South Korea said Sunday it will update the list of family members who have been separated by the 1950-53 Korean War by next month in an effort to restart dialogue on holding a temporary reunion later this year.
Nearly 130,000 people were registered as separated families here between 1988 and July 31, 2015, the Ministry of Unification said.
Of them, however, nearly half, or 63,000, were found to have passed away as of late June, with more than half of the surviving 66,000 past the age of 80.
“So many of these family members pass away each year, but reunions of separated families have been stalled since February 2014,” a unification ministry official said. “It’s important to update this list to ensure that another reunion may be organized in the near future.”
This will be the ministry’s first attempt to check the status of more than 60,000 survivors at once. Officials reassured that with more than 1,000 volunteers provided by the Korean Red Cross, the process shouldn’t take more than 15 days.
The ministry said the list should be complete in about a month, and its goal is to pass it onto North Korea by Chuseok, the autumn harvest festival celebrated by both Koreas.
It remains unclear whether North Korea would respond favorably to the South’s proposal for a temporary reunion.
Pyongyang has previously set the removal of the May 24th Measure, which is a series of sanctions imposed on the North by South Korea after the former’s attack on a naval ship in 2010, as a precondition for such an occasion.
The two Koreas have held 18 rounds of the reunions since their leaders’ first summit in 2000. (Yonhap)
