North Korean family seeks asylum in South

The refugees said they feared harsh punishment if they returned to North Korea

BEIJING, China -- A family of seven North Korean asylum-seekers has arrived in South Korea, ending a two and a half year odyssey that took them through China and then brief transit stopovers in Singapore and Manila.

An Asiana Airlines plane carrying the family landed at 6:13 p.m. (0913 GMT) at Incheon international airport, 50 kilometers (30 miles) west of Seoul, following a four-hour flight from Manila, airport officials said.

North Korea has warned that South Korea's acceptance of the family of could damage reconciliation between the two countries.

In its first official response to the incident, Pyongyang dubbed the family of seven "border transgressors" and accused the United Nations of overstepping its duties in handling the case.

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"The UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees) office illegally dealt with the issue ... beyond its authority, (and) thus laid obstacles in the process of the inter-Korean reconciliation," the Foreign Ministry said, in a statement carried by the North's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). The Jung family -- two grandparents, their daughter, son-in-law and three grandchildren -- had sought asylum at the UNHCR's Beijing office on Tuesday.

They left Beijing on Friday and flew to Singapore and then on to the Philippines.

North Korea said the incident had "incited confrontation on the Korean Peninsula."

Seoul has spearheaded a drive for improved ties with the North following a historic summit between the country's leaders last year that was designed to bring to a close half a century of confrontation.

The UNHCR supported the family's claim they would likely face punishment if returned to the North, in part because of drawings by one of the children, depicting hardships in the North, that have been published in South Korea.

Arranging their departure from China took three days of intense negotiations between the UNHCR and China, with Beijing allowing the family to leave on humanitarian grounds.

China dodged the family's demand for refugee status to avoid angering its ally North Korea and stem a potential flood of asylum-seekers across its land border with the famine-stricken Stalinist state.

Under a treaty with Pyongyang Beijing is normally obliged to return those who flee the secretive Stalinist state to North Korea.

It has a long-standing policy of treating those fleeing North Korea as economic migrants to be repatriated.

Welcoming the decision to let the family go, South Korea said it would work closely with the UNHCR to ensure the family were settled in safe place. "To be correct, the family are not refugees but those who illegally crossed the border," said Pyongyang's Foreign Ministry.

"When the country (North Korea) was under difficult conditions, those ordinary people crossed the border to go to China, ready to come back once conditions in the homeland get better."

The North also denied that it punished citizens for such transgressions.

Contact stalled

Aid groups estimate that 150,000 to 300,000 North Koreans have slipped into China and Mongolia to escape the natural disasters and famine that have ravaged their homeland since 1995.

KCNA said there is "a handful" of such cases and vowed "heightened vigilance" in the wake of the most recent incident.

Last year, the two Koreas pledged to work together to end a half-century of confrontation.

But contact between the countries has stalled in recent months, partly because of a more cautious approach to the North by the U.S. administration of President George W. Bush.

The two Koreas remain technically at war under a 1953 armed truce and Washington maintains 37,000 U.S. troops in the South to help safeguard the pact.

China's dilemma

The case put Chinese authorities in a dilemma having to choose between angering its ally, North Korea, by giving the family sanctuary; or forcing the family to return and appearing inhumane just two weeks before a vote on Beijing's bid for the 2008 Olympic Games.

Observers say China had feared opening the floodgates to a tide of North Korean refugees if it had agreed to give the family asylum.

Western diplomats said that by raising the health issue, Beijing appeared to have found a face-saving way out of its dilemma.

Last year, China returned seven other North Korean asylum-seekers to North Korea over U.N. objections. South Korean officials have said six of them were subsequently imprisoned.

Thousands of North Koreans have fled North Korea to China in recent years, fleeing poverty, a repressive regime and an on-going famine which aid agencies say has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

Reuters contributed to this report.