Background

After doing my posting on The Blue House Raid, I began to wonder whatever became of the bodies of the commandos that were killed during the botched operation?  After a little web searching, I found my answer:

PAJU: There is no resting in peace at South Korea’s “Enemy Cemetery”.

On a quiet hill, just south of the heavily armed border that divides the Korean peninsula, wooden grave markers with fading white paint are aligned in neat rows above bodies no one wants to claim at plots few dare visit.

In black ink splattered with mud, the Korean word for “Anonymous” marks almost all of the burial mounds for nearly 550 North Korean and Chinese soldiers and spies.

“The graves are pointed to the North. They are facing home,” said South Korean First Lieutenant Choi Won-joon, who served as a military guide to the graveyard.

The cemetery, which opened in 1996, is a reminder of the lingering hostilities between the Cold War foes.

Last month, the Defence Ministry said the cemetery was nearing capacity as hundreds of bodies of North Korean soldiers killed in the 1950-53 Korean war have been dug up in recent years and buried in the graveyard. North Korea refuses to take back the bodies.

“As far as the North Koreas are concerned, the entire peninsula is rightfully theirs. They are still in Korean soil as far as they are concerned and they are looking at unification as just a matter of time,” said Brian Meyers, a specialist in North Korea’s state ideology at Dongseo University in Busan.

The cemetery also contains the remains of North Korean commandoes sent on missions to kill. If the North claimed these bodies, it would also have to accept responsibility and apologise for the missions that Pyongyang has so far disavowed.

At the cemetery, a warning sign tells people to keep away and a small plaque tucked under a tree says: “The cemetery for North Korean soldiers and Chinese soldiers”.

“In the military, this place is officially known as the ‘Enemy Cemetery’,” Lt Choi said.  [Jon Herskovitz]

Read the rest, but all enemy agents such as the operative Kim Sung-gil who was captured with Kim Hyun-hee for bombing Korean Air Flight 858,  are buried at this cemetery.  The bodies from the crew killed in the 1998 spy sub incident are also buried. Here is what one North Korean defector had to say about the bodies buried at the cemetery:

“They were not evil people. They were simply acting under orders, and now they all lie here, forgotten by all.”
[Kim Tae San - Radio Free Asia]

The cemetery was also laid out with some thought for the victims kept there.  The cemetery currently houses 352 North Koreans and 84 Chinese bodies that are each given a gravestone with their bodies buried pointed North.  The fact that the North Koreans do not want these bodies back does not surprise me, but why won’t the Chinese take the bodies of their soldiers back?

Why Won’t North Korea Take These Bodies Back?

The cemetery is currently now running out of room because of the number of Korean War era North Korean soldiers that are being dug up and buried at the cemetery because the North Korean regime will not accept them back into North Korea.  This is because the North Koreans have long been using the fact that the US has been paying to recover American bodies within North Korea as propaganda on how the US had abandoned their bodies during the war and are now groveling at the feet of Kim Jong-il to get them back.  Bodies being returned to North Korea from the war would delegitimize this propaganda.

Plus the North Koreans consider all of South Korea their territory anyway, why would they care if these bodies are buried in Paju or not?  I think the biggest reason though is considering how the North Korean regime treats their people today, there probably is no one in the regime that cares about the bodies of soldiers killed nearly 60 years ago anyway.

Further Reading:

Choe Sang-hun – New York Times