Refugees Granted Asylum

Twenty-five North Korean asylum seekers arrived Friday for a three-day stopover in the Philippines, before heading for South Korea in the largest North Korean mass defection since the Korean War.

The six families and two orphaned girls were whisked out of the Spanish embassy in Beijing little more than 24 hours since they dashed inside their refuge past stunned Chinese paramilitary guards.

"They will be brought to an undisclosed place. Let's give them a little privacy," Presidential National Security Adviser Roilo Golez said after meeting the group on board a commercial plane that flew into Manila from Beijing. He told reporters they would stay for three days.

Earlier, Philippine Foreign Undersecretary Franklin Ebdalin said the asylum seekers would be quarantined overnight in the airport's transit area and leave for South Korea Saturday. Golez said the change of plan was due to security reasons.

Golez, who greeted the defectors inside the plane with the Spanish ambassador and South Korean officials, told Reuters by phone all 25 were wearing blue baseball caps with "Beijing" in white lettering emblazoned on them.

"They looked stressed, considering what they went through. But the children were running around," he said.

All wore heavy clothing, coming from cold Beijing to tropical Manila. There were six children among them.

"According to the Koreans, it would not look nice for them if those North Koreans would arrive in South Korea immediately after Beijing and Manila," Ebdalin said.

"By allowing, in fact, Manila as a transit point we will be antagonizing North Korea but we are doing it for humanitarian reasons."

South Korea has said it would accept the group once it was sure they wanted to come to the South, underscoring Seoul's long-standing policy of accepting asylum seekers from the North.

The Philippines and Singapore served as third-country conduits in a similar incident last June when a family seeking political asylum walked into the UNHCR office in Beijing.

Beijing's second major North Korean defection case in under a year threw China into a potentially embarrassing tangle.

The defections put Beijing in a sticky diplomatic fix, torn between old communist ally North Korea, economic partner South Korea and the United Nations, which favors giving refugee status.

Again there was no sign China had changed its policy on the tens of thousands of North Koreans who have fled their hungry homeland, hit by a series of natural disasters in recent years, to take refuge among their ethnic kin in northeast China.

The defections have thrown a spotlight on the plight of North Koreans fleeing across the border into China, some of whom make long and arduous treks in attempts to reach South
Korea.

The 25, who said they had escaped North Korea before only to be forced back by Chinese officials, had threatened suicide if they were sent home again, the Tokyo-based Life Funds for North Korean Refugees said in a statement. Some said they were carrying rat poison to kill themselves if they were sent home.

Norbert Vollertsen, a German doctor who once lived in North Korea and helped to organize the asylum bid, said more such actions were planned, with a growing number of North Koreans each time.

"They can't stop 25 people," he said, "and they will not stop for sure 150 people."

On Thursday morning, two North Korean asylum-seekers approached the Spanish Embassy first, occupying the guards while others streamed in through the open gate. The men then shook off the guards and rushed in themselves.

Life Funds for North Korean Refugees, a Tokyo-based organization that assisted the group, distributed statements by some members.

One man, who used a pseudonym, said hunger forced him and his wife to flee to China in 1996, but they were caught and sent home. He described being beaten and kicked in detention back in North Korea before the couple escaped the country again last year.

"North Korea," he wrote, "is a gigantic prison."

The United States, frequently critical of China's human rights record, said the North Koreans should not have to return.

"We have always felt that North Koreans should not be returned to North Korea because they would face persecution there," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.

There was no comment from Pyongyang or the North Korean embassy in Beijing.