Vietnam police raid SKorea wedding racket with 118 women
HANOI - Police in Vietnam said Tuesday they had raided and broken up an illegal match-making business where eight South Korean bachelors were choosing potential brides from among 118 local young women.
Police in the raid Monday detained the Vietnamese couple who were organising the business from a house in Ho Chi Minh City and sent the women back to their home towns, mostly in the poor Mekong Delta region.
"They thought their lives would change for the better if they married a foreigner," a police officer told AFP, adding that the women had also been handed into the care of provincial women's unions.
International marriages are legal in communist Vietnam, but the match-making rings -- where the women are typically paraded before men, sometimes holding signs with numbers, for selection -- are not, and the phenomenon has stirred anger here.
Police said they would fine the operators, Sen Cam Diu, 44, and his 37-year-old wife Huynh Thi Thu Thuy, who were running the business from a Tan Binh district house, said the state-controlled Thanh Nien newspaper.
The couple had arranged about 40 marriages over more than four years and charged three million dong (187 dollars) for each successful match.
Vietnam has become a popular destination for bachelors from
South Korea, Taiwan and elsewhere searching for a spouse, often on week-long marriage tours that include medical checkups, visa procedures and speedy honeymoons.
The marriage market has been fuelled by a traditional preference for sons in parts of Asia, a trend exacerbated by sex-screening technology for pregnant women, with has left proportionally more bachelors fighting over fewer women.
In South Korea, thousands of agencies now offer marriage tours to China, Vietnam and other Asian countries, often subsidised by rural authorities battling declining populations.
According to the South Korean National Statistical Office, the number of Vietnamese brides in South Korea totalled 10,131 in 2006, up 74 percent from the previous year, with most married to farmers and fishermen.
The phenomenon has triggered resentment in Vietnam amid reports that some of the women have suffered isolation and abuse in their new homes.
A year ago Vietnam summoned South Korea's press attache amid angry protests from women's groups after a newspaper in Seoul printed a photo of a line-up of Vietnamese would-be brides kneeling before a Korean suitor.
Agence France Presse - April 10, 2007.
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