Long wait for families

Thursday, Feb. 28, 2008 | 2:07 a.m.

Almost 55 years after the armistice that ended Korean War fighting, China has finally agreed to review its military records pertaining to the more than 8,100 U.S. servicemen who were either killed or captured in that conflict and are still unaccounted for.

China has defied repeated U.S. requests for this information ever since the hostilities ended on July 27, 1953. But on Friday it is scheduled to announce it has at least partially agreed to a request that was made during the Clinton administration.

Why the gesture is being made now has not been announced, but it is probably more than coincidental that it is being made as China is trying to soften its image for the Olympics, which it is hosting for two weeks in August.

Although details of the agreement are not yet known, we are gratified that at least some progress appears to be at hand. The families of the dead and missing servicemen have been waiting decades for this development.

The Korean Peninsula was divided after the Japanese were driven out toward the end of World War II, with the northern portion falling under communist control and the southern portion becoming democratic and under the protection of the United Nations.

Tensions flared in the late 1940s over the issue of unification, leading North Korea to invade the south on June 25, 1950. President Harry Truman ordered U.S. forces to lead the United Nations’ response, and by autumn of that year the communists had been driven out of the south and were on the defensive in the north. But the tide turned when forces from communist China entered the war, leading to the armistice, or truce, that remains in place today.

In our view, China has had a moral obligation from the start to share its Korean War casualty records with the Pentagon. We hope the agreement about to be announced represents a sincere effort by Chinese officials to fully disclose all that they know about the missing U.S. servicemen.