Some 80,000 people were abducted by North Korea during the Korean War. Many have never been seen again, and their stories to this day remain untold.  

Over the years, North Korean forces have abducted hundreds of citizens from around the world. Mostly these have consisted of South Koreans, Japanese, Chinese, and American citizens. On 25 July, 1950, North Korea’s leader Kim Il Sung initiated a policy mandating the systematic abduction of close to eighty thousand South Korean civilians, nearly all men, in a nation building exercise that, unprecedented in modern times, erased the lives and families of countless victims from the history books even to this day. What happened to these abductees and who were they?

As the Worker’s Party of Korea began its colonial-building project, Kim Il Sung, who had purged the young nation of its intelligentsia in his search for political control, found his young nation holding the reigns of a diminished machine. Most educated Koreans, who weren’t there already, had gone south before partition, fearing rightly their ability to freely determine their livelihoods. Their names were not merely remembered, their details – addresses, names of family members, education, professions, and other skills and capabilities – were collected, distributed among teams of soldiers, and, when the order for attack was given, systematically abducted on an impressive scale.

They would be bounded, close together in large columns, and marched north hundreds of miles to begin a life of servitude, never thanked, and barely remembered. Many were boys, some as young as six. Others were writers, educators, Christian pastors, Judges, and civil servants; knowledgeable members of society, many of their names, of which, appeared in early textbooks describing their roles in the establishment of the South Korean state.

Tens of thousands of brothers, fathers, husbands, sons, and grandfathers, indeed nearly all those abducted, would never be seen again. Still to this day, North Korea rejects the claim that such a campaign of mass abduction ever took place. Any former South Korean currently (and formerly) in the North came over willingly, or so it claims.

Perhaps most depressingly, when the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed, prisoners of war were exchanged, with the exception of civilian abductees, who remained in the north to linger away in the impoverished employment of the state. The American side, which had suffered 128,000 casualties during the war, were eager to conclude peace talks.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the front runner of the Republican Party for the presidential nomination in 1952, and a strong critic of the Truman administration’s handling of the war, promised to “go to Korea” and bring about an “early and honourable end.” In the haste to conclude the Agreement, Eisenhower’s generals agreed to North Korea’s use of the term “displaced civilians” in the place of “abduction”; a subtle change that removed a final point of disagreement. The point would begin a process of misremembering those abducted, and those killed in the process. So much for an honorable end to the war.

One can hardly blame the Americans. A 2011 hearing before the Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, Committee on Foreign Affairs, in Congress revealed that over 8000 American servicemen are still considered prisoners of war(POWs)/missing in action in North Korea. For South Korea, as many as 73,000 servicemembers, captured by the North, were never report by Pyongyang as POWs. There whereabouts, and indeed livelihoods, have been lost to time and circumstance.

The Permanent Exhibition at the National Memorial for Abductees During the Korean War has, quite impressively, pieced together the stories of the victims, almost all of which are from members of the victim’s families. It has been over 70 years since the beginning of the Korean War, and their whereabouts are still almost entirely a mystery.

An agreement was reached with Pyongyang in September 2002 to begin determining the fate and whereabouts of those who had “gone missing” during the Korean War. To move the North Koreans on the issue, the term “North Korean abductees” was once again avoided. However, no progress at the time was made.

Over the years, a very limited few have been allowed to visit family members at specially arranged border events that require a lottery system due to the many thousands of applications, at least on the South Korean side, to participate. Most applicants will never get the chance. According to a December 2021 survey from the South Korean Ministry of Unification,

“more than 68% out of the 133,675 applicants who applied for the lottery for inter-Korean family reunions since 1988 have already passed away, while over 85% of the remaining 42,000 people are over the age of 70. The survey results indicate that fewer than 20% of respondents have been able to ascertain the fate of their family members in North Korea, which remains the highest priority, followed by in-person reunions, letter exchanges, and hometown visits.”

My tour guide, during a recent visit to the demilitarized zone, was one of those few whose family got lucky in the lottery. Her uncle, now is his 80s, was kidnapped at the beginning of the war. He was six at the time. Her grandmother met her son in 2010 for the first time since his abduction during a highly guarded 2 hour visit. A second visit was arranged but never occurred, and the grandmother passed away soon after. How can two hours make up for a lifetime missed and spent in suffering, not knowing the fate of a child? It was, nonetheless, a small mercy.

Over the years, North Korea has waged various forms of its abduction campaign, from a South Korean actress and her movie maker husband, to Japanese couples visiting a beach in Obama City, Fukui Prefecture in 1978. Some 500 of these abductees have never been returned, and nor does the North Korean government recognise that they were even abducted.

One of the most confronting images at the Permanent Exhibition at the National Memorial for Abductees During the Korean War is one of refugees being dragged away by North Koreans, with orphaned children being left to fend for themselves. Multiply that image by several tens of thousands of accounts, and we may begin to understand some of the suffering that for many has never ended and may never be redressed.

Dr Adam Bartley is the managing editor for AIIA’s Australian Outlook and weekly columnist for The Week in Australian Foreign Affairs. He is a former Fulbright Scholar and resident fellow at the Elliot School for International Affairs, the George Washington University. Adam also has positions as post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for Cyber Security Research and Innovation RMIT University  and as program manager of the AI Trilateral Experts Group. He can be found on Twitter here.

This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.