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Lee Mi-il has campaigned to bring attention to the fate of kidnapped South Koreans.
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SEOUL — On a sidewalk in central Seoul recently, Lee Mi-il and several other older South Koreans took turns at a microphone, calling out what seemed like an endless list of names. They began in the morning and continued through the night, one faceless name after another — 83,000 in all — ringing out and melting into the cacophony of the capital city’s busiest district.

A few young pedestrians paused at this unusual demonstration. But most paid little attention.

The scene could have stood as a metaphor for Ms. Lee’s struggle of more than a decade.

Since 2000, she has campaigned to generate more interest in the fate of tens of thousands of South Koreans believed to have been forcibly taken to North Korea during the Korean War six decades ago. She has been demanding that the government negotiate for the return of those who might still be alive and the remains of those who are not. The government has never made that issue a priority in the times it has sat down with North Korea, treating her campaign as a distraction from what it considers a more important task: persuading the North to abandon its nuclear weapons.

But Ms. Lee, 62, is not giving up, and recently she has scored some victories against what she calls “a gigantic darkness and forgetfulness.”

“We shout our fathers’ names because our society no longer remembers them,” she said during an interview in her office, where one wall is covered with the black-and-white photos of people thought to have been abducted during the war, including her own father. “We hope that they will hear us and know that they are remembered.”

During the 1950-53 war, North Korea took away tens of thousands of South Korean civilians, mainly civil servants, educators, writers, judges, Christian pastors and businesspeople. Nearly all were men. Some appear in South Korean textbooks for their roles in building the young Korean state as it emerged from Japanese colonial rule. According to family accounts and the government, the North Koreans often seemed to have a clear idea of which individuals they wanted to move to the North, apparently to bolster their own professional ranks for reconstruction after the war or, in other cases, to neutralize enemies, such as members of anti-Communist, right-wing groups.

When Ms. Lee’s father, a factory owner in Seoul, was taken away, she was 18 months old and ailing. A spinal injury left her with a warped back.

When she speaks, her voice is little more than a raspy whisper. But a smile seldom leaves the face of this woman, only 135 centimeters tall, or 4 feet 5 inches.

“During air raids, mother said I screamed endlessly in the underground shelter,” she said. “That ruined my vocal cords.”

When the U.S. military signed a truce with North Korea in 1953, prisoners of war were exchanged, but civilian abductees were excluded. Their fate and their women’s sorrow lived on in a once popular song:

Hands trussed with a steel wire, my love looked back as he was dragged away, barefoot and limping,

Even if it takes 10, or 100 years, please return home alive.

But under Cold War-era dictatorship in the South, the women were barred from staging street protests. They were kept under surveillance out of fear that North Korea might send back their relatives as spies. Often their sons were taken in for interrogation by counterintelligence agents looking for any evidence of treason.

As the years passed, many older people abandoned hope of ever striking a deal with the North, and younger generations have been eager to move on. Many families gave up on their relatives as dead or feared that activism on their behalf might only endanger them in the North.

Ms. Lee, who is divorced with no children, was running a nursery in Seoul in 2000 when she determined to break that long silence.

That year, President Kim Dae-jung of South Korea and Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader, held the first intra-Korean summit meeting. When their governments later arranged reunions of families separated by the war, abductees were once again excluded. In the subsequent years, South Korea provided billions of dollars in aid, hoping that would encourage more humanitarian gestures by the North. But Pyongyang has not released any information about the missing South Koreans or allowed communication with their relatives, insisting that any intellectuals from the South who ended up in the North did so voluntarily. It calls Ms. Lee’s campaign “a grave political provocation.”

“They never admit kidnapping because that would be admitting a crime,” Ms. Lee said. “They just hope we’ll all be dead soon and this will all be forgotten.”

In 2000, she shut down her nursery and established the Korean War Abductees’ Family Union, bringing together 700 families.

In 2002, her group found a 1952 government document listing 83,000 South Koreans as kidnapped, a preliminary wartime compilation that officials had previously denied existed. It was gathering dust, uncataloged, in a government library.

On its Web site, her group posts videotaped interviews with the aging wives and mothers whose firsthand accounts of the war would otherwise be lost with their deaths.

Last year, after seven years of lobbying by her group, lawmakers passed a bill mandating the first government investigation of wartime kidnappings. In August, the government panel confirmed 55 men as kidnapped. More such rulings are expected during its four-year inquiry. To Ms. Lee, the official recognition was a first step toward establishing a “systematic war crime” by North Korea.

According to South Korean government estimates, Communist troops and militias killed between 59,000 and 122,800 South Korean civilians during the war.

South Korean troops and police officers carried out similar massacres of their own people suspected as leftists, according to recent government investigations. It remains unclear how many people were killed in mass executions in North Korea. However, during their short-lived advance into the North, U.S. and South Korean troops discovered mass graves of civilians, including women and children, apparently killed in haste by retreating Communists.

Also unclear is what happened to those South Koreans taken to the North.

Kim Yong-il, who was abducted and then escaped North Korea during the war, said that 600 of the 3,000 South Koreans he was forced to join in a “death march” did not make it to Pyongyang, falling victim to hunger, disease and aerial bombings.

“Young people must know that the prosperity they enjoy today is built upon the sacrifices of these forgotten people,” Ms. Lee said. “Forgetting is ingratitude, the worst sin.”

This year, a few cabinet ministers began wearing blue lapel pins in the shape of the forget-me-not Ms. Lee’s group is distributing as part of its awareness campaign.

She has also taken her campaign to the United States, where some Korean families emigrated to escape political surveillance and poverty at home. They are appealing for a U.S. congressional resolution for the return of their relatives from North Korea.

“Although we are grateful to the Americans for defending our nation during the war, we are disappointed with their failure to free those kidnapped people during the armistice talks,” Ms. Lee said. “Many of the families are now American citizens. So it’s an American issue.”

When her group staged a name-reciting rally in April, Ms. Lee’s mother, Kim Bok-nam, 89, was the first to take the microphone. With a trembling voice, she started with the name of her own husband, Lee Seong-hwan, who, if he were still alive, would be 91.

Ms. Kim never remarried. Two of her three daughters emigrated to the United States, but she and Ms. Lee remain in the old family house.

“Mother believes that if father returned, he would come to this house,” Ms. Lee said.