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December 15, 2017

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Let me go home, NK defector in Seoul pleas

A North Korean defector interrupted a United Nations human rights press conference in Seoul yesterday to plead tearfully to be allowed to go back to her relatives in Pyongyang.

More than 30,000 North Koreans have fled homeland to move to South Korea.

But they often struggle to make a living in the capitalist South and sometimes fail to adjust to their new lives.

Dressmaker Kim Ryon-Hui arrived seven years ago but has since made several desperate attempts to return to her family, including forging a passport, for which she was imprisoned, and falsely confessing to espionage in the hope she would be expelled.

“I’m a citizen of Pyongyang of the Democratic Republic of Korea,” Kim told dozens of reporters at a briefing in Seoul by Tomas Ojea Quintana, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on human rights in the North. “I have been forcefully detained in the South for seven years.”

Kim accused Seoul of violating her human rights, saying it had prevented her from going back to her aging parents and daughter.

“A mother is someone who can’t be apart from her daughter for even a moment, but seven years just hurts too much,” she said, her voice trembling, adding she had attempted suicide.

Most North Korean defectors are issued a South Korean passport six months after arrival, but Kim still has not received one and said the South’s intelligence services had told her she “might escape to the North.”

South Koreans need government permission, which is only granted in exceptional circumstances, to go to the North, with which the country is technically still at war.

Pyongyang repeatedly cites Kim’s case and has said it will not allow any more reunions of relatives divided by the Korean War until she and 12 North Korean waitresses, who it says were kidnapped from a restaurant in China, are returned.

The divided families are one of the most emotive outcomes of the conflict, which saw the Korea Peninsula partitioned in 1953, with around 60,000 increasingly elderly South Koreans still hoping to meet their relatives again in North Korea.

Quintana said the case was an example of the “absurd cost of division.”




 

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