MOSCOW, October 13 (RIA Novosti) An unidentified North Korean military official said Monday that the bodies of US soldiers killed in the Korean War over 60 years are being lost due to flooding, construction and land development projects, the Guardian reported.
The official’s statement, made at the Panmunjom truce village in the Demilitarized Zone, noted that many American soldiers’ remains are “left here...uncared for and carried away en mass” by flood damage, hydropower station construction projects and other land development projects, the statement said.
He blamed Barack Obama’s administration for its “unreasonable, hostile policy toward the DPRK,” South Korean news agency Yonghap reported.
The official noted that the US “should not forget even [for] a moment the proverb saying that even a skeleton cries out of yearning for the homeland,” AP cited him as saying.
The statement is a response to US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s statement last month that North Korea was to blame for stalling attempts to recover and repatriate the remains of its fallen soldiers to the United States, Yonhap noted.
A US military spokesman in South Korea dismissed the statement, calling it “one of North Korea’s usual accusations,” India’s Economic Times reported.
In 2012 the United States suspended a joint program to recover the 5,300 servicemen still listed as missing from the 1950-1953 war, and believed to be buried in North Korea. The program was suspended after a North Korean long-range rocket launch, which the US asserted was a long-range missile test.
North Korea claimed it to have been a satellite launch attempt.
The joint US-North Korean remains recovery program began in 1996, and through 2005, 33 joint recovery missions were carried out; 229 sets of remains were recovered. North Korea had earlier handed over 208 boxes of remains between 1990 and 1994, out of which 104 servicemen had been identified, the New York Times said.
The recovery program was first halted in 2005 by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who cited nuclear tensions and security concerns for recovery teams. The project resumed briefly in 2011, but was suspended a year later after North Korea’s rocket launch.
Reporters have said that North Korea may be using the issue as a measure to bring the US to the negotiating table; others believe the country may be trying to use the program as a way of obtaining foreign currency, given that the US had previously paid North Korea for the use of its workers, the New York Times said.
The US and North Korea are still technically at war following the 1953 armistice agreement. The US has about 28,000 troops in South Korea, purportedly to guard against North Korean aggression.
