Letter to Office of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights

Pyongyang, September 6, 2004 (KCNA) - The DPRK Society for Human Rights 
Studies and the Central Committee of the DPRK Red Cross Society on 
August 28 sent a letter to the Office of the United Nations High 
Commissioner for Human Rights complaining to it about the criminal 
actions taken by the U.S. and south Korean authorities to abduct DPRK 
citizens and take them to south Korea under the mask of "defectors."  
The south Korean authorities perpetrated such terrorism as alluring and 
abducting 468 DPRK citizens in broad daylight and taking them to south 
Korea under the mask of "defectors from the north" in two batches on 
July 27 and 28, the letter said, and continued: 

It is not the first time that the authorities committed such unethical 
and inhumanitarian crime. They have, in fact, systematically abducted 
DPRK citizens for years. 

This was an organized and premeditated allurement and abduction carried 
out under the manipulation of the U.S. as part of its hostile policy 
toward the DPRK, the policy aimed to tarnish the dignity and the 
authority of the DPRK and undermine it. 

It is an open secret that the U.S. has deliberately dreamed up the issue 
of "defectors from the north" in a bid to internationalize and 
politicize it. 

Pursuant to the U.S. policy to stifle the DPRK the south Korean 
authorities have set up in countries and regions close to the DPRK 
institutions and organizations staffed with many agents who specialize 
in alluring and abducting north Korean "defectors" to perpetrate 
systematic abduction and terrorism against DPRK citizens. 

The authorities' planned act of alluring and abducting DPRK citizens has 
divided more families and relatives in the reunification-oriented era 
after the publication of the June 15 joint declaration, adding to the 
nation's pain and misfortune. 

It is something deplorable that families in the north and the south have 
lived separated from each other for more than half a century due to 
outsiders, without being able to visit or see each other. It can not but 
be a tragedy for the nation that there cropped up another sort of issue 
of separated families and relatives in the peacetime, not in the 
wartime. 

The U.S. is keen to bring down the system in the DPRK under the pretext 
of its "human rights performance" while going frantic in its moves to 
destroy the DPRK through military threat, blackmail and economic 
sanctions and blockade. It should stop at once the base and clumsy 
operation for the "exile of north Korean defectors." 

It plans to take groups of abducted DPRK citizens to what it called 
"concentration camps for north Korean defectors" set up in areas close 
to the DPRK. This clearly proves that it has not entitled to talk about 
"human rights" and "freedom" and it is an empire of evil with the 
poorest human rights record in which the basic principle of 
humanitarianism is not observed. 

It is our hope that the office, true to its original mission to observe 
humanitarianism and respect human rights, would move to stop the U.S. 
and the south Korean authorities from carrying out such operation.