Bring them home.

(From The Korea Herald)

Quite a few South Koreans were impressed once again by the press report last Thursday that the remains of 19 U.S. soldiers killed in the Korean War were recovered in North Korea during a recent joint U.S.-North Korean recovery operation. The remains were brought to the South to be honored in a ceremony at a U.S. base here before being sent to Hawaii for identification testing, the report said.

Since 1996, the United States is said to have paid a considerable amount to North Korea to conduct some 32 joint searches and has recovered more than 200 sets of remains of U.S. soldiers in North Korea. They were among the 8,100 U.S. service members missing in action during the 1950-53 Korean War.

What moved some of us, of course, is the fact that the U.S. government has never given up its efforts to find its service members, even if they were believed killed more than 50 years ago. A U.S. military spokesman was quoted as saying it was most important that "we will be taking missing Americans from the Korean War back to American soil, so they are no longer lost in the hills in North Korea." What has our own government been doing in a similar situation? In stark and shameful contrast, the Republic of Korea government has done practically nothing despite reliable reports that there are some 500 surviving South Korean prisoners of war still being detained in North Korea against their will. As for efforts to recover the remains of soldiers killed in action in North Korea, the government hasn't even begun to think about them.

Although the communist regime in Pyongyang, in its usual roguish way, has insisted there was not a single South Korean prisoner of war in the North, several prisoners have successfully escaped from there, crossed the Chinese border and returned to the South on their own. According to them, there were hundreds of South Korean prisoners of war living in concentration camps and doing forced labor in coalmines and other places.

Their testimony, however, fell on the deaf ears of South Korean leaders and government officials who are worried that their remarks - or, indeed, any official demand for repatriation - would irritate or upset North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il and his cronies in Pyongyang.

The report on the remains of the U.S. soldiers came one week after Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi visited North Korea, successfully negotiated with Kim Jong-il and brought to Japan the sons and daughters of two Japanese couples who had been abducted by North Korean agents and forced to live in the North for decades before being allowed to visit their native land 17 months ago. The abductees chose not to return to North Korea and the Japanese government, instead, worked hard to bring their children to Japan permanently.