A
group of 13 North Koreans working at a restaurant in an unidentified
country defected to South Korea this week, Seoul's unification ministry
said Friday.
The South Korean government declined to provide any personal information about the group or identify the route they took in defecting, Yonhap News Agency reports.
The
group, including one male manager and 12 female employees, arrived
in South Korea on Thursday, according to the ministry that
oversees inter-Korean affairs.
South Korea’s spy agency estimates
that North Korea runs about 130 restaurants in other countries — about
100 in China and the others in Russia, Southeast Asia and South Asia.
Restaurants
operated abroad are an important source of hard currency income for
Pyongyang but have faced economic difficulties since the U.N. Security
Council imposed sanctions on North Korea for its recent nuclear test and
long-range rocket launch.
"It marked the first time that a group
of North Koreans at the same restaurant has opted to come to South Korea
at once," Jeong Joon-hee, a ministry spokesman, told reporters in
Seoul, according to Yonhap. "The government has accepted their request
to come to South Korea on humanitarian grounds."
Friday's public announcement is unusual for South Korea, which typically keeps a low-profile about defections.
The defectors told South Korean officials that they learned about the South and began to distrust North Korean propaganda after watching South Korean TV dramas and movies and searching the Internet while living overseas, Jeong said.
The Unification Ministry’s website says more than 29,000 North Koreans have defected to South Korea as of March, although group defections are rare.
The Associated Press called a number of North Korean restaurants in Asia, and all were open except one located in the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Danang, Vietnam. A person who answered the telephone at the hotel said the Pyongyang Restaurant
closed two weeks ago and all the Korean staff left the country. She
declined to provide more details or identify herself. It was unclear
whether the restaurant was connected to the defections.
In a report to the U.N. General Assembly in October, 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 AP reports.
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