Category: Humanitarian Aid and Relief

North Korean defector Eun Kim on adapting to South Korea

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In  A Thousand Miles to Freedom: My Escape From North Korea, Eunsun Kim gives us a glimpse into everyday life in North Korea behind the “Bamboo Curtain.” She now lives in Seoul and offers insights on the major differences between North and South Korean culture:

North and South Korea both speak Korean, but for North Korean refugees the most difficult thing is the language difference. In South Korea, they speak “Konglish”. A lot of words are different.

Communication is very different. North Koreans communicate more directly; South Koreans communicate indirectly. For example, if a North Korean refugee has a job interview, and the owner says, ‘I will call you if we need you,’ the North Korean refugee will wait for a month for the company to call. Then, he will call the company back and say, ‘You said you would call me, but you didn’t, what’s happened?’

The humor is also different. Even today, if I watch a [South Korean comedy], I won’t laugh because I don’t find it funny.

The most difficult thing [about adapting to life in South Korea] was the loneliness, because we had no relatives there. But it was a new place and we had to learn—like a baby taking its first steps—how to go the market, how to ask a question, everything. When I went to high school, the most confusing thing was learning about Korea. In North Korea, we learned South Korea invaded. Here they taught us that North Korea invaded South Korea.

North Korea is a big prison. People live there, but they have no human rights. So we need to open the prison and give people freedom. It’s not only North Korea’s problem.  It’s a global problem.

I believe a little movement can bring huge change in North Korea. It’s already changing faster than ever before. Videos and USB’s are being smuggled in from South Korea all the time and through those media young people are learning about other worlds outside North Korea and to have their own ideas.

And even if Kim Jung Un is a psychopath, he’s trying to change things, he seems to be shifting North Korea towards capitalism. Before, North Korea really hated Western things. Now a lot of people use these things.

[National Geographic]

Eun Kim’s thousand-mile journey to freedom

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Many [North Koreans] died because of malnutrition, including my grandparents. In 1997, my father passed away too. [When I was 11] my mom sold or bartered everything from our apartment until we had nothing left. So she decided to go to the city to search for food. She left me at home, but took my older sister who’s two-years-older than me. She said she would be back in three days, but if she got food earlier she would be back sooner. She gave me 15 North Korean chon—enough to buy just one piece of tofu—and left.

Three days passed, then four, then five. I was waiting for her to come home but on the sixth day I had no energy left and thought maybe today is my last day. I wasn’t afraid of death. I had seen so many people dying during that time. What made me sad was that I felt my mom didn’t want me.  She took my other sister but didn’t come back for me.

So I decided to write a will, at 11 years old. … But on the sixth day she came back. I was happy even though she arrived empty-handed. But she didn’t give up. She didn’t leave me alone. The first words she said were, ‘let’s die together.’ But I was still happy.

We lived in Hamgyong province, in a village called Undok in the northern part of North Korea. The first time we escaped during wintertime. The river was frozen hard and we made it across. In China, we were bought by a human trafficker then repatriated to North Korea. We were regarded as traitors, so we lived as beggars on the street, sleeping under bridges or in the market.

But we had tasted freedom. Two months later, in springtime, we escaped again. My story is a common one among North Korean refugees. Many North Korean women experience human trafficking in China. But we weren’t separated, even though we were sold to a Chinese man. So we could share the sadness and challenges, even when we were in China. Even when we were repatriated to North Korea, I was with my mother. That’s why I say, we were lucky. We didn’t become separated.

Eventually, we made it to Shanghai, where we lived for almost four years. Then, through friends, we found a way to go to South Korea.

Escaping from one’s home is not a simple thing to describe in a few words. Even though I really hate the North Korean government and the Kim family, I miss my hometown, because it’s my hometown. But I had to leave to survive.

[National Geographic]

On North Korean defectors settling in South Korea

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The following is an excerpt of a Washington Post interview with Lee Hark-joon, a journalist for the Chosun Ilbo, South Korea’s largest newspaper, responding to the question “ What could the world – and South Korea in particular – be doing to better help people who have escaped from North Korea?”:

A North Korean defector I interviewed had a son with cerebral palsy … She came from an artistic group in North Korea and was good at playing musical instruments. She had the so-called “star quality” that outsiders want from a defector.

Many human rights groups, churches and TV networks wanted her to appear for lectures or shows. In short, she was offered money to sell her horrible personal stories. She asked my opinion.

My advice was this. “It’s your decision in the end, but I don’t think that kind of life is an ideal way to settle down. What if another defector emerges with more horrible or stronger stories? The attention given to you would move to the other person and you might try to make up a story to win the attention back. It’s a vicious circle. How about looking for a way to earn decent money and live with your family?”

With help of her local church and charity groups, she learned to be a hairdresser and got a job. A hospital sponsored her son’s medical treatment. She once lived in the middle of media spotlight, but she now happily lives as an ordinary citizen in Seoul with her family.

I consider this as a model case of a North Korean defector settling down in South Korea. An ordinary citizen is valued in a democratic society.

To do more of this, regular people in South Korea need to pay more attention to North Korean defectors so they can live normal lives without being tempted by human rights groups or the media to sell their stories. North Korean defectors need to get jobs without discrimination and local community need to try harder to embrace them.

Hyeonseo Lee now knows how naive she was

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When famine struck in the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the North Korean government initiated a wide public education campaign — “Let us eat two meals a day” was the slogan, accompanied by information on how eating less was healthier.

As food distribution worsened and after the death of her stepfather, who had been arrested by military police on suspicions about his business deals and apparently killed himself while in hospital, the intense impact of famine became obvious.

“I saw people dying on the street. I was shocked. If we went near the train station or under the bridge we can easily see those dead bodies everywhere and the smells of decomposing bodies,” she says.

It troubled Lee not just emotionally, but intellectually. All her education and the propaganda told her North Korea was the greatest country on Earth, its leader could change the weather and her homeland was a beacon of light in a world immersed in darkness.

Across the river, there were the lights, twinkling in the Chinese town of Changbai. “I wanted to find out the answer myself by seeing the real life in China with my own eyes and I was very young, naive girl at the time so I was brave. I took the huge risk by crossing the border.”

The frozen river was narrow near her home and could be crossed with ease. She intended a “sneak visit,” she says, to see China, visit her father’s relatives there and return. She did not intend to defect.

But in China she saw her upbringing had been a lie. For the first time, she heard people speaking openly about the North Korean regime. She heard Kim Jong-un called a “bastard” and the country’s starvation blamed on his failed economic policy.

“It was shocking to me; how can you make fun of our Dear Leader like that?” she says. And at first it was hard to accept, she still wanted to respect her country — a common thing, she learned, for those who have just fled North Korea.

She says now she knows how naive she was, about that as well as how hard her journey would be. Walking across the river was perhaps the easiest part.

[National Post]

New York University student in North Korean jail to be set free?

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A South Korean student from New York University who is being detained in North Korea for allegedly entering the country illegally said Tuesday that he hopes to be released soon.

Won Moon Joo, who was presented to the media in North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang, also said he was being treated well and asked his family not to worry too much about him.

He acknowledged breaking North Korean laws, but such admissions are often recanted by detainees after they’re set free. Detainees are also often coached ahead of time by North Korean officials as to what to say.

Joo, 21, who has permanent resident status in the United States, was arrested in April for allegedly entering North Korea illegally across the Chinese border. He did not explain why he tried to enter North Korea.

The appearance by Joo on Tuesday came as South Korea announced it had sent back two North Korean fishermen who were rescued from South Korean waters earlier this month.

[AP]

China set to try jailed US missionary near North Korea border

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On July 28, China will begin the trial of a Korean-American missionary, Peter Hahn, arrested last year over a non-profit school he ran near the sensitive border with North Korea, his lawyer said. Supporters of Hahn said he was being targeted because of his Christian faith and because of the small vocational school he ran.

Authorities have dropped three of the four charges against Hahn, 74, probably for lack of evidence, his lawyer, Zhang Peihong, told Reuters, leaving only the least serious charge of counterfeiting receipts. “I wouldn’t call my attitude optimistic,” Zhang said by telephone. “After all Peter has only done good works, so he shouldn’t face any punishment. I do hope the court will act impartially.”

Hahn could receive a maximum of two years in prison, Zhang said, but he expected authorities would simply deport him back to the United States instead.

Hahn, who was formally arrested in December after months under house arrest, will be tried in Yanbian prefecture, near the North Korean border in northeast China, Zhang added. Hahn has diabetes and has suffered strokes, his wife has said.

A sprawling crackdown by the Chinese Government forced hundreds of Christian missionaries out of China, most by having their visas refused, sources told Reuters last August.

Last year, a Canadian Christian couple who worked with North Korean refugees and ran a coffee shop in Dandong on the Chinese border were accused of espionage by the Chinese government.

[Channel NewsAsia]

Diplomats state international pressure the key to change in North Korea

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Maintaining international pressure on Pyongyang is crucial in moving North Korea to improve its behavior and to better human rights conditions inside its borders, diplomats from the United States, the Republic of Korea and Japan said at a Heritage Foundation forum this past week.

Speaking at the Washington, D.C., event, Ahn Ho-young, South Korea’s ambassador to the United States, said, “Much of the leverage is held by China” in addition to the three allies and Russia.

The U.N. Commission of Inquiry on human rights in North Korea “shocked the international conscience,” Ahn said, when it released its report on conditions there in February 2014. He added that only 17 of the 108 non-aligned nations in the United Nations supported Pyongyang by not approving the report’s recommendations for inspections, further isolating the regime diplomatically.

U.N. inspectors “need to be given access to North Korea” to understand how dire the situation is,” Sasae said. International concerns about the regime’s actions “are not only limited to nuclear and missile issues.”

[USNI]

UNICEF: Drought puts North Korean children’s lives at risk

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A severe drought in North Korea is putting the lives of children at risk and many are in serious danger of disease and malnutrition, the U.N. children’s agency said on Wednesday.

UNICEF said in a statement that there had been in a sharp increase in cases of diarrhoea among children in drought-affected areas, as access to safe drinking water and sanitation was severely compromised. “Lack of rain reduces access to clean water and undermines effective hygiene, putting children’s lives at risk,” UNICEF Regional Director Daniel Toole said.

The North says it is experiencing its worst drought in a century, with some of its main farming regions particularly hard hit.

The country’s large number of malnourished children – as many as one in four children according to a 2012 study – heightens concerns about the impact of drought, UNICEF said. “These children are particularly vulnerable, because children who are malnourished have less resilience to water-borne illness and disease,” the agency said.

Experts said that despite the severity of the drought, the North’s fledgling markets and private farm plots should provide a buffer against a famine of the sort that devastated the country in the 1990s.

[Reuters]

Defector lawmaker urges Seoul to stand firm with North Korea

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A North Korean elite-turned-South Korean lawmaker, Rep. Cho Myung-chul of the ruling Saenuri Party, has insisted Seoul must be firm and patient in dealing with Pyongyang, asserting that Seoul must avoid talking for the sake of talking, or giving unilateral concessions.

“The North refuses to apologize for the 2010 Cheonan sinking and the 2010 Yeonpyeongdo Island shelling,” Cho told the Korea Herald, touching on the March 2010 sinking of the South Korean naval ship Cheonan and the North’s November 2010 shelling of a South Korean island. “If we forgive them again and just forget about it, nothing will come of it. How can we just forgive them, when they kill our young men left and right, whenever they want?” the first-term lawmaker said.

Cho also urged Seoul’s National Assembly to pass a human rights bill aiming to improve the situation in the North as soon as possible. The bill has been stalled in the Assembly since 2005. “The North is a country where freedom is absolutely absent,” the lawmaker said. “I know this because I’ve been there, and lived there.”

Cho, 56, is a former professor of economics at Kim Il Sung University, the North’s top school. Cho defected to the South in 1994 while serving as an exchange professor in China, leaving his parents, his brothers, a wife and children in the North. Cho said his frustration with the North’s repressive government led him to come to the South. “I felt that if I, a person from one of the most prestigious families in the North, defected, I would be able to shock the government’s leadership. My defection was a form of protest.”

[The Korea Herald]

Information the most powerful weapon against North Korea

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Beijing has the power to dramatically alter the course of history in North Korea. Because of this, the west needs to put pressure on both capitals and create a new vector of power: information.

New platforms and forms of communication are necessary to reverse a campaign of brainwashing that dates back three generations. Pirate videos, thumb-drives and smuggled phones spread the truth, that in the outside world, people lives unimaginably better lives than they do inside North Korea. Critics of the state rely on hot-air balloons to carry anti-regime information across the border, but it’s not enough.

Interviews with defectors reveal that many listen to news from shortwave radios, despite fear of severe punishment, and despite the government’s best efforts to isolate its population.

The BBC, hard-pressed as it is, must seriously consider broadcasting into North Korea. According to BBC internal estimates a Korean service would cost around £1m a year to run and a shortwave transmitter would cost about £300,000 a year. North citizens need to understand more about the true working of their own country.

This regime, that looks so strong, is weaker than you think.

[Excerpts from John Sweeney’s book “North Korea Undercover”, as published in The Guardian]