On the Korean peninsula, separation pains endure

PANMUNJOM, North Korea -- The North Korean colonel talking with American journalists during a recent government-sponsored tour grabbed one of the reporters by the waist and squeezed forcefully with both hands.

''It hurts, right?" Colonel Kang Ho Sop, 57, said with a grimace. ''That's how it feels to be cut in half."

More than half a century after the Korean peninsula was severed in two, the pain of being a divided nation gnaws at millions of people on both sides of the Demilitarized Zone that separates North and South Korea.

''It's like a tragedy for me that I don't know what happened to my relatives in the South," Kang said as he looked over an expanse of the lush 155-mile-long, 2 1/2-mile-wide DMZ that is often called the most dangerous place on earth. ''I really hope that reunification will be fulfilled before I die."

The dream of making the fractured nation whole is never far from people's lips in this isolated, Stalinist country of 23 million. Such sentiments also resonate among the 48 million people across the DMZ in South Korea, the 1.5 million Koreans living in the United States, and the 2.5 million people of Korean descent living in northeast China.

''Of course we all want to reunify," said Peter Chuang, a professor of hospitality at the Youngsan University in South Korea, who was visiting Pyongyang last month to attend celebrations marking the 60th anniversary of North Korea's Workers Party's ascent to power. ''This is a common 'national' mission of our people. Is that so hard to understand?"

Today, more than 10 million Korean families still live divided by an offshoot of the Cold War, and life for them is a series of missed family connections.

''Every birthday or festival day, my mother used to mourn silently for her sister and family members" in the North, said Adrian Kim, 42, a South Korean businessman also visiting Pyongyang for the celebrations. ''So, in a way, we always lived with this feeling of absence or loss around us."

In addition to blaming lingering tension between the North and South, Kim and many of his generation also believe that US policies have contributed to the family divisions. President Bush's 2002 speech branding North Korea as part of an axis of evil frightened North Korea, they say, forcing it back into its shell just when Pyongyang had embraced the Sunshine Policy to encourage business and cultural exchanges.

Such talk angers some South Koreans who say they cannot forget about the 34,000 US soldiers who died keeping North Korea from swallowing the South during the Korean War.

''But the war was a long time ago," said Kim. ''The problem of separation is a real one that people are living with today."

US-based Korean families who try to reconnect with lost family members often are forced to use unreliable sources, said Stephen Ko, 34, a second-generation Korean-American living in New York.

''I'd met my uncles, aunts, and cousins [living in North Korea] only once, in 1986," Ko said. ''Then when I was living in Seoul [this September] I was suddenly contacted by a man who said he was my cousin."

Ko said he went all the way to Yan Li, a Chinese town on the North Korean border, expecting to meet his relative, but no one came. ''He was probably a poser hoping to receive handout," Ko said sadly.

The pain of separation is constant in Dandong, an ethnically Korean border town on the Chinese side of the Yalu River that divides China from North Korea. Although Chinese-Koreans can visit family members on the other side with relative ease, ''our tragedy is seeing the miserable conditions they live in but being unable to do much to help," said Ping, a Chinese local of Korean descent who asked to be identified by only his last name.

Ping said he and other Koreans in China and South Korea were trying to do what they could to improve things for people in the North. Everyday, an endless stream of trucks crosses the Friendship Bridge that links Dandong, a boomtown with glittering skyscrapers, to Sinuiju, a decrepit-looking North Korean town.

The North Koreans bring in minerals, stones, and scrap iron, and take back food, oil, electronics, household goods, and clothes.

This border trade, estimated to be worth about $1.5 billion annually, is probably the only thing keeping the world's last Stalinist state from imploding, analysts say.