N Korea dubs South 'wicked terrorist' over refugees

SEOUL - North Korea has denounced South Korean authorities as "wicked terrorists" who orchestrated the airlift of 468 North Korean refugees as part of a plot to bring down the communist system.

In a long commentary on last month's operation to get the refugees to South Korea from Vietnam, the North's official KCNA news agency said at the weekend the defectors had been abducted and should be returned to the North without delay.

South Korea says the mission to get the largest single group to the South since the 1950-1953 Korean War was humanitarian. Aid groups say 100,000 North Koreans, and possibly twice that number, are camped out or hiding in the region, mostly in China.

KCNA said the North's National Reconciliation Council -- which it uses as a conduit for links to South Korean non-governmental groups -- had issued an indictment accusing South Korea of using agents and anti-North groups to abduct North Korean citizens on business or visiting relatives in China.

"After abducting a big group of DPRK citizens the wicked terrorists carried out their second-phase operation to take them to South Korea under the cloak of refuge-seeking," KCNA said.

DPRK is short for the North's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

"This thrice-cursed crime is a wanton violation of the basic spirit of the June 15 North-South joint declaration," KCNA said, referring to a document agreed at a summit between the leaders of the two Koreas in 2000.

The operation was "a blatant challenge and an unpardonable hostile act intended to bring down the political system in the DPRK", it said in language reminiscent of the accusations East Germany often made against West Germany about asylum-seekers.

The agency said the South Korean government had struck an economic deal with Vietnam to allow the refugees, who aid workers say had made their way to Vietnam from China, to leave.

The South's Yonhap news agency quoted members of parliament in Seoul as saying North Korea had protested to Vietnam about its part in the operation. This would make it difficult for defectors to use that route in future.

The South Korean government had acted like "cat burglars", flying the refugees to the South on two chartered aircraft against their will, KCNA said.

"This is, therefore, terrorism perpetrated through the exercise of mental and physical deterrent force to abuse human rights," it said, reiterating that the United States had orchestrated the operation.

Despite the North's protest, the South Korean government is considering seeking China's cooperation to find out the exact size and status of North Korean refugees staying in China so as to secure their safety on humanitarian grounds, Yonhap reported.

North Korea has threatened unspecified retaliatory measures. That prompted the South's National Intelligence Service to issue a rare warning that the North could be planning to use terrorism.

- REUTERS