Like the other campers, she’s grown up with the idea that the two Koreas should reunite.
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The women are to testify in a freaky court case ostensibly brought by their families in North Korea, who claim the women were abducted by the South Korean government.
The move came ahead of a hold a South Korean court put on a request by a group of lawyers for a hearing to question 12 waitresses in the group whether they had defected of their free will, after the spy agency refused to present them in court.
The women did not appear at the hearing Tuesday at Seoul Central District Court.
The campaign has included emotional video interviews with the women’s relatives in the North, angrily denouncing the South Korean authorities and demanding a meeting with the defectors.
Former waiting staff Choe Rye Yong and Han Yun Hui said that they had worked with the 12 women for more than two years at the North Korean-run Azalea Friendship Restaurant in Ningbo, China.
“They believe that their families’ lives will be threatened if they openly testify that they fled the North of their own free will”, Park said.
“There’s just this sense that they want to keep the story safe, they want to keep it secure they want to keep it within tightly controlled realms”, Son says.
Local media reports said the group of lawyers obtained power-of-attorney from the defectors’ families in the North for the hearing.
The North, however, maintains they were “lured and abducted” by the South Korean government, calling for their immediate repatriation. According to the Associated Press news agency which has a bureau in Pyongyang, Ri Gum-suk, the mother of one of the workers, So Kyong-ah, said all the parents were heartbroken. I want to hear the words from my lovely daughter. Why don’t they let her meet us?
The intelligence agency has held the group since its April 7 arrival in the South at a facility it runs on the southern outskirts of the capital, Seoul, where more than 1,000 defectors from the North stay each year in the initial stages.
“The whole point is to define what the government did right or wrong, which is important and I understand that, but there are lots of unnecessary problems in the way (Minbyun) is doing it especially in terms of the defectors’ involvement”, the ministry official said on customary condition of anonymity.
For all North Korean defectors, life in the South begins with intensive NIS interrogation that can last for months and is aimed at weeding out possible spies.
And even if the kids’ curiosity is piqued at camp, all South Koreans are prevented by their own government from checking out North Korean materials or reading North Korea’s news outlets online.
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“The North Korean restaurant workers are receiving fundamental education necessary for resettlement into South Korean society at the protection center”, the official said. In total, North Korea has about 50,000-60,000 workers overseas, mostly in Russian Federation and China, to earn foreign currency for the country, it said.
