SEOUL — It was a daring rescue, the stuff of legends.
With the stealth of a covert operation, the South Korean government last month organized an airlift to pick up 468 North Korean defectors who had taken refuge in Vietnam. Aside from a last-minute leak to the media, the operation came off without a hitch and the refugees -- the largest number of Northerners ever evacuated at once -- arrived here safely.
But the airlift has put the South Korean government in an uncomfortable position as it tries to juggle its professed commitment to human rights and relations with its hot-tempered northern neighbor.
The repercussions are threatening to scuttle the next round of six-nation talks on North Korea's nuclear program and are complicating various projects between the Koreas.
South Korea's national intelligence agency this month issued a rare warning to citizens to be on guard for acts of retaliation by North Korea, particularly when traveling in China or Southeast Asia. Human rights activists Friday revealed that a 24-year-old woman, a former North Korean who is now a citizen of the South, recently had been kidnapped by suspected agents of the North while honeymooning in China.
Meanwhile, the Seoul office of Durihana, a Christian missionary group that helped the defectors who passed through Vietnam, has had two break-ins since the airlift.
The North's communist regime, which normally does not comment on defections, has repeatedly lashed out at its neighbor for what it has called a terrorist operation and an abduction.
"A thrice-cursed crime ... and an unpardonable hostile act designed to bring down the political system" in the North, the official KCNA news service asserted last week. The refugees arrived from Ho Chi Minh City aboard two charter flights July 27 and 28 and were whisked to temporary housing on the outskirts of Seoul, where they were to be questioned by South Korean intelligence agents.
At the request of Vietnam, which feared damage to its relations with its communist ally, the operation was to be kept secret. However, word leaked out and reporters staked out the military airport near Seoul where the first charter plane arrived.
Refugee activists say the North Koreans had escaped to China and then moved to Vietnam for fear that they might be arrested by Chinese police and sent home. They lived secretly in small churches and other shelters near Ho Chi Minh City for months before they were evacuated.
