Seven NK Refugees Enter SK School; All Are Swiftly Betrayed, Arrested, and Repatriated

I wish the South Korean government would stop pretending that it makes protests against things like this when the Chinese are so conspicuously comfortable about ingoring them:

Seven North Korean defectors who entered the compound of a Korean international school in the Northwestern Chinese city of Yantai, Shandong Province, on Aug. 29 and requested safe passage to South Korea have been returned to the North. The group consisted of two men and five women, four of them from the same family.

The Foreign Ministry on Friday confirmed they were repatriated. “Despite our request for a transfer of custody, Chinese security forces apprehended them and returned the group to the North a month later,” an official said.

This could be the start of a more hardline approach to North Korean refugees in Beijing. Since 2004, some 100 North Korean escapees managed to make their way into international schools in China, but this is the first time China has deported them. “This is a deviation from China’s usual practice,” the ministry official said. Last November, China arrested 62 defectors who had been staying on the outskirts of Beijing and repatriated most of them.

The government last Thursday called in Chinese Ambassador to South Korea Ning Fukui to protest against the deportation of North Korean defectors. On Monday, the Foreign Ministry released a statement urging China to prevent similar occurrences in the future. Beijing says the step was a deterrent because a growing number of defectors have made it difficult for international schools to go about their normal business.