Former defector presses N.K. to let him see children

Oh Kil-nam, a retired economist, shows his application for a reunion with his two daughters detained in North Korea at the Korean Red Cross office in Seoul on Sept. 4. (Yonhap News)

WASHINGTON (AFP) ― A South Korean economist who defected to the North and back again pleaded Tuesday for a meeting with his two daughters after a U.N. group said they were arbitrarily detained by the communist state.

Oh Kil-nam, 70, said that he was enticed to move to North Korea in 1985 when he was in Germany on promises of employment and treatment for his wife Shin Suk-ja’s hepatitis.

Oh said the family instead endured rigorous indoctrination and that he was tasked with luring more South Koreans. Oh escaped in 1986 when he slipped authorities a note reading, “Help me,” as he presented his passport at Copenhagen’s airport.

The ex-defector has been campaigning ever since to see his family. While he long made no headway, he said North Korea recently gave limited information on his family when the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention took up the case.

The U.N. group said that Oh’s wife and daughters were being arbitrary held.

In a letter to the body, North Korea said that Shin Suk-ja had died of hepatitis and that his daughters no longer considered Oh their father.

Oh was visiting Washington in hopes of raising more international pressure.

He said that he would also go to Germany and was asking the two governments to urge North Korea to allow him to see his children, if only briefly.

“Despite all the brainwashing, I believe that my daughters Hae-won and Kyu-won’s fundamental feelings toward me will not have changed,” Oh told an event held by the Washington-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.

“I think that if we could spend a month together that they would open up and speak truthfully to me. I have faith in that,” Oh said.

Oh said he also wanted evidence that his wife was dead. Oh has not heard from his daughters, who would now be in their mid- to late-30s, since 1991 when he received a recording pleading for him to return to North Korea.

Defectors have said that they saw his family members in the notorious Yodok camp for political prisoners.