SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea said Monday it plans to bring the families of four defectors to a meeting with South Korean officials, an apparent attempt to pressure the South to release the asylum-seekers.
South Korea says four of 31 North Koreans held after their fishing boat strayed into southern waters last month have asked to stay in the South. Seoul has offered to return the remaining 27, but an infuriated North Korea demands the repatriation of all 31 people.
The North accuses Seoul of pressuring or coercing the four to stay in South Korea, a claim the South denies.
The wrangling over the defectors is the latest friction between the Koreas, whose ties soured last year because of the sinking of a South Korean warship blamed on Pyongyang and North Korea's shelling of a front-line South Korean island. A total of 50 South Koreans were killed.
On Monday, the North's Red Cross sent a message to its South Korean counterpart, expressing anger over the South Korean decision and proposing talks at the border village of Panumjom on Wednesday.
Family members and friends of the four North Koreans have testified that they have no reason to defect, the North's official Korean Central News Agency said. It said the North's Red Cross will bring the family members to the meeting site and South Korea should also bring the four defectors there.
"North Korea intends to use the family members as hostages to force the four people to change their minds," said Baek Seung-joo of the state-run Korea Institute for Defense Analyses in Seoul.
South Korean officials said they have no intention of repatriating the four people.
The South's Red Cross said it told the North that it is only willing to hold talks on how to verify the four people's intention to resettle in the South. The North gave no immediate response, South Korean Red Cross officials said.
A Seoul-based activists' group said South Korea's Red Cross should have rejected the North's dialogue offer, calling the North's plan to bring the family members a "cruel, inhumane act."
"Everyone has the right to live in a place they want," said Do Hee-youn, head of the Citizens' Coalition for Human Rights of Abductees and North Korean Refugees.
Since the end of the Korean War in 1953, more than 20,000 North Koreans have left their homeland for the South. South Korea says it accepts those who choose to defect and repatriates those who wish to return home.
The Korean peninsula officially remains in state of war because the Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.