44 Missionioners Trip to Dagestan Alarms Seoul
By Kim Se-jeong
Staff Reporter
Following the Korean hostage crisis in 2007 that claimed two deaths, the news of 44 Korean Christians, including pastors, entering the Republic of Dagestan, a member of the Russian Federation, is again haunting the government, according to Yonhap News Sunday.
They will return in late January, reports said.
The neighbor of Chechnya has been involved in a guerilla war for longer than a decade, resulting in combatant and civilian casualties, and the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has restricted Koreans traveling there.
An official at the ministry's Overseas Koreans and Consular Affairs Bureau told The Korea Times that the ministry sent an advisory letter urging them not to enter Dagestan to the Korean Embassy in Moscow on Jan. 14.
The group, comprised of young Koreans and Korean-American students, entered Dagestan, despite the letter, he said.
``We were told by a Korean missionary in a neighboring country that they would exit Dagestan by Saturday local time, but we haven't been able to confirm that.'' There is a six-hour time difference with Korea.
Paul Park, the head of InterCP, a missionary organization which organized the trip, told Yonhap that the group has traveled to the region since 1992, and the region is far from dangerous. Park wasn't available for an interview for this article.
The region, however, is stained with physical violence committed by Muslim fundamentalists. In 2005, a bomb exploded in a downtown street of the capital Makhachkala, killing at least three police officers and wounding civilians. As recent as October last year, 10 policemen were killed in a gunfight.
The official said, ``Clearly, it is a dangerous region to travel. And InterCP has a bad record of sending missionaries to other conflict regions, for example, the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan and Iran.''
``They were once stopped by the Pakistani police,'' he added
Since the hostage incident in Afghanistan almost two years ago, the necessity of missions by religious entities, especially to dangerous regions has been under question, and the government has issued travel restrictions.