PYONGYANG: A senior North Korean official on Wednesday ruled out any more reunions for family members separated decades ago by war unless 12 citizens from the reclusive state who ended up in South Korea are returned.
The North says the 12 were kidnapped while the South says they defected voluntarily.
The relatives separated by the conflict, which ended more than 60 years ago, are the most emotional manifestation of the division of the Korean peninsula.
With no direct contact between North and South, not even telephone links, many have no idea whether their parents, siblings or children are still alive.
A series of highly charged meetings were held in recent years, when ties across the Demilitarised Zone were warmer, enabling around 4,000 of those in the South to see their relatives for the first time in decades.
But the last such reunion was in 2015 before inter-Korean relations were frozen amid North Korea’s drive for nuclear weapons.
Ruling and opposition parties in the South agreed earlier this week to seek a new reunion in August to mark the anniversary of the end of the Second World War.
But Kim Yong-chol, of the North’s Committee for the Peaceful Unification of Korea, poured cold water on the proposal Wednesday.
“At the moment another issue is more important and more urgent,” he told AFP in Pyongyang, saying that the 12 workers who defected from a restaurant in China were “being detained by force in South Korea”, along with Kim Ryon-hui, a dressmaker who says she wants to go back to the North.
“They should be returned immediately.”
The father of Ri Ji-ye, one of the 12, he said, “died with his eyes open and cursing the conservative elements who have detained his daughter”.
“Unless Kim Ryon-hui and 12 other women workers are returned immediately there can never be any kind of humanitarian cooperation. And this is our principled stand.”
Rights groups say that would-be defectors who are returned to the North, usually from China, face severe punishment.
The 12 waitresses at a North Korean state-run restaurant in the Chinese city of Ningbo defected to the South in April 2016, making headlines as the largest group defection in years.
While Seoul said they fled voluntarily, Pyongyang claimed they were kidnapped by South Korea’s National Intelligence Service and has waged a vocal campaign through its state media for their return.
The waitresses were released from Seoul government custody last August but have never made public appearances.
Citing government sources, South Korean media have said the women — mostly in their early 20s — have enrolled in universities but remain under strict government protection provided to high-profile defectors.
