On a sweltering morning earlier this week, an unusually large assembly congregated at Imjingang Station, the terminal point of Seoul’s metropolitan subway line that ventures closest to North Korea.
The scene comprised scores of activists and law enforcement officers, their collective gaze fixed upon Ahn Hak-sop, a 95-year-old former North Korean prisoner of war. Mr. Ahn was embarking on what he termed his final journey, seeking to return to his homeland to be buried, after spending the majority of his life in South Korea, much of it against his will.
Ultimately, he was denied passage across the border, as anticipated, due to the South Korean government’s assertion that insufficient time remained to finalize the necessary arrangements.
However, Mr. Ahn approached as near as circumstances permitted.
Weakened by pulmonary edema, he was unable to traverse the 30-minute distance from the station to the Unification Bridge (Tongil Dae-gyo), one of the few conduits linking South Korea and the North.
Instead, he alighted from his vehicle approximately 200 meters from the bridge and completed the final stretch on foot, assisted by two supporters.
Upon his return, he brandished a North Korean flag, a rare and unsettling spectacle in the South, and addressed the assembled reporters and approximately 20 volunteers.
“I simply desire my body to find rest in a truly independent land,” he declared. “A land liberated from imperialism.”
Ahn Hak-sop was captured by South Korean forces at the age of 23.
Three years prior, he was a high school student when then-North Korean leader Kim Il-sung initiated an attack on the South, rallying his countrymen under the assertion that the South had instigated the conflict in 1950.
Ahn was among those who believed this narrative. He enlisted in the North Korean People’s Army in 1952 as a liaison officer and was subsequently assigned to a unit deployed to the South.
He was captured in April 1953, three months before the armistice, and sentenced to life imprisonment the same year. He was released more than 42 years later due to a special pardon on Korean independence day.
Like numerous other North Korean prisoners, Mr. Ahn was labeled a “redhead,” a term denoting his communist sympathies, and he faced difficulty securing stable employment.
He recounted to the BBC in an earlier interview that the government initially offered little assistance, and he was subjected to surveillance for years. Despite marrying and fostering a child, he never felt a sense of belonging.
He resided in a small village in Gimpo, the closest a civilian can live to the border with the North.
In 2000, he declined an opportunity to return to the North alongside dozens of other prisoners who desired repatriation, expressing optimism that relations between the two sides would improve, facilitating free travel between the two countries.
However, he ultimately chose to remain, fearing that his departure would be construed as a victory for the Americans.
“At the time, they were pushing for US military governance [in the South],” he stated.
“If I returned to the North, it would’ve felt like I was just handing over my own bedroom to the Americans – vacating it for them. My conscience as a human being just couldn’t allow that.”
While the precise context of his statement remains unclear, it likely alluded to the burgeoning ties between Seoul and Washington, including a robust military alliance that guarantees South Korea’s protection from potential attacks from the North.
This relationship deeply troubled Mr. Ahn, who remained steadfast in his belief in the Kim family’s propaganda, which portrayed “imperialist America” and a South Korean government beholden to it as the primary obstacles to Korean reunification.
Born in 1930 in Ganghwa County, Gyeonggi Province, during Japan’s colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula, Mr. Ahn was the youngest of three brothers, with two younger sisters.
His patriotism was instilled early. His grandfather forbade him from attending school to prevent him from becoming “Japanese,” delaying his formal education until after his grandfather’s death.
When Japan surrendered in 1945, marking the end of World War Two and its colonization of Korea, Mr. Ahn and his younger brother, a deserter from the Japanese military, sought refuge at their aunt’s residence at the base of Mount Mani on Ganghwa Island.
“That wasn’t liberation – it was just a transfer of colonial rule,” he stated.
“A leaflet [we saw] said that Korea wasn’t being liberated, but that US military rule would be implemented instead. It even said that if anyone violated US military law, they would be strictly punished under military law.”
As the Soviet Union and the US vied for influence over the Korean peninsula, they agreed to divide it, with the Soviets assuming control of the North and the US administering the South, where they established a military administration until 1948.
When Kim launched his attack in 1950, a South Korean government was in power, but Mr. Ahn, like many North Koreans, believed that the South provoked the conflict and that its alliance with Washington impeded reunification.
Following his capture, Mr. Ahn was presented with several opportunities to avoid imprisonment by signing documents renouncing the North and its communist ideology, a process known as “conversion.” However, he consistently refused.
“Because I refused to sign a written oath of conversion, I had to endure endless humiliation, torture, and violence – days filled with shame and pain. There’s no way to fully describe that suffering in words,” he told the crowd that had gathered near the border on Wednesday.
The South Korean government never responded to this particular charge directly, although a special commission acknowledged violence at the prison in 2004. Mr. Ahn’s direct allegations were investigated by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Korea, an independent body investigating past human rights abuses, in 2009, which found that there had been a deliberate effort to force his conversion, which included acts of torture.
It has long been accepted in South Korea that such prisoners often encountered violence behind bars.
“Whenever I regained consciousness, the first thing I checked was my hands – to see if there was any red ink on them,” Mr. Ahn recalled in his July interview.
That usually signaled that someone had forced a fingerprint onto a written oath of ideological conversion.
“If there wasn’t, I’d think, ‘No matter what they did, I won’. And I felt satisfied.”
The North has undergone significant transformation since Mr. Ahn’s departure. Kim Il-sung’s grandson now leads the country, a reclusive dictatorship that has grown wealthier since 1950, yet remains one of the world’s poorest nations. Mr. Ahn was absent during the devastating famine of the 1990s, which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, prompting tens of thousands of others to flee the country.
Mr. Ahn, however, dismissed concerns about humanitarian conditions in the North, attributing them to media bias and the tendency to focus solely on the country’s negative aspects. He maintained that North Korea is prospering and defended Kim’s decision to deploy troops in support of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The South has also evolved significantly during Mr. Ahn’s time there, transitioning from a impoverished military dictatorship to a prosperous and powerful democracy. Its relationship with the North has experienced periods of both open hostility and hopeful engagement.
However, Mr. Ahn’s convictions have remained unwavering. He has dedicated the last 30 years of his life to protesting what he perceives as the ongoing colonization of South Korea by the US.
“They say humans, unlike animals, have two kinds of life. One is basic biological life – the kind where we talk, eat, defecate, sleep, and so on. The second is political life, also called social life. If you strip a human being of their political life, they’re no different from a robot,” Mr. Ahn told the BBC in July.
“I lived under Japanese colonial rule all those years. But I don’t want to be buried under [American] colonialism even in death.”
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