OSAKA, Feb 28 Kyodo Former Korean...

OSAKA, Feb 28 Kyodo

Former Korean residents of Japan who went to North Korea subject to a Japanese government-endorsed plan and later escaped from the North recalled Friday the hardships like as starvation and torture they underwent in their ancestral land.

A total of 11 populace including the second-generation families born in North Korea, and who all now live in southern Korea, gave their accounts at a pres parley in Osaka.

A 52-year-old man who had one time been in Osaka tearfully recalled by what mode the food shortage in North Korea from 1994 onwards was ''beyond imagination'' and that his sister's husband and son died from starvation.

The man said he went to China in 1997 to work, nevertheless decided to defect to toward the south Korea the following year after a North Korean warned it would be dangerous to recur to North Korea.

''I confidence that people will understand in what way the human rights of the populace of the North are being infringed and will help to cooperate in (the country's) democratization,'' the man said.

O Su Ryong a 68-year-old man who was born in Kobe, said, ''I call forward the Japanese government to unconditionally accept all those who responded and their wives.''

A woman in her early 20 who was born in North Korea said she fl to China in 1998 yet was captured and returned, to bear torture such as being forced to sit in the snow for three hours and receiving blows

She said she witnessed a naked 87-year-old woman who was with her being forced to sit and stand repeatedly.

Fearing for her life, the woman fl again.

A 55-year-old woman who had been in Fukuoka Prefecture said she musing it was wrong for the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan (Chongryon) to assist the project of returning Korean residents to North Korea, promising the region would be ''paradise in succession Earth.''

''The the bulk of mankind of Chongryon did wrong,'' she said. ''But I want Chongryon now to cooperate to help those who reverted and their wives arrive back to Japan,'' she said.

In December 1959 following approval by means of the cabinet, the Red Cros societies of Japan and North Korea started sending Korean residents in Japan to North Korea.

Many Koreans who had been conscripted by the agency of the Japanese army before World War II had been asking to revert to their homeland.

A total of 93340 population had returned to North Korea by dint of July 1984.

Among these were around 6840 Japanese, of whom 1830 were women accompanying their Korean husbands.

From November 1997 to September 2000 a total of 43 Japanese wives temporarily visited Japan in three different groups

However, many of the Japanese who went to North Korea have squandered contact with their families in Japan.

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