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A defector from North Korea originally held as a prisoner of war from the South has been caught by Chinese police, and is about to be forcibly returned to the North. Yet it's hard to find any active effort on the part of the Korean government to save him.
It has been confirmed that Jeon Yongil, now 72, was arrested on Monday while trying to make it to a third country from Hangzhou Airport in China's Zhejiang Province, and that by Tuesday, he had been sent to a holding center in the city of Tumen, located on the North Korean border. Urgent government action is needed, as it's almost assured he'll be handed over to the North if nothing is done.
"We're in contact with the Chinese government, and they're responding positively to Jeon coming to [South] Korea," said a government official, but you can't hear this and rest assured when you consider the disinterest our embassy showed for him before he was arrested by the Chinese police. You wonder if he'd have been sent to Tumen so quickly if our government had gotten actively involved even after he was arrested.
More than a thousand defectors a year are now making their way to the South, and the Korean embassy in Beijing has a constant number of Northerners engaged in a sit-in asking to be allowed to go, so of course the embassy there is going to find it hard to pay attention to every Northern defector. But this is someone who is fully a citizen of the Republic of Korea, a prisoner of war who as such suffered the most can in war. No government excuse is going to work if he wound up in this predicament without the embassy's help.
Who believes the government when it says it's going to work for resolution to the issue of our prisoners of war still in North Korea, when it ignores calls for help from one among them who escaped the North on his own? Even if you count only the POWs the Ministry of National Defense has confirmed are still alive, there are as many as 500, and yet the government remains unable to bring up the issue with the North. This comes in contrast to the way the North readily welcomes prisoners held in the South for decades without renouncing their allegiance to North's system.
The government must start by doing everything at its disposal to save Jeon. If by chance he does end up being returned to North Korea, the government would be unable to avoid the question of just who it exists to serve.
November 21, 2003
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