400 Who Fled North Korea Stage Protest in Bangkok


By CHOE SANG-HUN
Published: April 26, 2007 NY Times

SEOUL, April 25 — More than 400 North Korean refugees have gone on a hunger strike in a detention center in Bangkok to protest poor sanitary conditions and delays in their resettlement in South Korea, human rights advocates and officials said Wednesday.

Also on Wednesday, three young North Koreans who had been detained in Laos for five months for illegal entry were flown to Thailand after South Korean diplomats won their release a day earlier, refugee advocates said.

The refugees in Bangkok, including 100 men and 314 women who had fled North Korea and entered Thailand through China, began their hunger strike Tuesday evening, said Lee Ho Taeg, secretary general of the International Campaign to Block the Repatriation of North Korean Refugees.

“The hygiene is terrible in the detention center,” Mr. Lee said. “More than 300 women are packed into a facility designed to hold only 100. It has four toilets, and two or three are always broken.”

The supervisor of the Bangkok Immigration Detention Center, Lt. Col. Prawit Sirithorn, was quoted by Reuters as saying of the refugees: “Nothing’s happening. Some of them might have been stressed out because of the heat.”

But in Seoul, Foreign Minister Song Min-soon confirmed the hunger strike. “We are working with the Thai authorities to solve this problem smoothly,” he said at a news briefing.

Mr. Lee said that by Wednesday afternoon a standoff had developed between Thai immigration officials and the refugees. The officials were threatening to send the refugees back to North Korea unless they ended their strike, and the refugees were demanding airline tickets to Seoul.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/26/world/...l?ref=asia