[USFK Forums] Reporting spat delays return of reunion kin [JoongAng]

[C. Y. Lee]

Uploaded by C. Y. Lee on Thursday, March 23, 2006

Reporting spat delays return of reunion kin

After a standoff over a reporters’ stories, North relents, allows buses to go south

The JoongAng Daily

March 23, 2006 ㅡ In the wake of a quarrel with South Korean journalists covering the inter-Korean family reunion at Mount Kumgang in North Korea, Pyongyang yesterday barred a group of 99 aged South Koreans from leaving the country. They relented at about 8 p.m., after the group had spent several hours waiting on buses and then in their hotel rooms.

North Korea was protesting the use by some journalists of the term “a South Korean kidnapped to North Korea” in some reports describing some of the North Korean participants in the reunion.

A day earlier, officials seized videotape that broadcast journalists were attempting to transmit to Seoul by satellite because of the use of the offending term. The event opened at Mount Kumgang on Monday.

A group of 99 South Koreans arrived to be reunited with 269 North Korean kin, among whom was Cheon Mun-seok, a South Korean fisherman who was detained by a North Korean patrol boat in June 1969 and taken to the North. He was reunited with his wife, Seo Sun-ae, after 37 years of separation.

The problems began Monday, when journalists from MBC and SBS described Mr. Cheon as a victim of a North Korean kidnapping as they described his meeting with his wife. The North shut down the satellite links.

On Tuesday, the North Korean officials demanded that the reporters involved in the incidents remain in their hotel rooms; other pool reporters then decided not to cover the planned reunion events. Yesterday afternoon, they abruptly demanded that an SBS reporter join the departing South Koreans to return home rather than covering the second half of the reunion.

He refused, and the standoff continued into yesterday evening. The reporter was eventually allowed to stay, although it was unclear whether any other conditions were attached by the North Korean authorities. The second group of South Koreans at the two-part reunion are expected to leave the South today, as scheduled, for the North Korean resort.

by Ser Myo-ja



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