Long Quest of South Korean Man to Restore Family

South Korea says the first high level talks for years with North Korea have been called off. The talks were seen as a chance to improve relations after months of escalating tensions over the peninsula.

Hostilities between the two ended 60 years ago, but for some families, this cold rivalry is very personal.

The South Korean government says that over the decades, some 2,000 citizens has been kidnapped by the North Korea... and the families are often treated with suspicion.

We meet Ahn Yong-soo, a South Korean man who says the disappearance of his brother destroyed his family’s honor.
 
Ahn Yong-soo welcomes me to his apartment. It’s small but tidy, and I sit down in front of an over-stacked bookshelf. 

From this pile, Ahn hands me a photo album. He shows me a black and white picture of his older brother Ahn Hak-soo, taken in the mid 1960s.

He was dressed in a South Korean military uniform, but Hak-soo was headed to fight communist in Vietnam.
 
Ahn Yong-soo says his brother was not ready to go to the battlefield.
 
“While my brother was still in Korea, doing his military training, he wrote a letter and tied it to a rock.  He threw it over the gates of the barracks and someone picked it up and called my family.”

What did that note say, I asked.

“He said the training was so hard and he didn’t want to go to Vietnam.  He wanted my father to get him out of there.”
 
But that didn’t happen and Ahn Hak-soo was sent to work in Saigon.
 
In another album, Ahn shows me postcards his brother sent from the frontline... just weeks before Hak-soo went missing. 
 
It was on March 1967, Ahn recalls, that he and his family first learned that his brother was no longer in Vietnam.
 
“A woman who worked at my father’s school had turned on the radio and we heard my brother’s voice. He was saying the names of people in my family.  But we quickly found out this was a propaganda broadcast from North Korea. I turned it up, I could hear my brother’s voice was very strained. He didn’t sound like he was speaking freely, like he was reading from a script.”
 
Human rights groups say Pyongyang has for long aired broadcasts like this. They show alleged defectors or captives confessing to crimes commited by the South Korean or American governments.  They often praise the North’s rulers as well.
 
But Ahn Yong-soo says he didn’t buy that.
 
“My brother knew if he did so, his family would be doomed, he would have never gone there on his own.”
 
But that’s not what the South Korean government thought.
 
Ahn says his family was deemed guilty by association. His father was forced to give up his job and was sent to work in a factory.  Ahn and his younger brother were denied entry into university.

Ahn adds, that wasn’t even the worst of it.
 
“They put a bucket over my head so I couldn’t see what they were about to do to me.  They beat me all over my body.  I was threatened at gun and knife point.  They hung me upside down and hit me with a shovel. And they dunked my head under water that had been mixed with pepper powder.  They’d wait until I was about to drown, then pull me out.  They were very good at that.”   
 
Ahn was tortured at the hands of his own government... and he was left with permanent physical and psychological damage. He found solace in the church and became a pastor... but still takes medication to cope with the pain and anxiety.

And it’s not an isolated case... other families who lost their loved ones were treated the same way.

Lillian Lee is with Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights, a group that supports the families of South Koreans believed to have been abducted by Pyongyang.
 
“They were extremely ostracized, they were seen as somehow being tied with the Communist North, they were seen as being traitors to their country.”
 
A decade ago, Ahn Yong-soo started his own quest to clear his family’s name... following his father’s last wish before he died. And after six years of trying, a breakthrough happened.

“A journalist gave me documents regarding South Korea’s role in the Vietnam War.  These military papers listed my brother as a Prisoner of War. I presented it to the National Intelligence Agency and requested more information.  I was then given more papers regarding my brother and Vietnam. They had obviously been tampered with: dates had been changed, others clearly stated he was captured in Vietnam.” 
 
Ahn presented these inconsistencies to the South Korean government.

A year later, they declared his brother, Ahn Hak-soo, a Prisoner of War.

It was the first time that Seoul admitted that any South Koreans had gone missing during the Vietnam War. 

But even after his brother’s record was set straight and the family received some compensation for the years of abuse, his family honor has not been completely restored.

“The Ministry of Defense still refuses to confess to the cover up, that they knew all along that my brother was abducted.  Until they confess, only half of my family’s honor has been returned.”
 
But an official from South Korea’s Ministry of Defense says there are no plans to reinvestigate the disappearance of Ahn Hak-soo.
 
Later on, a government document revealed that North Korean authorities had executed his brother in 1975 after he tried to escape to China.

Ahn was devastated to hear this... but this has fueled him to go on another mission.

“Through my connections with North Korean defectors, I learned that my brother was married and had a son.  But after he was executed, his family was sent to a prison camp.  As far as I know, they are still alive and I want to somehow help get them out.”
 
Ahn says this won’t be easy.. but he’s ready to take on this challenge, for his brother.