Seoul:Two relatives from a family separated by the Korean War met for the first time in a third country in September, marking a rare meeting between second-generation members of the family amid frozen inter-Korean relations. Tensions remain high on the divided Korean Peninsula, with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un ruling out talks with South Korea and defining inter-Korean ties as those between "two states hostile to each other."
According to Yonhap News Agency, the meeting came five months after South Korea's Unification Ministry received a request from a North Korean member of a separated family seeking help to find a maternal uncle in South Korea. The request was relayed by a North Korean defector living in the South. The ministry located the uncle in its database of separated families, only to learn he had died 30 years earlier. Contact was eventually made with a 65-year-old cousin living in Gyeonggi Province near Seoul.
The South Korean cousin agreed to contact the North Korean relative, saying the cousin's late parents had hoped to meet family members left behind in the North. The relatives first made contact through a mobile messaging app before meeting face-to-face in a third country. It was not clear how the North Korean relative traveled to the third country, but this marked the first privately arranged family reunion reported to the South Korean government in about two years.
Unlike most privately arranged reunions, which typically involve South Korean individuals seeking family in the North with the help of brokers, this case began with the North Korean relative initiating contact to locate family in the South. The Korean War technically has not ended, as it concluded with an armistice rather than a peace treaty, leaving the inter-Korean border sealed with no direct means of communication.
South and North Korea have previously held government-arranged temporary reunions for separated families, often around major holidays. The last such reunions occurred at Mount Kumgang in August 2018, during a brief thaw in relations. The issue of separated families remains a pressing humanitarian concern, with many surviving registered family members being 80 or older.
In September, President Lee Jae Myung emphasized the urgency of resolving the issue of separated families. As of late August, 134,848 South Koreans had registered as having separated family members in the North, but only 32,948 were still alive. Privately arranged reunions had peaked in 2003 and have significantly decreased since then, with no such reunions reported from 2020 through 2023 due to severed ties and border closures during the COVID-19 pandemic.