From: "Juche 86" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2001 04:54:22 +0100 To: "Juche Insurrection" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [Juche Insurrection] AFP: Pyongyang Festival Turns Into North-South Dispute AFP. 15 August 2001. Pyongyang festival turns into North-South dispute. SEOUL -- South Korean organisers threatened Wednesday to withdraw a delegation on a controversial trip to the communist North just hours after their arrival in Pyongyang, media reports said. A dispute erupted after 150 members of the delegation of 337 social and religious activists went to a unification festival in Pyongyang they had previously agreed to boycott, according to pooled media reports. With relations with the North becoming more strained, the South Korean government only allowed the group to fly to Pyongyang on Wednesday morning after they signed a pledge to stay away from political activities. Twenty thousand North Koreans were at a festival around a new monument unveiled in the city on Tuesday, the reports said. North Korean officials told the South Koreans the public wanted them to go and laid on five buses to take about 150 people there, they added. Kim Chang-Soo, head of the South Korean delegation, was quoted as saying organisers were now considering withdrawing the whole delegation and returning immediately to Seoul. Thousands of people were out on Pyongyang streets to greet the southern visitors, who included two people previously jailed by the Seoul authorities for going to the North without permission, the reports said. Lim Soo-Kyong, a former student leader who became known as "the flower of unification", and novelist Hwang Suk-Yong have both suffered for previous contacts with the communist North. Hwang was among the union activists who went to the North Korean festival on Wednesday. Lim became a national heroine in North Korea after going on a clandestine visit there as head of a student movement in 1989. She was later jailed for three and a half years for breaching the security law. Former dissident novelist Hwang spent five years in exile after a secret visit to the [so-called] Stalinist state in 1988. On returning to Seoul in 1993 he was jailed for five years. The South's Unification Ministry had also ordered the group not to go near the new 30 metre (100 foot) monument unveiled in Pyongyang on Tuesday which represents the North's view of how the two Koreas should be reunited. _________________________________________________ KOMINFORM P.O. Box 66 00841 Helsinki Phone +358-40-7177941 Fax +358-9-7591081 http://www.kominf.pp.fi General class struggle news: [EMAIL PROTECTED] subscribe mails to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Geopolitical news: [EMAIL PROTECTED] subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] __________________________________________________
