Report: North Targeted South’s Elite

Research has revealed that North Korea systematically abducted young intellectuals, engineers, and public servants from the South during the Korean War under prearranged plans.

The War Abductees Information Center under the Korean War Abductees’ Family Union (KWAFU) and economics professor Kim Myeong-ho at Kangnung University recently released the result of a complete survey of 96,013 abductees during the Korean War.

The research is the first survey of the time period of abductions and professions of all the war abductees reported so far.

According to the paper titled, “Research on the Verified Analysis of the Realities of the Korean War Abductees,” which Dong-A Ilbo obtained, a total of 84,659 people (88.2 percent) were abducted during the three months between July and September in 1950, immediate after the outbreak of the war.

During the period, 2,919 public servants, 2,836 engineers, 863 professors and teachers, 572 medical staffs, 190 judicial officers, and 169 politicians including assemblymen were abducted to North Korea.

Over 80 percent of the abductees were kidnapped from their homes or nearby their homes, which indicates that the North made a list of the people to kidnap and identified their home addresses. Furthermore, 69 percent of all abductees were in their 20s and 30s.

In regards to this, professor Kim’s research team said that the communist regime purposely seized the so called ‘”intellectuals” from the South to meet their needs for brains.

The statement of Kim Il Sung in 1946, which the War Abductees Information Center confirmed at the Unification Ministry’s information center in 2004, also backs up the assumption of the research team that the abductions were planned in advance of the war.

In a statement under the title of “About Bringing Intellectuals form South Korea” on July 31, 1946, Kim Il-sung said, “To solve the problem of lacking intellectuals, we have to bring them from the South. We have to rescue them from the American imperialists and their collaborators.”

KWAFU Director Lee Mi-il said, “The war abductees so far have been the ‘forgotten ones’ to the government and academics because there was not enough evidence to prove whether they went to the North on their own will or were abducted. This research is the first in history to prove that North Korea systematically kidnapped South Korean figures at the initial stage of the war.”