"(The offer) is unacceptable, considering their hopes, free will,
and international customs concerning humanitarian issues," it said.
North Korea offers to send families of restaurant "abductees" to Seoul(Channel News Asia)
North Korea on Friday offered for a second time to send to Seoul the families of a group of restaurant workers who it says were abducted to the South, state media said, after South Korea rejected the first approach.
South
Korea said two weeks ago that 13 North Korean workers at a restaurant
run by the North in China had defected, in a case it described as
unprecedented. North Korea accused South Korea of a "hideous abduction".
"The
families of the abductees are eagerly asking for face-to-face contact
with their daughters as they were forced to part from their beloved
daughters," the chairman of the North Korean Red Cross said in a statement.
"At their earnest requests, our side again seriously notifies your side of our decision to send them to Seoul via Panmunjom."
Panmunjom
is the inter-Korean border village on the demilitarized zone where
North and South Korea hold rare joint meetings and rival soldiers stand
face-to-face in the world's most heavily fortified border.
A
truce ending the 1950-53 Korean War was signed in Panmunjom in place of
a peace treaty, meaning North and South Korea remain technically at
war, locked in a prolonged period of exchanged rhetoric and heightened
tension.
Under leader Kim Jong Un,
North Korea has adopted a different strategy when it comes to
defectors, displaying re-defectors on national television and bringing
the families of defectors to Panmunjom.
Seven of
the restaurant workers who did not defect returned to Pyongyang and were
paraded in front of a CNN reporter on a trip to the isolated country
this week. They wept as they described how their colleagues had been
tricked.
South Korea's unification ministry said
in a statement, reiterating comments from Thursday in response to North
Korea's first offer to send the families to the South, that the
defection took place according to the workers' "free will" and dismissed
the offer as propaganda.
"(The offer) is unacceptable, considering their hopes, free will, and international customs concerning humanitarian issues," it said.
About
29,000 people have fled North Korea and arrived in the South since the
war, including 1,276 last year, with numbers declining since a 2009
peak. In the first quarter of this year, 342 North Koreans arrived in
the South.
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