Steve Quayle News Alerts

June 14, 2002

South Korea and China faced a growing diplomatic row on Friday after Chinese police detained a North Korean would-be asylum seeker at the South Korean consulate in Beijing. As a measure of Seoul’s displeasure, the South Korean Foreign Ministry called in China’s ambassador on Friday to protest and demand the Chinese hand back the North Korean man.

“WE REGISTERED a protest to the Chinese side and demanded they undo what was done,” President Kim Dae-jung’s spokeswoman, Park Sun-sook, told reporters.
On Friday, China denied any official violation of the South Korean consulate and expressed strong displeasure at Seoul diplomats who tried to prevent police taking away a North Korean asylum seeker from it.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said Chinese guards who entered the consulate on Thursday morning to drag the man away were not employed by the Chinese government, but by a private firm that provides guards for the diplomatic compound.

CONTRADICTORY STORIES
South Korea says police forced their way into the consulate. There were televised scuffles later outside the compound in which at least one South Korean diplomat was hurt.
But China said police arrived hours later to take the asylum-seeker away from a guard house outside the compound and South Korean diplomats tried to stop them doing their jobs, Liu said.
“Their behavior was extremely incompatible with their diplomatic status and violated international law. China expresses extreme displeasure,” Liu said.
The detained man’s son managed to stay inside, joining 17 other North Koreans in a mounting refugee problem that has been overshadowed by bigger events such as the Middle East and tensions between India and Pakistan, as well as the World Cup.
South Korean media were outraged by the incident.
The Korean Peninsula
“It is unimaginable in any civilized country that police intrude into foreign premises, drag out asylum seekers and even beat up protesting diplomats,” said the newspaper Chosun Ilbo.

GROWING DEFECTIONS
Japan went through a similar diplomatic incident last month involving five North Koreans at its consulate in the Chinese city of Shenyang.
The five were allowed to leave for South Korea. China has let 38 North Koreans leave since March after they got into foreign missions. There are two North Koreans at Canada’s embassy.
In Beijing on Friday, China had put up barbed wire fencing in front of at least two gates of the previously lightly guarded South Korean consulate. A police van was outside the compound.
As the asylum numbers grow and diplomats struggle to cope, memories of similar scenes of large numbers of East Germans at West German missions across Eastern Europe in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of communism spring to mind.

“China and North Korea are afraid about the media,” said Norbert Vollertsen, a German doctor who worked in North Korea before being expelled for speaking out about human rights.
“They may stop two North Korean defectors — but they cannot stop 200,” he said in an e-mail to journalists. Vollertsen has said he wants to emulate the 1989 asylum crisis in Europe to bring down North Korea’s communist state.

G8 CONSIDERS KOREA
The United States said it was extremely concerned about the latest incident.
Foreign ministers of the Group of Eight (G8) said after a meeting in Canada they recognized the need to continue to urge the North “to respond constructively to international concerns over security, non-proliferation and humanitarian issues.”
The G8 comprises Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States.
The U.S. envoy on North Korea policy will have talks with North Korean officials in New York on Friday to prepare for talks at a higher level, a State Department official said on Thursday.

That would be the first contact since North Korea said in April it wanted to take up a U.S. offer of unconditional talks.
North Korea has seemed to be growing moderately impatient. On Thursday, the North Korean Foreign Ministry complained Washington was attaching strings to the talks offer because Secretary of State Colin Powell set out a list of areas where Washington wants to see progress for relations to improve.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/765171.asp