You mean to tell me that seven people got into this open boat, drifted South “accidentally, braved nine-foot waves, and now want to go back to North Korea?
Seven North Koreans expressed their desire to return home after they were found drifting south of the Yellow Sea border, a government source here said Tuesday. The North Koreans were detected by South Korean Coast Guard officers Monday afternoon and have since been under investigation by intelligence and police authorities.
“Roughly speaking, they appear to want it (repatriation),” the official, who is well-versed in North Korea-related intelligence, said on condition of anonymity because questioning is still under way. But the Unification Ministry in charge of inter-Korean affairs could not yet confirm whether the North Koreans wanted to return home or intended to settle in the South. [Yonhap]
Roughly speaking? How roughly do you need to speak to them before they figure South Korea is just like the North? I suppose anything is possible, but in the context of an eerily similar incident involving a North Korean soldier this year, it seems suspicious.
And we all remember how the last such incident worked out, don’t we?
My suspicions may be paranoid, but frankly, I still don’t have a strong sense of what Lee Myung Bak’s game plan is with respect to North Korea, and how well that game plan has been disseminated to the players on the field. For the most part, I suspect Lee wants Sunshine but isn’t willing to pay up or kiss North Korean ass for it, and expects a little reciprocity in return. If that is the plan, it has long since collided with the hard reality that North Korea doesn’t do reciprocity.
There are any number of possibilities and it is not at all necessary that they are refugees desperate to re-settle in the South as you appear to conclude.
They could have been out fishing or diving for oysters or something else along those lines. It could be some kind of DPRK dummy defection or test… They could be spies.
These people may be strong supporters of the regime (probably a prerequisiste for living in the border area) or they could simply be regular people who want to return for family reasons; supposedly they’ve got friends, family a house and jobs.
There IS something resembling a middle class there and the people who belong to that group probably do not want to defect even though the sight of the relative affluence of South Korea was probably a surprise to them. It might all have happened by chance and they genuinely had trouble making up their minds.
You must have skipped over the parts where I said, “I suppose anything is possible,” and “[m]y suspicions may be paranoid.”
Maybe they wanted to get back home and listen to Beyonce
http://worldfocus.org/blog/2009/11/11/sweet-dreams-of-beyonce-in-n-korean-peoples-paradise/8247/
guess is that this some sort of grassroots, subversive North Korean tourism project: “tourists” set off in boats, pretending to go fishing. Then, they “accidently†cross the NLL, get picked up by South Korean naval forces and get a quick tour of Seoul before heading back. A perfect day trip!
Does anyone know what happens to the repatriaters after they get back? Are they cloistered away from society and sent to the concentration camps because they’ve “seen too much†or are treated as heroes for choosing to return home? Or something else…
I would guess the former.