Photographs by Jae Hyun Seok for the IHT
Moon Sang Bong, left, and Moon Choong Il.SEOUL One brother was a Communist spy from North Korea who served 27 years in a South Korean prison.
At night, thugs would come to his solitary cell, barely larger than a coffin, and drag him to a dungeon under the watch tower. Muffling his cries of torture, they would beat him night after night until he signed a letter renouncing his political beliefs.
The other brother was a refugee from communism. After spending 10 years in prison and a labor camp in China, he led his family of four on a five-year odyssey through Southeast Asian jungles.
When he reached his destination in 1994, South Korean newspapers and television networks hailed his as a "journey for freedom."
Today, the two brothers are free and live within two hours of each other. But they have yet to reunite. Their story is emblematic of the ideological enmity that still divides the Korean Peninsula, and a measure of how difficult it remains for the two Koreas to reconcile a past marked by war and mutual scheming.
"I have a brother here I cannot call a brother," said Moon Sang Bong, 80, the former spy who has rejected his younger brother's repeated appeals for reunion.
During an interview, the elder Moon at first did not acknowledge he had a younger brother in Seoul. When asked about Moon Choong Il by name, he showed little emotion.
"He risked his life to come here," Moon Sang Bong said, "and I oppose the system here to the end.
"What am I supposed to do even if we meet - pat him on the back for making such a difficult trip to the South? Some people have tried to arrange a reunion, but I told them to leave me alone. I've got nothing to say to him or about him."
Moon Sang Bong was freed from prison in 1987, when human rights groups, encouraged by the easing of authoritarian rule in the country, began speaking out for old, tortured spies.
He is a waxen, feeble shadow of a fierce Communist spy. Nowadays, he can barely sit up by himself.
But he remains loyal to the North Korean regime, even when television images of his famished countrymen, contrasted with the capitalist affluence all around him, provide a daily reminder of which system is succeeding.
His hope is that this loyalty will one day bring him a final redemption: a trip home to the North and a reunion with his wife and two daughters, both toddlers when he last saw them, 46 years ago.
Until that day, he says, he will hold fast to the political conviction that first brought him to the South: that the capitalist South is "a colony of our sworn enemy, U.S. imperialists," that needs to be "liberated."
All of which leaves the younger brother bewildered.
"What's good about the North Korean government, a regime of gangsters, which can't even feed its own people so that its citizens flee and wander around as refugees?" asks Moon Choong Il, 67. "My brother and I have completely different political ideas. But I pray for him. Ours is a tragedy of a divided nation."
In 1941, the two brothers and their parents emigrated to China to escape brutal Japanese colonial rule at home.
Shortly before the defeat of Japan and the liberation of Korea, their father went to Seoul, promising to relocate his family there.
But the suddenness of the liberation and its political aftermath left the family in the Communist zone.
In China, Moon Sang Bong joined a People's Liberation Army unit of ethnic Koreans who were fighting for Mao Zedong. His outfit was later incorporated into the North Korean Army, which invaded South Korea in 1950 in an effort to unify the divided peninsula.
After the war ended in a stalemate that left the peninsula still divided, Moon Sang Bong became an agent who escorted North Korean spies into the South and picked up those returning from missions.
One night in 1960, South Korean soldiers ambushed his boat as it pulled in to pick up an agent. As flares illuminated the sky and mortar rounds pounded the water, Moon Sang Bong escaped but was caught after a month as a fugitive in the hills. Later that year he was sentenced to life in prison in South Korea.
In the same year, 22-year-old Moon Choong Il was imprisoned in China.
Villagers witch-hunting for reactionaries turned him in for keeping a diary in which he longed for his father and a trip to South Korea, which then had no diplomatic ties with China.
His mother had died two years earlier.
In prison, Moon Choong Il saw inmates die of hunger. He was eventually released, and later swam a border river into North Korea in 1973, hoping to live with his brother. But border guards sent him back to China - now as an illegal immigrant.
He returned to his village in Inner Mongolia, where he worked in a collective farm under surveillance.
During the political thaw in the 1980s, Moon Choong Il wrote letters to South Korean radio stations looking for his father.
He did not hear from his father (and has never been able to find any record of him), but South Korean missionaries sent him Bibles and cash, asking him to build underground churches.
"We didn't know how to do a service. So we sat around, played cassettes of sermons and hymns the missionaries sent us. We all sang along," Moon Choong Il said. "Around this time, I also located my brother's family in North Korea and exchanged letters and photographs. They said my brother was in South Korea, but didn't say exactly what he was doing there."
In the decades following the war, the two Koreas infiltrated each other with armed commandos and spies. In 2000, following a historic North-South summit meeting,
South Korea repatriated 63 aging spies. But Moon Sang Bong was not among them because he had signed a "letter of ideological conversion" in South Korea, and was therefore not welcome back.
As their colleagues returned home to a heroes' welcome in North Korea, Moon Sang Bong and 27 other former spies, now in their 70s and 80s, were left behind, humiliated and regretful they had buckled under torture.
North Korea still demands the return of Moon Sang Bong and others. But it refuses to repatriate any of the hundreds of South Korean POWs and fishermen believed to be kidnapped there in postwar years, as well as an unconfirmed number of Southern spies. Conservatives and family members in the South oppose repatriating any more Communist spies unless the North reciprocates.
The North denies holding any South Koreans against their will, leaving Moon Sang Bong and his colleagues hostage to an unresolved past.
In 1989, two years after Moon Sang Bong's release from prison, Moon Choong Il
fled China with his wife, son and daughter. After five years in Myanmar and Thailand, including two years in a mountain village controlled by a drug lord, he reached South Korea in 1994.
His arrival was sensational. He was the first North Korean native to defect via Southeast Asia - a route other North Korean refugees fleeing dictatorship and hunger in their homeland would follow later. But he found no trace of his father in the South, and his defection shook his brother's political belief to the core.
"Once I sent my son and daughter with clothes and a letter to see if my brother would at least meet his nephews," Moon Choong Il said. "But my children returned without seeing their uncle. He also returned the letter and package unopened. I understand why my brother hates me. I am no longer asking him to meet me. That's better for my brother."
Moon Sang Bong was refusing to meet his brother, a traitor by North Korean standards, partly because it might jeopardize his family in the North, said Shin Byong Chul, a Christian pastor who had met Moon Sang Bong in trying to arrange a reunion. "The old man didn't say it, but he had to choose between his brother and his own family and ideology," Shin said.
When Moon Choong Il left China, he took with him the letters and photographs he had received from his brother's family in the North. All were lost on the journey, except a 1987 black-and- white photo that shows Moon Sang Bong's wife holding a grandchild and two grown-up daughters with their husbands.
But Moon Choong Il could not deliver even that picture to his brother.
"I pray that my brother will return home, meet his family and live his remaining days as a happy man," Moon Choong Il said. "But if the day comes when my brother crosses the border, I want to go and shout at his back, 'Why? Why should I and my brother live like this?'"
