Defections

The soprano in the blue dress sang a sad tune about a sacred mountain. Soon the women brought tissues to their eyes and began sobbing over memories of home. That's when the cameras moved in -- crowding for a better angle, zooming in, panning faces, until many of the defectors ducked their heads in embarrassment and shame. For the first time, officials on Wednesday allowed outsiders into the Hanawon resettlement center where North Korean defectors are debriefed.

Steve Kim went to China to make money. The furniture dealer from Huntington, N.Y., sniffed an opportunity to manufacture colonial reproductions at a fraction of the cost for export to the U.S. market. He had no interest in politics or human rights. That was until one Sunday morning, when he ran into a couple of North Korean defectors at the church he attended in Guangdong province. They were thin with bad skin and shabby clothing and had the terrified, needy look of stray kittens.

A woman who fled North Korea after living there for 43 years returned to the communist country Tuesday after nearly four years in Japan, saying she missed her children and found Japanese society unwelcoming. To Chu Ji's family gave her a bouquet, embraced her and wept when she arrived in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. Before leaving, To spoke at a rare news conference at the North Korean Embassy in Beijing, saying she had been cheated by "bad people" into leaving North Korea in 2003.

When the year began, Cuban soccer players Osvaldo Alonso and Lester More knew they were going to come to the United States to play in the Gold Cup. Not long after that, they knew they would stay. Alonso and More defected from the Cuban national team last month. "I was going to play two or three games so people could see me, and then I was going to leave," said Alonso, who after two games left the team in Houston before its game against Honduras.

In a cloak-and-dagger operation, six North Korean defectors arrived in the United States over the weekend in the first effort sponsored by the U.S. government to give political asylum to North Koreans. The State Department has kept tight wraps on the operation, but activists confirmed that the refugees had flown in late Friday and had been taken immediately to an undisclosed location for debriefing.

With her accordion and a suitcase of spring clothes, Ma Young-ae flew from Seoul to Atlanta two years ago for a monthlong tour playing folk songs in church basements. But when it came time to return to Seoul with her musical troupe, Ma and her husband, North Korean defectors who had quarreled with the South Korean tour organizer, refused to go to the airport.

Six North Korean defectors -- the first refugees the U.S. has admitted from the totalitarian nation -- arrived in Southern California on Saturday bearing accounts of famine, sexual enslavement, torture and repression. The group was met at Los International Airport by leaders of four large Korean congregations in Southern California, all members of the Korean Church Coalition, which has pushed the government to take in North Korean refugees.

Three North Korean teenagers, two of them orphans, have taken refuge in a U.S. Consulate in northeast China and are being processed for resettlement in the United States. A State Department official familiar with the case of the three unrelated teens confirmed that the U.S. intended to resettle them in America.

A Southern California player agent who has represented defected Cuban baseball players was among five men charged Tuesday with smuggling, transporting and harboring Cuban players who were signed to professional baseball contracts, federal immigration officials said.

Nearly 200 troops serving Somalia's Western-backed interim government defected to the Islamic Courts movement, an Islamic official said, as both sides braced for impending war. Mohammed Ibrahim Bilal, head of the Islamic Court in the Al Bayan region, said the troops were "ready to be incorporated into the Islamic Courts forces." The government denied Bilal's claim.