The 95 -year -old warfighter of war forced to live in South Korea who seeks to return to the north to die

Weakened by a pulmonary edema (accumulation of fluid in the lungs), could not perform the 30-minute walk from the station to the unification bridge -o Tongil Dae-Gyo-, one of the few steps that connect South Korea with the north.

So he got out of the car about 200 meters from the bridge and toured the final stretch on foot, flanked by two supporters who held it.

He returned with a North Korean flag in his hand, an unusual and dissonant image in the south, and addressed the journalists and the twenty of volunteers who had come in their support.

“I just want my body to rest on a truly independent land,” he said. “A free land of imperialism.”

Ahn Hak-sop was 23 when he was captured by the South Koreans.

Three years before he was in the institute when the then North Korean ruler Kim Il-Sung attacked the south. Kim, who wanted to reunify the two Koreas, mobilized his compatriots stating that the South had started the 1950 attack.

Ahn was among those who believed him. He enlisted in the Popular Army of North Korea in 1952 as a link officer, and then assigned a unit that was sent to the south.

He was captured in April 1953, three months before the armistice, and sentenced to life imprisonment that same year. More than 42 years later he was released thanks to a special pardon on Korean Independence Day.

Like many other North Korean prisoners, AHN was also labeled as “red head”, referring to his communist sympathies, and had difficulty finding adequate job.

It was not easy, he told the BBC in an interview in July. The government did not help much at the beginning, he said, and the agents followed him for years. He married and even adopted a child, but never felt that he really belonged to his family.

During all that time, he settled in a small town in Gimpo, as close as a civil border with the north can live.

However, in 2000 he rejected the possibility of being returned to the north along with dozens of other prisoners who also wanted to return.

Then he was optimistic about the improvement of ties between the two countries, and the possibility that their people could travel freely from one place to another.

But he chose to stay because he feared that leaving an victory for Americans.

“At that time, they were pressing for the United States to rule (in the south),” he said.

“If I had returned to the north, I would have felt as if I were delivering my own room to the Americans, unemployment for them. My conscience as a human being did not allow me.”

It is not clear to what he meant, apart from the growing ties between Seoul and Washington, which include a solid military alliance that guarantees South Korea protection against any North attack.

That relationship deeply annoy Ahn, who has never stopped believing in the propaganda of the Kim family: that the only thing that prevented the reunification of the Korean Peninsula was an “imperialist United States” and a South Korean government that was indebted to them.

Born in 1930 in Ganghwa County, Gyeonggi province, during the Japanese colonial domain of the Korean Peninsula, AHN was the youngest of three brothers and also had two younger sisters.

Patriotism rooted soon. His grandfather refused to go to school because “I didn't want to get Japanese,” he recalls. So he began to go to school later than usual, after the death of his grandfather.

When Japan surrendered in 1945, ending World War II and the colonization of Korea, Ahn and his younger brother, who had defected from the Japanese army, hid at their aunt's house, at the foot of Mount Mani, on the island of Ganghwa.

“It was not a release, but a transfer of colonial domain,” he said.

“A pamphlet (which we saw) said that Korea was not going to be released, but that the US military government would be implemented. He even said that if someone violated US military law, it would be strictly punished under military law.”

Since the Soviet Union and the United States disputed the Korean Peninsula, they agreed to divide it. The Soviets took control of the North and the Americans, the South, where they established a military administration until 1948.

When Kim attacked in 1950, there was already a South Korean government, but Ahn, like many North Koreans, believes that the south caused the conflict and that his alliance with Washington prevented reunification.

Once captured, AHN had several opportunities to avoid jail: they asked him to sign documents renouncing his communist ideology, what was called “conversion.” But he refused.

“As I refused to sign an oath of written conversion, I had to endure humiliations, torture and endless violence, days full of shame and pain. There is no way to fully describe that suffering with words,” he told the crowd that he had congregated near the border in August.

The South Korean government never responded directly to this accusation, although a special commission recognized violence in prison in 2004.

The direct accusations of AHN were investigated in 2009 by the Truth Commission and the reconciliation of South Korea, an independent body that investigates human rights violations committed in the past, which concluded that there had been a deliberate effort to force its conversion, which included acts of torture.

In South Korea it has been accepted for a long time that these prisoners usually suffer violence between bars.

“When I recovered knowledge, the first thing I checked were my hands, to see if they had red ink,” AHN recalled in his July interview.

That used to indicate that someone had forced a fingerprint in a written oath of ideological conversion.

“If there wasn't, I thought: 'No matter what they have done, I won.' And I felt satisfied.”

The north has changed significantly since Ahn left. Kim Il-Sung's grandson now governs the country, a lonely dictatorship with nuclear weapons that is richer than in 1950, but remains one of the poorest countries in the world.

Ahn was not in the north during the devastating famine of the 1990s, which killed hundreds of thousands of people. Tens of thousands of people fled, carrying out mortal trips to escape their lives there.

Ahn, however, rejects the suggestion of any concern for the violation of human rights in the north, blaming the media to be partial and only inform about the dark side of the country.

He states that North Korea is thriving and defends Kim's decision to send troops to help Russia in his invasion of Ukraine.

The South has also changed during the time Ahn has been there: before it was a poor military dictatorship and is now a rich and powerful democracy. His relationship with the north has had ups and downs, oscillating between open hostility and hopeful commitment.

But Ahn's convictions have not faltered. He has dedicated the last 30 years of his life to protest against a country that, in his opinion, continues to colonize South Korea: United States.

“They say that humans, unlike animals, have two types of life. One is the basic biological life, in which we talk, eat, define, sleep, etc. The second is political life, also called social life. If a human being is stripped of his political life, he does not differ from a robot,” Ahn told the BBC in July.

“I lived under the Japanese colonial domain all those years. But I don't want them to bury me under colonial (American) domain, not even dead.”

With additional information from Jungmin Choi in Seoul

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