'I just hope they are doing well'

North Korean refugees in the South long for the families they left behind the impenetrable border, writes AFP

- AFP

After taking a bow and making an offering of fruit and a dried fish, Ryh Jae-hong tosses a cup of alcohol towards the thick barbed-wire fence that protects South Korea's Gyodong Island from North Korea.

South Koreans perform this funeral ritual during the autumn harvest festival Chuseok at altars erected along the border to honour ancestors who remained in the North.

Refugees and other elderly people would also gather in Gyodong on festive days to sing old Korean ballads from the Japanese occupation of 1910-1945, at the tops of their voices.

Just two kilometres from the Manghyangdae altar, on the northern tip of Gyodong, farmers work the land beneath red flags and a slogan in giant letters on a nearby hilltop reads: “Long live socialism!”