S. Korea to build new centre for N. Korea refugees

South Korea announced Wednesday it would build a new resettlement centre to help a growing stream of refugees from communist North Korea assimilate in the capitalist South. Seoul, which currently operates a mandatory three-month resettlement course at the Hanawon centre, will build the second facility by the end of 2012, said the unification ministry in charge of cross-border affairs. "The number of North Korean defectors keeps rising... the current Hanawon facility is on the verge of being overcrowded," spokeswoman Lee Jong-Joo told reporters. "We felt we wouldn't be able to provide systematic support for resettlement with only the current Hanawon," she said, adding more than 2,000 North Koreans have fled to the South every year since 2006. Work on the new centre, in the town of Hwacheon, around 120 kilometres (75 miles) northeast of Seoul, will begin in July. It will accommodate about 500 people at a time. More than 21,700 North Koreans have fled their impoverished and hunger-stricken homeland since the 1950-53 war, the vast majority in recent years. South Korea sends each new arrival on a three-month assimilation and training course at Hanawon, in the city of Anseong, south of Seoul, and provides financial and housing support afterwards. The course covers career guidance, information on the South and basic everyday skills such as buying a subway ticket, opening a bank account and using a credit card. But many struggle to find decent jobs, partly because their ideological education in the North is irrelevant in the South. Some allege discrimination in the workplace. Seoul will also offer a more diverse range of training courses for refugees based on their previous jobs in the North such as doctors and teachers, Lee said. She said the ministry had long focused on helping new arrivals. "But with the number of refugees rising, we thought we need more systematic programmes to help them settle here."