SEOUL – North and South Korea remained at loggerheads Tuesday over Pyongyang’s demand that all 31 of its citizens stranded in the South be repatriated, including four would-be defectors. In its latest comments, the North said it was “nonsensical” for the South to try to send back only 27 of the 31 people whose fishing boat drifted across the border in thick fog last month.
The North refuses to accept that two men and two women want to defect, and says the South pressured group members to stay on to try to fuel cross-border tensions. It called on Seoul to bring the four to a meeting with their families at the border village of Panmunjom on Wednesday so they can confirm in person that they want to stay in the South.
The South’s Chosun Ilbo newspaper in a website commentary described the North’s demand as an attempt to pressure the defectors “by more or less openly threatening the families they left behind in the North”.
The South says it is willing in principle to hold talks but will not bring the four to any such meeting. “There is no change in our stance,” a unification ministry spokesman told AFP.
“Currently, no discussions are underway with the North that would be needed for such a meeting. It is now physically impossible to arrange a meeting tomorrow,” he said. Investigators from the US-led United Nations Command, which supervises the armistice in place since the 1950-53 Korean War, have interviewed the four and confirmed they freely decided to stay in the South.
They are the 38-year-old boat captain, a 21-year-old female nurse, a 44-year-old unemployed man and a 22-year-old female statistician.
Relations on the peninsula have been icy since the South accused the North of torpedoing a warship in March 2010 near the disputed Yellow Sea border with the loss of 46 lives. Pyongyang denies the charge.
