Words in the News Monday 18 March 2002 Vocabulary from the news. Listen to and read the report then find explanations of difficult words below.
North Korean defection Summary: A group of 25 asylum seekers from North Korea have arrived in South Korea after bursting into the Spanish Embassy in Beijing last Thursday and asking to be sent to South Korea. This report from Caroline Gluck:
This is the biggest group of North Koreans to defect en masse since the end of the Korean war nearly fifty years ago. The North Koreans will spend their first few days in a safe house, where they will receive medical checks and be debriefed by officials. They will then be taken to a government-run rehabilitation centre to help them adjust to their new lives in the South. The group made a dramatic bid for freedom last week, bursting into the Spanish embassy in Beijing and asking to be sent to South Korea.
It's the second major defection by North Koreans in Beijing within a year and it's bound to have repercussions. Human rights groups worry that there may be a further crackdown against North Korean escapees by the Chinese authorities. In general China does not consider them as refugees but economic migrants and has repatriated those caught on its territory under a bilateral treaty with North Korea.
As many as two to three-hundred-thousand North Koreans are thought to be hiding in China having escaped their country because of serious food shortages or for political reasons. South Korea's Ministry of Unification is already reviewing its policy on how best to handle the increasing number of defectors, with arrivals roughly doubling each year.
