Interview reveals some North Korean defectors didn’t know where they were going

Tomas Quintana, the UN special rapporteur on the human rights situation in North Korea

UN special rapporteur recommends South Korean government investigate

After interviewing North Korean waitresses who worked at the North Korean Ryugyong restaurant in the Chinese city of Ningbo until they defected to South Korea in Apr. 2016, the United Nations special rapporteur for North Korean human rights said on July 10 that some of the waitresses came to South Korea without knowing where they were headed. This represents at least partial confirmation by the UN special rapporteur of allegations that have been raised not only by North Korea but also inside South Korea that the group defection had been orchestrated by the administration of then president Park Geun-hye.

Tomas Quintana, the UN special rapporteur on the human rights situation in North Korea, made the remarks during a press conference at the Press Center in Seoul’s city center on Tuesday morning. “My recommendation to the South Korean government is first, carry out a total and independent investigation to find out as soon as possible who is responsible,” Quintana went on to say.

If the waitresses were taken from China against their will, Quintana said, it could be regarded as a crime. He emphasized that investigating the possibility of criminality in regard to this incident is the duty and responsibility of the South Korean government. It remains to be seen how the South Korean government will respond.

When asked about his interview with the North Korean waitresses, Quintana said that they had clearly been “some shortcomings” in how they reached South Korea. “I am implying that they were subject to some kind of deceit in regard to where they were going,” he said, while conceding that he had gotten this information from interviews with only a few of the 12 waitresses who had defected.

On Tuesday, MINBYUN-Lawyers for a Democratic Society provided a more detailed account of Quintana’s interview with the North Korean waitresses. According to MINBYUN, the manager of the Ryugyong restaurant and two waitresses met with Quintana for one hour and 10 minutes at the UN human rights office in Seoul on the morning of July 4 and “testified in detail how they had arrived in South Korea after being ordered to travel under the impression that they were changing their workplace.”

“The two waitresses said that the South Korean government had deceived them by announcing the fact of their group defection the very next day, which received widespread coverage in the press and cut the waitresses off from contact with the outside,” MINBYUN also related.

MINBYUN said that when Quintana had asked the waitresses what they thought about North Korea’s demands for their repatriation, “the waitresses said that if the South Korean government carried out a thorough investigation and acknowledged its responsibility, everything would work out naturally.”

The waitresses asked Quintana to “approach this issue as if we were your daughters, as if we were part of your family,” MINBYUN said.

An image of 12 North Korean waitresses and the manager of the Ryugyong restaurant in China when they entered South Korea on Apr. 7, 2016, just before the general elections.

Decision to repatriate should be made by waitresses, Quintana says

Quintana did not say during the press conference whether either of the waitresses he interviewed had said they want to return to North Korea. In regard to whether the waitresses should be repatriated to North Korea, he reiterated that the decision was theirs to make and that their decision ought to be respected. He added that he thought it was appropriate for such issues to be resolved through ongoing dialogue between South and North Korea.

Allegations that the waitresses’ defection had been orchestrated by the NIS have not died down since the waitresses’ arrival in South Korea was announced in Apr. 2016. At the time, the Unification Ministry denied the allegations during a press conference in which it stated that the waitresses had “recently made up their minds to defect as a group.”

But the controversy was reignited this past May when a man surnamed Huh, the manager at the Ryugyong and the leader of the group of defectors, appeared on TV and claimed that he had brought the waitresses to South Korea without revealing their destination under orders from South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS).

Denials from unification ministry

Following Huh’s allegations, the Ministry of Unification announced its plans to look into the matter, noting that “new claims had been made” that “need to be verified.” But a Unification Ministry official who was contacted after Quintana’s press conference on Tuesday declined to elaborate: “My understanding is that [the waitresses who defected] entered South Korea of their own free will, and I have nothing further to say.”

The defection of the waitresses from the Ryugyong restaurant is a sensitive issue for inter-Korean relations. North Korea has attempted to pressure the South Korean government by tying the issue with holding unions for divided families on Aug. 15, the anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule. The leaders of South and North Korea agreed to hold these reunions during their inter-Korean summit at Panmunjeom on Apr. 27. But perhaps because of the issue’s explosiveness, North Korea has reportedly not yet directly brought it up in governmental talks.

By Kim Ji-eun, staff reporter

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