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23 days after their sudden repatriation from Laos through China, nine teenagers have been thrown into the public eye in North Korea. Chosun Central News Agency revealed news of them on June 20th, covering a press conference held in Pyongyang during which the nine alleged that they were kept in China and taken to Laos against their will.
The piece alleges that the nine had been living at the home of a South Korean minister in China for between five months and three years before they were taken by car across the Chinese border into Laos. However, the Laotian government, realizing that the nine were being kidnapped and taken to South Korea, helped them to return to Pyongyang.
The home of the minister, Jang Ha Jin, and his wife was in Dandong, just across the Sino-North Korean border from Sinuiju, the piece notes.
It also alleges abuses committed against the nine, saying that their freedom in China was circumscribed and they were beaten with an umbrella or baseball bat if they failed to memorize religious texts properly.
“They wrote ’General Kim Jong Il is eternal’ and ‘Long live the Chosun Workers’ Party’ in their notebooks, and when the couple saw the writing, they called them ‘commies’ and ‘communist spies,’ took off their shoes and beat them mercilessly,” it adds.
The nine are alleged to have explained that although they had left the motherland, they couldn’t forget the love of the North Korean leader, and were unable to erase the image of his portrait from their hearts.
Ever since the nine were repatriated at the end of last month, it had been expected that they would be instrumentalized for use in state propaganda in some way.
