man a final wish, we as a country failed not just to respect his freely made choice, upholding his dignity as an individual citizen. We also failed in a collective sense at a moment of opportunity to remind ourselves and our North Korean foe of our superior values.

The man, Ahn Hak-sop, has a remarkable story. It’s one that most of us are not aware of and would likely not care for if we were, given Ahn is an unrepentant fan of North Korea. Here is his story.

When he was 23, Ahn, a soldier in the People’s Army, was captured in a battle with South Korean troops. In prison, authorities discovered he was not North Korean at all, but from Ganghwa Island in the South and that he had volunteered to fight for the communists. Instead of being shoved in with the other prisoners of war, he was charged with collaboration.

Family members heard of his plight but it took them time to get permission to visit him. Travel from Ganghwa Island was restricted due to its proximity to the front. A relative finally obtained the necessary pass, but it was too late to plead for leniency. A military court had, a week earlier, sentenced the young soldier to life imprisonment. Such was the rough corruption of that time that the relative was told that, had she arrived before the trial and paid a few dollars, she could have claimed Ahn had been press-ganged and obtained his release.

Consider this. Ahn began his sentence halfway through the Syngman Rhee era. He was kept for the most part in solitary confinement through the rule of Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan when he and the small group of North Korean soldiers and spies were no longer allowed to receive mail or visits.

The outside forgot them. But behind the prison walls, guards were pressuring them to convert. In a system the Japanese had used to great effect against independence activists, and which was formally adopted by South Korean authorities in 1955, they were able to swear loyalty to the country and be pardoned.

In 1972, when rights were even more harshly curtailed under the Yushin Constitution, there was a new effort to break ideological inmates. They were required to sign two documents, one regretting past actions and the other an oath of allegiance to South Korea.

Those who did became eligible for release. Ahn and a few others resisted. At least seven died under torture. The “unconverted” had years added on to their sentences.

Conditions improved somewhat in the late 1980s with the arrival of democracy. Amnesty International adopted the unconverted as prisoners of conscience after satisfying itself that they were not terrorists and had not committed violence. This gave democratic South Korea the dubious distinction of holding the longest-serving prisoners of conscience in the world. Few Koreans were aware of this and, even if they were, tended to feel that, like old Nazis, the diehard communists should just be left to rot. Finally, in 1995, when he was 65, Ahn was quietly released.

The president at the time, Kim Young-sam, had allowed a captured war reporter, Li In-mo, to return to the North. But politicians here were too new to democracy and the idea of individual rights to defend the decision after inter-Korea relations worsened and Pyongyang used Li for propaganda. They saw people as subjects to serve and be exploited by the state, rather than as individuals whose liberty the state exists to protect.

In 2000, President Kim Dae-jung let 63 former prisoners return to the North.

Ahn is one of six former North Korean soldiers and spies who have served their sentences without renouncing Pyongyang and who have expressed their wish to be repatriated.

He approached the Unification Bridge this week, struggling with a cane and holding a North Korean flag. When soldiers at the checkpoint warned him against crossing, he turned back. He was driven away in an ambulance.

The next time we read about him will no doubt be a small item saying that he has died, and we may wonder what we have gained.

Michael Breen (mike.breen@insightcomms.com) is the author of "The New Koreans.” The views expressed here are his own.