hankyoreh

By Park Byung-soo, staff writer

The tragic story of Oh Kil-nam and his wife Shin Sook-ja, both 70, is receiving new attention after North Korea’s announcement that Shin has died of hepatitis. Shin’s death ends her family’s complicated story and eliminates chances for a reunion with her husband Oh, who fled North Korea after moving there from West Germany in the 1980s.

Oh went to West Germany for his studies in 1970 and earned a doctorate in economics from the University of Bremen in 1985. He then left the country that year to travel to North Korea with Shin and their two daughters. Disappointed with his experience there, Oh defected from North Korea the following year while in Denmark on orders from Pyongyang to attract exchange students from East Germany.

After defecting, Oh was questioned for more than six months by US military intelligence authorities before being delivered to a West German-administered refugee facility. He subsequently stayed on in Germany, making various appeals to return the family members he had left behind in North Korea. When this failed, he headed to the South Korean embassy in Germany in April 1992. The following month, the government arranged for him to fly to South Korea, where he was introduced as a “former exchange student in Germany and surrendered spy.”

At the time, the family’s story was the subject of major media attention. Part of the reason Oh’s turbulent experience became a controversial issue in South Korea was the fact that he claimed involvement by Yun I-sang in his decision to go to North Korea. Yun was a celebrated composer from South Korea who made his career in Germany, where he lived and worked until his death in 1995.

Oh‘s situation provided the perfect opportunity for government authorities to label the composer a North Korean collaborator who had been arrested by the South Korean secret service in Berlin in the 1960s over alleged espionage.

In an August 2011 interview with the Chosun Ilbo newspaper, Oh said that Yun had sent him a letter in 1985 wondering what Oh planned to do after receiving his degree. “Congratulations on your degree,” he reported the letter as reading. “I think it’s now time for you to play an active role in the reunification campaign. I want you to go to North Korea and use the knowledge you’ve learned for the sake of your fellow Koreans.”

Yun and Oh were acquainted from their time working with Building a Democratic Society, a civic group mainly consisting of Koreans in Germany that was formed in 1974, when the Yushin dictatorship was at its zenith in South Korea.

But those who knew Yun gave a different account of things. In a February interview with the Hankyoreh, Yun’s widow Lee Su-ja bluntly said, “Nothing like that happened.

"Suppose he did feel that way," she added. "For something that important, Yun would tell him (Oh) directly. Why would he write a letter? We’re not talking about a three-year-old here. A fifty-year-old man with a doctoral degree made the decision to pack everything up and take his family. Where’s the coaxing or pressuring?"

Oh said he lost the letter while packing for North Korea.

The two sides also gave conflicting accounts of their relationship after Oh‘s defection. Oh said he had asked Yun to help bring his wife and children back from North Korea and received two letters from Shin through him in 1987 and 1988.

In an interview published in the September 2009 edition of the Monthly Chosun (the monthly magazine of the conservative Chosun Ilbo), Oh claimed that Yun attempted to pressure him into going back to North Korea in January 1991. Oh claimed Yun gave him a cassette recording of his wife’s voice and six family pictures and told him, "It’s your attempted imperialist espionage agent. You betrayed President Kim Il-sung after he did so much for you. They have no choice but to hold your family hostage."

Lee Su-ja denied the claims. She recalled, "Yun I-sang, Mr. Oh, and I sat in the living room and listened to the tape. . . . Then Mr. Oh giggled and said, ‘Those kids really look ugly, don’t they?’ ‘Sir, I’ve giving up trying to get my family back.’ Mr. Yun was enraged. He screamed at Mr. Oh never to show his face again."

Regarding the circumstances of the letter and tape’s delivery to Oh, Lee said, ”[Yun] went to the North Korean Embassy to ask them to let Mr. Oh‘s family out, and that was all he got.“

In the Chosun Ilbo interview, Oh explained, "I did look at the pictures of the children and say they were ugly. Could I have been in my right mind at that point? Seeing them grown up all thin and pale, I just felt so sorry."

Oh finally heard word about his family in October 1992. An Hyuk and Kang Chol-hwan, escapees from a North Korean labor camp for political prisoners, told him Shin and their two daughters were living in ”subhuman conditions“. In 1994, the secretary-general of Amnesty International went to Pyongyang to request a meeting with Shin, but was told by North Korean authorities that Shin did not want to meet.

August 2008 brought word from the North Korean Red Cross that Shin was incommunicado and that the two daughters were alive.

Oh said he did not believe North Korea’s explanation on Apr. 27 that Shin had died of hepatitis. The group International Coalition to Stop Crimes against Humanity in North Korea (ICNK), which had been working for the family‘s repatriation, requested that the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention make additional inquiries about disclosing Shin’s official death certificate and organizing a meeting in third country with the two daughters to verify their freedom of expression.

At a press conference Tuesday at the Seoul Press Center, the ICNK showed a document sent to the working group on Apr. 27 by the North Korean mission in Geneva. The document stated that Shin had died of hepatitis, which she had been suffering from since the 1980s. However, it did not include specifics about the time, place, or circumstances of her death.

The North Korean document was a response to an inquiry about Oh’s family sent by the working group in March. The ICNK had submitted a petition to the working group in November 2011 for the rescue of Oh’s family.

The document claimed that the daughters "do not view Mr. Oh as their father, since he abandoned his family and drove the two daughters’ mother to her death.

“They are vehemently opposed to meeting Mr. Oh and requested that they not be bothered any more,” it continued.

North Korea also denied the family was being forcibly detained, saying their situation “bears no connection to arbitrary detention.”

Regarding the daughters’ reaction to the document, Oh said, “North Korea is painting me as an immoral man who abandoned his family, but that wasn‘t how it was.

"I would like to see North Korea moving in a new direction," he added.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]