Yonhap
4/10/2007
South and North Korea on Tuesday agreed to dispatch a joint team to China to disinter and repatriate the remains of a prominent independence fighter buried there.
They will also push to organize joint commemorative events for the 100th anniversary of the death of the freedom fighter An Jung-geun in 2010, according to a statement released by the Unification Ministry.
The agreement came at the end of the one-day working-level talks held in the North Korean border city of Kaesong. The talks were resumed after a 13-month hiatus.
“The joint excavation team will be sent to China for about a month beginning in late April. We will work out details for the dispatch later at the truce village of Panmunjom,” the statement said.
An was executed in Dalian in 1910, a year after assassinating Hirobumi Ito, Japan’s first resident-general in Korea, on a railway platform in Harbin. His remains are still buried near a former prison run by Japanese authorities in Dalian.
An’s assassination of Hirobumi was an attempt to prevent Japan’s annexation of Korea, but the Korean Peninsula was formally colonized by Japan from 1910 to 1945.
During the Japanese colonial period, millions of Koreans are believed to have been killed or sent into forced labor, including sexual servitude for the Japanese military.
The South Korean delegation was headed by Lee Byeong-gu, director general of the Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs, while Chon Chong-su, deputy bureau chief of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland led the North Korean team.
