N Korean defector: South won’t let me leave

A NORTH KOREAN defector interrupted a United Nations human rights press conference in Seoul yesterday to plead tearfully to be allowed to go back.

Kim Ryon-hui, a dressmaker, arrived in South Korea seven years ago but has made several attempts to return to her family – including forging a passport, for which she was imprisoned, and falsely confessing to espionage, hoping she would be expelled.

“I’m a citizen of Pyongyang of the Democratic Republic of Korea,” Ms Kim told reporters at a briefing by Tomas Quintana, the UN’S special rapporteur on human rights in the North. “I have been forcefully detained in the South for seven years,” she added.

Pyongyang repeatedly cites Ms Kim’s case and has said it will not allow any more reunions of relatives divided by the Korean War until she – and 12 North Korean waitresses who it claims were kidnapped from a restaurant in China – are returned.

More than 30,000 North Koreans have fled poverty and repression in their isolated homeland to move to South Korea. But they often struggle to make a living in the capitalist south and fail to adjust to their new lives.