Nine North Korean refugees sail to Japan

[unreal.livejournal.com]

Japanese Coast Guards say they have found a boat carrying nine people, who say they are North Koreans, off the country's west coast.

Sailors found the wooden boat, carrying three men, three women and three boys, off the Noto Peninsula near the city of Kanazawa.

The group told Japanese officials they wanted to go to South Korea.

In recent years more and more North Koreans have been making their way to the South, but rarely via Japan.

Most cross the border into China before travelling on to South Korea, often via South East Asian nations.


Japanese officials said they were alerted to the boat - an 8m-long (26ft) wooden vessel - by fishermen.

The group, who appeared to be in good health, said that they had been sailing for five days.

"They said they left a port in North Korea last Thursday, hoping to reach South Korea," a Japan Coast Guard spokesman said.

Only two other groups of North Korean refugees have arrived in Japan in the past.

A family of four arrived in 2007, 20 years after 11 crew members of a North Korean ship sailed into a Japanese port. Both groups were transferred to South Korea.

More than 21,000 North Koreans have arrived in South Korea since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War, and in recent years the rate has been increasing because of food shortages and economic hardship.

Such incidents tend to anger the North Korean authorities, who demand their citizens back. China repatriates North Korean refugees, but South Korea accepts them and helps them start a new life.

Earlier this year, a tense row erupted between the two Koreas after four sailors whose fishing boat drifted into Southern waters opted not to return home.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura said Japan would "make an appropriate decision based on past examples" about what to do with the group.

Source: bbc

Comments

[noir-shiroi.livejournal.com]

I saw this on the news today but I wasn't really paying much attention so I wasn't sure exactly what had happened. Glad to finally know.

[ababobaby.livejournal.com]

Glad they won't send them back. Those people sent back had to go through the wrath of the North Koreans :(

[ababobaby.livejournal.com]

Yup :/ I've watched in Discovery Channel how they keep a keen eye on them. They stayed in like an abandoned house, and the husband of a woman there smoked and so they were discovered? Something like that

[umetraehi.livejournal.com]

I think they go through china because of the lack of millitary presence that the N/S korea border has. As for what happens when they get back from what Ive read from news articles and a few documentaries its essentially labor camps when you get worked to death for various reasons. No one is really sure though because the north denies it and foreign media isnt allowed access to really anything

[umetraehi.livejournal.com]

I know if they really are true (I think one of the International human rights groups is looking into it now) that would be a horribly drawn out way to die

[padmik.livejournal.com]

it's good they won't send them back. it's already terrifying trying to escape and being sent back would just be horror.

[lysblack.livejournal.com]

thank god they won't be sent back, i hope that from now on they can live their lives a bit more peacefully.