[The U.S. Air Force C-17 aircraft departed for Kalma Airport in the North Korean city of Wonsan before 6 a.m. Friday. It returned about 11 a.m. local time and was greeted by a crowd of several hundred U.S. service members and their families. U.S. service members from throughout South Korea were invited to the event.]
By Adam Taylor and Dan Lamothe
 |
|
North
Korea transferred the remains of 55 American soldiers killed in the Korean War
to
the U.S. military on July 27, the 65th anniversary of the armistice. (Reuters)
|
OSAN
AIR BASE, South Korea — A
U.S. Air Force plane carrying what are thought to be the remains of 55
Americans killed during the Korean War arrived at Osan Air Base in South Korea
on Friday morning, the 65th anniversary of the armistice that ended the
fighting.
The U.S. Air Force C-17 aircraft departed for
Kalma Airport in the North Korean city of Wonsan before 6 a.m. Friday. It
returned about 11 a.m. local time and was greeted by a crowd of several hundred
U.S. service members and their families. U.S. service members from throughout
South Korea were invited to the event.
The exchange means that one part of the
agreement reached between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un
in Singapore on June 12 has been partially fulfilled — albeit more slowly than
many had anticipated.
“After so many years, this will be a great
moment for so many families. Thank you to Kim Jong Un,” Trump tweeted.
The remains are expected to stay at Osan for
a few days for initial testing before a repatriation ceremony is held Aug. 1
and they are sent on to Hawaii.
In Washington, Trump hailed the handover of
the remains, while suggesting that they were already on the way back to the
United States. He said Vice President Pence would personally attend the
repatriation, and he again thanked Kim.
“At this moment, a plane is carrying the
remains of some great fallen heroes from America back from the Korean war,”
Trump said Friday morning in an impromptu news conference outside the White
House. “They’re coming back to the United States. Mike Pence, our wonderful
vice president, will be there to greet the families and the remains.
Trump added: “And I want to thank Chairman
Kim for keeping his word. We have many others coming. But I want to thank Chairman
Kim in front of the media for fulfilling a promise that he made to me, and I’m
sure that he will continue to fulfill that promise as they search and search
and search.”
Earlier, White House press secretary Sarah
Huckabee Sanders said in a statement: “Today’s actions represent a significant
first step to recommence the repatriation of remains from North Korea and to
resume field operations in North Korea to search for the estimated 5,300
Americans who have not yet returned home.”
Sounding a note of caution, Rep. Mimi Walters
(R-Calif.) tweeted Friday: “This is step in the right direction, but we must
remember that we are dealing [with] a ruthless regime that still poses a threat
to our nation.”
Yonhap News Agency reported Thursday that
North Korea accepted 100 wooden transit caskets that it planned to use to
return the remains. The U.S. military command in South Korea moved the caskets
into the demilitarized zone that splits the Korean Peninsula in late June.
Earlier Thursday, the expected recovery was
greeted with cautious optimism by Rick Downes, executive director of a group of
families whose loved ones never came home from the Korean War. They have
watched discussions in recent weeks with a mixture of hope and cynicism, he
said.
“These are poker chips, unfortunately,” said
Downes, who runs the Coalition of Families of Korean & Cold War POW/MIAs.
“These guys, these missing men, are still serving. The war still goes on, and
they are being negotiated and used as a bargaining tool.”
[For the U.S., a frustrating history of
recovering human remains in North Korea]
A U.S. official told The Washington Post last
week that North Korea agreed to hand over about 55 sets of remains. Friday was
suggested as a likely date for the repatriation because of its symbolic
importance as the anniversary of the armistice. The official cautioned that the
number of remains would need to be checked after they are handed over.
Former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson,
who has worked on repatriation issues and visited North Korea several times,
said Thursday that he saw the potential recovery as a positive first step. But
he warned that Pyongyang could stall in delivering other remains and attempt to
use the issue as a way to make money.
“They’ll give a certain amount of remains for
free right away,” Richardson predicted. “But then they’ll say, ‘The next ones,
we need to find them, locate them, restore them.’ And then they’ll start
charging, and they’ll milk this.”
Though the United States has a policy of
refusing to pay for the repatriation of remains, in the past, it has agreed to
provide some funding for expenses incurred by the North Koreans.
The Pentagon estimates that nearly 7,700 U.S.
troops are unaccounted for from the war; among them are 5,300 believed to have
been killed north of the 38th parallel, which largely coincides with the
boundary between North and South Korea.
The North Korean government is believed to
have somewhere between 120 and 200 sets of U.S. military remains in its
possession and ready to deliver, but there are thousands more still in the
North Korean countryside, said Mickey Bergman, vice president of the Richardson
Center for Global Engagement that the former governor founded.
Some remains were buried by U.S. troops in
cemeteries that were intended to be temporary until China’s entry in the Korean
War forced U.S. forces to withdraw farther south. Other remains are at sites
where aircraft crashed or in unmarked graves, Bergman said.
“One of the things that is so important is
for the American people to understand that this is just the beginning,” he
said. “This is going to take years. It’s going to take interviews and sight
surveys and teams on the ground. My fear is that we will get these remains and
once again say ‘Mission accomplished!’ And it’s not.”
After the remains are returned, scientific
testing will be needed to confirm that they belong to American troops from the
Korean War. In the past, North Korea has been accused of deliberately including
non-American bones — even animal bones — in a bid to fool U.S. authorities.
The remains will be sent to Hawaii, where the
Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency runs a laboratory at Joint Base Pearl
Harbor-Hickam. The identification process there could take years, U.S.
officials have said. It often includes a review of archival information that
determines where certain U.S. troops were likely to have disappeared or been
buried.
After the historic summit between the two
leaders last month, Trump and Kim agreed to work together to recover U.S.
remains left in North Korea and to implement the “immediate repatriation of
those already identified.”
Only a few days after meeting Kim, Trump
portrayed the return of the remains as something that had already happened. “We
got back our great fallen heroes, the remains,” he told a campaign rally in
Minnesota. “In fact, today, already 200 have been sent back.”
However, while the U.S. military had moved
caskets into the Korean Peninsula’s joint security area in anticipation, no
remains had been sent back. Soon, negotiations were dragging out longer than
many had expected.
“That it took this long to secure such low-hanging
fruit is a bad sign that North Korea intends to lean on its traditional
negotiating posture,” Van Jackson, a former Pentagon official who teaches at
Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, said of the prospective
repatriation.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was expected
to return with remains when he visited Pyongyang for an overnight stay July 6.
But after his team was criticized by the North Korean Foreign Ministry, his
visit only highlighted tensions between the United States and North Korea over
the return of the remains and issues surrounding denuclearization.
On July 12, North Korean military officials
left their U.S. counterparts waiting for hours at the joint security area
before belatedly calling to request that they reschedule their prearranged
meeting. Only after this meeting and subsequent ones was practical progress
made.
One part of the holdup appeared to be North
Korean requests for payment.
The last time North Korea’s military returned
likely remains of American troops was in 2005 amid escalating tensions with
Pyongyang, when the United States halted a program that had been running since
the 1990s.
In 2007, Richardson visited North Korea on a
private mission that had the approval of the Bush administration. Richardson
returned with the remains of six service members.
The return of the remains now would come
after commercial satellite imagery appeared to show that North Korea had
destroyed part of a satellite-testing facility that was part of the country’s
missile-development program. Trump, who told reporters in June that North Korea
had agreed to destroy that facility, said Tuesday that the United States
appreciated the move.
Lamothe reported from Washington.
Read more: