The Forgotten People

In its wary hope for peace, in its tense preoccupation with the great struggle between freedom and Communism, the world is apt to forget one fact: one of the items on the agenda at Kaesong is a country called Korea and some 30 million people who still live there.

If Peace Comes. In Korea last week, on the first day of the sixth month of the lunar year, dutiful elder sons went through a little ceremony. They placed bowls of rice or cups of wine before wooden frames that held thin paper strips. On these were written the names of relatives recently dead. All over the country, there were many paper strips in many frames.

After a year's fighting, 375,000 South Korean civilians are dead or missing, 125,000 more have been wounded. No one can be sure how many people were killed in North Korea. A least 6,000,000 Koreans, North and South, are homeless.

Peace, if it comes, will find Korea's cities dead. In Seoul the gutted, white-domed capitol of the Republic of Korea stands like a skeleton among the city's ruins. Suwon's huge, half-destroyed gate, once a monument to Korea's kings, guards only rubble now. Fifty cities and towns in South Korea have been destroyed.

The steel mill at Inchon and the spinning works at Yongdungpo are heaps of blasted machinery. In Pusan, Korea's largest spinning mill is starved of electric power. The once-flourishing coal mines at Yongwol are silent relics. In North Korea, U.S. bombers have smashed a nitrogen plant at Hungnam, the oil refinery at Wonsan, marshaling yards at Sinuiju.

Humbler and more complete than the city ruins is the destruction of the grass-roofed villages. They have vanished--more than 12,000 of them--into heaps of bluish-grey ashes. Bleak stone walls still stand in front of them, and mulberry and acacia bushes, covered with heavy dust.

Peace, if it comes, will not find the tall poplars that once lined every Korean highway--they have been chopped up for firewood. In their place the roads are hedged with the vegetation of war--gutted tanks, charred vehicles, abandoned guns, an occasional hastily dug grave.

The Spokesmen. But peace, if it comes, will still find the Koreans. Said a U.S. Red Cross man: "I've seen the Korean starve to death. I've seen him freeze to death. I've seen him burned by napalm, mangled by bombs, crippled by bullets. I've seen doctors chop off his leg with only a cigarette to kill the pain, but I haven't heard a word of complaint yet. Accepting misfortunes without complaint or bitterness, he expects others to do the same. It can make him the most cruel creature in the world."

To Western soldiers, the Koreans through the year of war became human generalizations: the faceless, white-clad refugees--who all seemed to look alike-- wading across paddyfields or trudging the railroad tracks; the old woman sprawled dead on a hillside; the little girl weeping in front of a ruined house. In a year during which the tide of war washed back & forth across their country, they had just gotten in the way of the soldiers. Yet, in a real .sense, it was for them, as well as for vital U.S. interests, that American soldiers had gone to fight in Korea.

The divided, devastated country would have its representatives at Kaesong--the spokesmen for the North Korean Communist puppet regime and for the South Korean government. But there were other spokesmen, not at Kaesong, and not articulate, who might tell more eloquently what happened in Korea.

"I Have to Run." There was, for instance, Lee Ham Bok, 12. Last December, when the Reds assaulted Seoul for the second time, his city-bred father wanted to flee. His mother, who was born on their two-acre farm, begged, "It is better to be killed by bullets than to die without rice away from home." But his father had his way. Next morning, their belongings on their backs, the Lee family trudged southward on the freezing road from Seoul.

At Singali, 20 miles away, they found that the Communist advance had beaten them. A North Korean wearing an armband and a steel helmet stopped them, ordered them into a house with five other families. Next day the man with the armband stopped at the house with a copy of the North Korean national anthem. He told them to memorize the words. All day, and for days afterward, the six families sat huddled inside singing the words over & over again.

Lee does not remember when Singali was first hit by U.N. air attacks, but he recalls waking one morning and thinking, "I have got to run away." Without stopping to see what his parents were doing, he ran toward the hills outside the town. When he looked back, he could see swooping airplanes and the flash and smoke of bombs.

When Lee came back to the house, it was a pile of ashes. He dug through the ashes with a stick looking for his parents' bodies. He could not find them. When he slipped down to the river at night to get water, he could see bodies floating by.

For uncounted days Lee lived in the houses of friends. His only food was some scorched rice he had found. Then the Reds retreated and a U.N. signal company bivouacked near the town. Lee began to hang around the company mess tent, picking up scraps of G.I. food. He carried the soldiers' laundry to town, shined shoes, washed jeeps.

A month ago, U.N. civil assistance officers picked Lee up, vaccinated him and put him in an orphanage in Seoul. His only ambition, he told them, was to be a soldier. "Now I am only a boy," he said, "so I am afraid. When I become a soldier, I'll be brave."

"I Used to Dream." There were Son Hyun Ki, 12, and Hwang Chon Man, 13. When a packed refugee train from Seoul suddenly pulled out of the station at Taegu last winter, they were left behind on the platform, weeping and terrified. A trainman got them a ride southward to Pusan the next day. But when they arrived, half-frozen from the trip on a flatcar, they could nowhere find their families.

Now, six months later, Son and Hwang still scramble through the dirty streets of Pusan. There is almost nothing left of their neat primary-school uniforms. All Son wears is a blackened suit of underwear fastened around the shoulder with copper wire. They have no money. The 5,000 won (about $1.25) which Hwang's mother gave him was taken from them by hoodlums the day they arrived. They beg. They sleep in doorways, each noon go to the Pyongyang Noodle Shop, where the proprietor fills their pails with slops from the tables. Neither of them has a pair of shoes.

They think vaguely that it would be nice to be back in school. They have given up hope of finding their families. "Sometimes," Son said, "at first I used to dream of my mother holding out her arms to me. When it rains I still remember how it was on the warm floor at home. But I don't think so much about my mother now."

No Victory? Lee, Hwang, Son and the millions like them, their brothers and their elders, are a staggering problem for the U.N. So far the U.N.'s Civil Assistance Command--meaning, mostly, U.S. Army G-4--has prevented starvation in South Korea. Since war began, the Army has shipped in 100,000 tons of grain, millions of yards of cloth, 3,000 tons of clothing. Soup kitchens, emergency refugee camps, orphanages have been set up in the South. In North Korea, things are worse.

Not so many battles were fought in the North, but a year of U.N. air bombardment and the exactions of the hard-pressed Communist armies have ravaged the land. The refugees who still stream southward from the "People's Republic" tell of North Korean farmers eating rice seedlings, grass and bark.

For the day when emergency relief ends, U.N. members have pledged $250 million to cover the first year of an estimated five-year rehabilitation program. But until Korea's political future is settled, rehabilitation can make little headway.

One of the observations heard repetitively last week was that, no matter how the truce talks turned out, there could be no victory for the Korean people. The Koreans' plight is a great tragedy, but they know that there are differences even in suffering. Amid death, destruction and hopelessness, millions of Koreans held on to a simple fact: they would rather live where the Americans are than where the Communists are. To the bulk of Koreans, it still makes a great difference whether or not their country--or half their country--is run by Communists.

The South Korean government is disorganized, has more than its share of corruption, for a year has been unable to function anywhere near like a normal government. But in the Korean people themselves, near despair though they were, there were still flashes of a dogged will.

The Survivors. This week, in the village of Myonmoki, ten miles east of Seoul, lines of straw-hatted farmers stood knee-deep in the flooded paddies, transplanting their delicate rice seedlings. Unlike the city people, most of the farmers did not flee during the war. When the Communists occupied Myonmoki, the young men hid for three months in the hills, returned to their fields when the Communists retreated, did their plowing in a no man's land between the two armies.

Farther south, the town of Chinju, the center of heavy fighting last August, is still a shambles. It is now a town of shanties and tents, and stone gates in front of vanished houses. But trade of a sort is reviving in Chinju. Barbers do a rush business, with customers seated in opulent-looking chairs salvaged from the wreckage. A businessman named Lim Moon Bong has scraped together $1,600 to build the town's finest postwar structure, the "Lighthouse Tearoom," with nautical fixtures.

In his temporary office above a printshop, Mayor Lee Pak Kyo looked out at the new tiled roof on the primary school. "Reopening the school," he beamed, "was the first objective." The children now have readers illustrated with tanks, battleships and soldiers wriggling through the tall grass. "See the tanks all marching," says one. "They are to crush the Chinese Reds." It was a far cry from the peaceful, American-style schoolbooks they had been learning to use before the war.

Later, continued Mayor Lee, there will be roads, bridges and more work on the irrigation dikes, which the war had suspended. Chinju desperately needs outside aid, but it is doing what it can on its own. Said Mayor Lee: "I feel like living again."

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