Seoul – South Korea warned Monday there is a risk of its citizens being abducted by Pyongyang in retaliation for the defection of a dozen North Korean staff at a restaurant in China.

Twelve women working at the restaurant in the eastern Chinese city of Ningbo defected to the South with their manager last month.

Seoul said they came voluntarily while the North insists they were tricked into defecting by South Korean spies who effectively “kidnapped” them.

The South’s Unification Ministry, which handles inter-Korea affairs, said overseas missions had been advised to heighten their vigilance.

“We are closely watching out for multiple possibilities, including abduction or terrorism … by the North,” said ministry spokesman Jeong Joon-Hee.

“We are trying to ensure the safety of our nationals,” he told reporters.

Seoul’s Hankook Ilbo daily reported Monday that Pyongyang was plotting to abduct South Koreans to trade for the 13 defectors.

“They set the target of 120 people including expats, soldiers and officials,” the newspaper said, citing an official source familiar with North Korean affairs.

Nearly 30,000 North Koreans have, over the decades, fled poverty and repression at home to settle in the capitalist South.

But group defections are rare, especially by overseas restaurant staff who are generally hand-picked from families that are “loyal” to the regime.

Pyongyang has proposed sending the women’s parents to Seoul to meet their daughters and has released a video of them tearfully demanding their return.

North Korea has a track record when it comes to abductions.

In the most high-profile case, late leader Kim Jong-Il had a famed South Korean film director and his actress wife kidnapped in Hong Kong in 1978, in order to make films in the North.

The couple escaped in 1986.

In 2002, North Korea admitted it had kidnapped 13 Japanese in the 1970s and 1980s to train its spies in Japanese language and customs.

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AFP, Reuters

Seoul – The head of a Korean subsidiary of a British consumer goods company was slapped and shouted down Monday as he apologised for his firm’s role in selling a humidifier disinfectant blamed for more than 100 deaths in South Korea.

Shouting “too late” and “cannot forgive” in English, a handful of the victims’ relatives rushed the podium where Atar Safdar, the head of Oxy Reckitt Benckiser Korea, was speaking at a hotel in Seoul.

The executive was slapped and pushed several times as the event descended into chaos.

Safdar was finally able to resume his statement, in which he offered a “heartfelt and sincere apology” to all the victims and said his company was committed to a multi-million dollar compensation plan.

The case came to light after four pregnant women died of lung problems for unknown reasons in 2011.

A subsequent government probe found a “significant association” between lung damage and products used to sterilise domestic humidifiers.

Most of the victims were found to have used Oxy Ssak Ssak, a liquid humidifier disinfectant sold by Reckitt Benckiser in South Korea from 2001, that has been blamed for around 103 deaths – mostly women and children.

“Oxy RB accepts responsibility for the role that Oxy RB products played and the delay in providing adequate remedy,” Safdar said.

He also announced the creation of a five billion won (S$5.9 million) humanitarian fund to “provide assistance to those who have suffered”.

The company had earlier donated a similar amount to a fund set up by the South Korean Environment Ministry.

The company has been sharply criticised in South Korea for taking too long to apologise or accept any responsibility in the case.

Cambodia – Standing next to cages that once housed political prisoners, former Khmer Rouge foot soldier Tho Lon gets a surprisingly sympathetic hearing from a clutch of students, despite his work for a regime that wiped out a quarter of Cambodia’s population.

“All my life I’ve been cheated by politicians,” he told them in Anlong Veng, a dirt poor town where Pol Pot and his henchmen are still venerated.

“My heart is pained, but I pretend not to be hurt,” he adds.

That his complaints get an airing may jar with many Cambodians in a country still piecing together the horrors of the past.

But his testimony is part of a pioneering reconciliation scheme introducing students to former fighters.

Until now, historians, officials and civil society groups helping Cambodia have struggled to decide on how to approach Anlong Veng, which lies on Cambodia’s remote northern border with Thailand.

It was here and among the surrounding Dangrek Mountains that Pol Pot and senior Khmer Rouge leaders lived on long after their murderous regime was toppled by Vietnam in 1979.

Hidden deep in the jungle they launched two decades of guerilla attacks that only ended with the rgeion’s final defeat in 1998.

As the students listened intently, Tho Lon explained why he kept on fighting.

“We were living in the mountains,” he said. “We had lost all contact with others so we believed what we were told, that the Vietnamese would behead us (if we stopped)”.

Tho Lon, 57, paid for his loyalty. He lost his sight in one eye and his right arm below the elbow in a mine blast fighting for a Marxist agrarian utopia that never materialised.

The country paid a bigger price – a grisly legacy for Cambodia’s younger generations.

Along Veng also hosts the dilapidated grave of Pol Pot, the regime’s “Brother Number One”, who died nearly two decades after the Khmer Rouge fell.

“I feel a mixture of excitement and pity,” said Sang Thong, a 25-year-old student from the town of Battambang, as classmates snapped pictures of the grave on their phones.

Some of his relatives died under Pol Pot, he explained.

“But I don’t come here to take revenge against him, I come here to learn more and understand more deeply about his regime.” Ly Sok-Kheang, head of the Anlong Veng Peace Programme, part of the Documentation Centre of Cambodia that researches the country’s genocide, said the meetings “promote historical empathy and understanding.”

But he admits it was no easy sell.

When Cambodia’s long civil war finally ended with the fall of Anlong Veng, he explained, most of the reconciliation work understandably centred on commemorating the Khmer Rouge’s victims.

The country’s killing fields and notorious detention camps like Tuol Seng have become focal points for those efforts, while Anlong Veng has remained an impoverished backwater.

But Ly Sok-Kheang believes the town should also be remembered, precisely because it was the place where Cambodia finally managed to end decades of violence.

“I think Anlong Veng is the perfect place when we talk about peace in Cambodia,” he told AFP.

Ignoring it, some argue, has fed the festering support for Khmer Rouge in the region.

Tho Lon gave his lecture in the grounds of a tumble-down but once grand villa that was owned by Ta Mok, a senior Khmer Rouge leader nicknamed “The Butcher” for the massacres he perpetrated.

He died in 2006 without ever seeing justice.

Ta Mok rose to number three in the Khmer Rouge hierarchy. But he eventually turned on Pol Pot as the remnants of the movement imploded and turned on eachother.

Pol Pot was arrested and tried by Ta Mok’s faction in 1997.

Ta Mok remains celebrated in the town, primarily for irrigation projects and doling out money and favours.

“I would like to stress that living under Ta Mok, both civilians and troops loved him,” said Tho Lon.

Sieng Sok Heng, chief of Anlong Veng’s tourism office – a wooden shack down a dusty road – agreed.

“A lot of the people here were under Ta Mok,” he said, adding they instead “hate the regime and its leaders.” Sieng Sok Heng hopes more tourists will seek out the town. Currently some 2,000 locals and 30 international tourists visit each month.

Many seek out Pol Pot’s grave.

The Khmer Rouge leader died in yet to be fully explained circumstances shortly after his trial by Ta Mok’s henchman.

He was swiftly cremated on a bed of car tyres on a hillside overlooking the town, a stone’s throw from the Thai border.

His grave lies in the shadow of a large, newly constructed casino filled with Thai and Chinese tourists, the only clue to its existence a rusty blue sign.

For Chhoeun Chhay Lin, 18, the grave stood as a warning.

“I feel a little bit scared of him as a leader, whether he’s dead or alive, he still has some power over people,” she said.

“But students should know about history. We must learn never to follow the direction of that dark regime again.”

Taipei – Growing up in Taiwan under martial law, Hsu Hsu-mei knew almost nothing about her father, only that he was executed for being a “thought criminal”.

She was five years old when doctor Hsu Chiang was taken away on espionage charges during the “White Terror” political purge by the ruling Kuomintang (KMT).

Decades later Hsu is finally learning more about his death thanks to a “confession letter” her father wrote just before he was executed.

She is one of many White Terror relatives only now putting together the missing pieces of their loved ones’ lives as official files gradually open up.

The letter was discovered in government archives.

Thousands labelled “anti-government” were tortured and killed between 1949 and 1987 under the rule of nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and his son, whose KMT fled to Taiwan after it was defeated by Mao Zedong’s Communist Party.

“My mother never told me any details (about my father). She would only say he was a thought criminal,” says Hsu, now a 71-year-old grandmother.

The letter finally shed light on why he had risked his life for his beliefs by joining a communist organisation.

“It was utterly disappointing to see the oppression of the Taiwanese people…the corrupt, inept ways of officials,” he wrote.

“The large hospitals cater to the wealthy…regular citizens can’t even get seen by a doctor.” Hsu said she learned her father’s greatest wish was simply for a fairer system and to improve lives through medical research.

“He really just wanted justice for society,” she said.

Official records state around 140,000 people were tried by military courts during the White Terror, with between 3,000 and 8,000 executed. Many believe the actual numbers are higher.

Since the end of martial law, Taiwan has evolved into a democracy and a new Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government will take power on May 20, after the KMT were trounced in presidential and legislative elections.

The DPP has its roots in the political movement that opposed Chiang’s dictatorship.

President-elect Tsai Ing-wen has pledged to bring justice to White Terror victims and fully publicise records from the period.

Since the founding of the National Archives in 2001, there have been steps by previous governments to give access to files from the period, whether to families, historians or the general public.

The National Archives department says it has uncovered nearly 800 pages of personal letters written by 179 victims, and has proactively contacted their relatives.

To date, letters from 106 of the victims have been returned, a spokeswoman told AFP.

But relatives say retrieving documents can still be a lengthy and complex process, while campaigners say there has not been a concerted effort to gather and analyse disparate information from the era.

They want new legislation to coordinate that effort and to release documents to the public, as part of a more complete investigation into the repression.

They also want former nationalist leaders to account for their suppression.

“Taiwan needs to come to a conclusion on what responsibilities Chiang Kai-shek needs to bear and how he should be portrayed in the people’s eyes,” said Huang Cheng-yi, chairman of the Taiwan Association for Truth and Reconciliation (TATR), a civil group that has helped families track down the letters.

There are still memorials to Chiang all over Taiwan, where some still revere him as an anti-communist hero while others revile him as a dictator.

“He doesn’t deserve to be put on a pedestal,” says Hsu, adding memorials named after the former leader should be changed and his statues removed.

Guo Su-jen was less than three years old when police came to her home to arrest her father, elementary school principal Guo Ching.

He had kept his family in the dark about his communist links.

Speaking about him after his death was taboo and her family burned most of his memorabilia for fear of their own safety, Guo says. But she still felt an affection for the father she never really knew.

“I couldn’t admit or accept that my father was a so-called villain,” Guo, 69, told AFP.

Through the help of TATR, she discovered unsent letters he had written right before his execution.

They were brief sentences, but finally gave her the connection she craved.

“One will eventually die, please do not be overly saddened,” he wrote to his wife.

“If possible, I hope you will remarry!” he added.

“When I finally saw the letters, it confirmed that I had a father, and he cared about us,” says Guo.

“They should have been returned to us a long time ago,” she said.

After a battle with the government, who said they were classified, Guo also obtained photos of her father and other rope-bound victims, taken before and after they were executed.

Guo now sees her father as a man standing up to an “inhumane” regime.

“He dreamed of a better society… I believe that’s what he was chasing after,” she said.