Two Koreas to hold family reunions Aug. 20-26

By Kim Bo-eun, Joint Press Corps

South and North Korea agreed to hold reunions of families separated by the 1950-53 Korean War from Aug. 20 to 26 at Mount Geumgang in the North, in Red Cross talks held Friday.

The reunions will be resumed almost three years since the last in October 2015.

Delegations led by the South's Korean Red Cross President Park Kyung-seo and the North's Pak Yong-il, vice chairman of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland, reached the agreement in a meeting at a hotel at Mount Geumgang. The mountain is where past reunions were held.

One hundred participants each from the South and North will take part in the event, according to the joint press statement. The Koreas agreed to begin confirming surviving family members on each side starting July 3 and exchange the final list of participants by Aug. 4. The South will send a team to repair facilities at the mountain on June 27.

The Koreas agreed to hold additional Red Cross talks and working-level meetings to further discuss the reunions and other humanitarian issues.

“It is meaningful in itself that Red Cross members of the North and South sit down together at Mount Geumgang to hold our first talks and discuss the issue of separated family reunions as our first event,” Pak said ahead of the meeting.

The Red Cross talks were the first since October 2010, when the meetings were suspended due to the North's shelling of Yeonpyeong Island in the South. The last meeting between working-level officials was in September 2015.

“When the Koreas let go of the past and come to the talks with a new attitude, the humanitarian cooperation projects will be held smoothly and there will also be a dramatic change in inter-Korean Red Cross relations,” he said.

In response, Park said, “Let us make a successful meeting with the Red Cross spirit based on humanitarianism.”

Resuming reunions of separated family is among the agreements in the Panmunjeom Declaration reached at the inter-Korean summit on April 27. The agreement states the two Koreas will seek to hold the reunions around Aug. 15, which marks Korea's liberation from Japan's colonial rule.

Resuming the reunions has been an urgent humanitarian issue because most surviving family members are elderly.

According to government data, 131,531 people were registered as separated family members, of whom 57,920 are still alive.

Among them, those in their 70s and above account for 86.2 percent.

Red Cross delegates also discussed enabling the separated members to visit their hometowns as well as write to one another. This move would enable ongoing contact between the families, instead of simply a one-off event.

Since the first reunion in 2000, which was held after the first inter-Korean summit, 20 reunions have been held. They enabled around 20,000 people to meet their long-lost relatives, but this is only about 15 percent of the number registered.

Inter-Korean Red Cross talks began in 1972 to enable reunions of separated family members, but mostly dealt with humanitarian aid for the North, including food and medical services.