On April 8, South Korea announced that 13 North Koreans working at a restaurant in China defected to the South. It was the largest group of defectors since Kim Jong Un became the Supreme Leader in 2011.
In tears and clearly distraught, seven North Korean women met with CNN reporter Will Ripley this week to say 12 other waitresses were tricked by their manager to defect to South Korea.
All of them worked together at a Pyongyang-run restaurant in Ningbo, China.
READ MORE: North Korean defectors: brutal work abroad better than life back home
Overseas North Korean workers are usually thought to be chosen largely because of their loyalty.
North Korean defections are a bitter point of contention between the rival Koreas. Pyongyang usually accuses Seoul of enticing North Korean citizens to defect, something Seoul denies.
North Korea is calling the incident a mass abduction and the remaining waitresses claimed they were forced to follow their manager.
“In mid-March our restaurant manager gathered us together and told us that our restaurant would be moved to somewhere in Southeast Asia,” head waitress Choe Hye Yong told CNN.
The South Korean Ministry of Unification told CNN in statement: “13 defectors voluntarily decided to leave and pushed ahead with the escape without any help from the outside. Following their voluntary request to defect, our government accepted them from a humanitarian point of view.”
On Friday, South Korea rejected the North’s extraordinary move to send North Korean relatives to Seoul to reunite with the 13 restaurant workers.
“The families of the abductees are eagerly asking for face-to-face contact with their daughters as they were forced to part,” said the message carried by Pyongyang’s state run media the Korean Central News Agency.
Seoul’s Unification Ministry responded in a brief statement that it cannot accept the North’s request because the restaurant workers decided on their own to resettle in the South.
The 13 defectors told South Korean officials that they learned about the South and began to distrust North Korean propaganda by watching South Korean TV dramas and movies and from searching the Internet while living overseas.
In a report to the U.N. General Assembly in October last year, Marzuki Darusman, a U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in North Korea, said more than 50,000 North Koreans are working in foreign countries, mostly in China and Russia, providing a source of money for Pyongyang. He cited various studies, including a 2012 report by the International Network for the Human Rights of North Korean Overseas Labor that estimated North Korea was earning as much as $2.3 billion annually from the workers it sent abroad.
The seven North Korean women are holding out hope that their friends will have a change of heart and return to the hermit country.
“Comrade Kim Jong Un is yearning for all of you to return. We are awaiting your return, unable to sleep or eat. Please hold on a bit longer, gain victory and come back to our country,” said Choe.
– with files from Jenny Sung
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