Category: Kim Jong Un

Defectors speak at North Korean human rights film festival held in Berlin

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The International North Korean Human Rights Festival took place in Berlin in October, with satellite events held in Heidelberg and Trier. The festival was organized by Saram, a Berlin-based group partnered with various human rights-focused NGOs with the mission of raising awareness for North Korean refugees.

In addition to screening relevant movies (e.g Cash for Kim, The Crossing, 48m) the film festival sought to address two questions: “Why does a place like North Korea still exist?” and “Can NGOs make a difference?”

Nicolai Sprekels, a spokesperson for Saram, emphasized during his opening speech the importance of understanding the challenges faced by North Korean refugees and defectors. His talk provided insights on the current circumstances and challenges that North Koreans face within their country and in China. He stressed the importance of “raising awareness not only for those who have managed to escape, but also for those who are still living in the North […].”

One defector who shared his story was Mr. Hyeong Soo Kim was born in North Korea and escaped in 2009. Kim states his age as seven years old because, as he puts it, “Only after my escape did I begin to live.” Kim himself studied biology at Pyongyang’s prestigious Kim Il Sung University and was tasked with developing the most beneficial food possible to ensure Kim Jong Il’s longevity. He later began working for the notorious Office 39, a shadowy organization known to manage the Kim family’s slush funds. After illegally listening to foreign radio broadcasts, he began to doubt the premise of the North Korean state and decided to escape. He now works for the Northern Research Association.

Throughout the event, Kim reflected on the events of his past and, as he refers to it, the “wrong years” in North Korea. He noted that there were rumors being spread in the North, warning that anybody who arrives in South Korea will only end up in a prison camp and die. This is one of the reasons why many refugees and defectors at first choose to stay in China. He also noted that during the 1998 Olympics in Seoul, many North Koreans were able to see the “real” South Korea for the first time. Kim explained that in 1998 in particular, many were killed as a result of Kim Jong Il’s orders to shoot anybody who attempted to cross the border into China. “I saw myself,” he said. “I saw seven dead bodies in the river. Six women and a man.”

[Read full Daily NK article]

Defectors adjusting to life beyond North Korea

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For most people, adapting to life in a foreign country is a challenge. For North Korean defectors, such challenges are much more imposing.

Take those who defect to South Korea, for example. “For them, it’s kind of like waking up from a time machine and finding yourself in the future,” Sokeel Park, director of Research and Strategy for Liberty in North Korea, an international non-governmental organization that works with North Korean defectors.

North Korea and South Korea started off on similar footing. Unlike North Korea, the South embraced globalization, democratization, and massive economic development. Where South Korea is one of the most wired countries in the world today, most North Koreans have never used a computer.

North Korean defectors sometimes struggle with poverty, language barriers, social anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression and suicidal thoughts, criminality, drug abuse, a lack of education and employable skills, and discrimination, Park explained.

North Koreans living in South Korea are reportedly three to four times more likely to end up prison than their local counterparts. “Under the burden of livelihood difficulties and homesickness, more defectors tend to get involved in crimes with the number of defector prisoners on the rise,” South Korean Rep. Kang Chang-il reported in late September.

Drug abuse is a noteworthy problem. Park noted that some North Korean defectors abuse drugs because that cultural norm exists in North Korea. Others use narcotics as a response to trauma, and for some other defectors, drug abuse is a type of self-medication.

For many North Koreans, freedom, while cherished, is sometimes bitter-sweet. The transition from a broken kingdom to the modern world is often overwhelming.

Most North Korean defectors despise the Kim regime for the tragedies inflicted upon them and their families, and pray for change in their former homeland.
[Daily Caller]

A ‘balloon warrior’ subverts North Korea, thousands of leaflets at a time

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Lee Min-bok’s house, fashioned out of two shipping containers, is monitored by 12 police surveillance cameras. Dogs woof at any stranger walking up the dirt path. Plainclothes detectives check his mailbox and tag along wherever he goes to protect him from possible assassins sent by North Korea, which openly threatens to kill him.

balloon-warior-lee-min-bok-north-korean-defectorOn days when the wind blows to the north, Mr. Lee, 59, ventures out with his secondhand five-ton truck, hauling a large hydrogen tank to the border with North Korea, an hour’s drive away. There, he fills dozens of 23-foot and 39-foot barrel-shaped balloons with the gas and lets them drift away.

The balloons carry special payloads: radio sets, one-dollar bills, computer memory sticks and, above all, tens of thousands of leaflets bearing messages that Mr. Lee says will debunk the personality cult surrounding Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea.

His leaflets list the number of cars and other figures from South Korea’s vastly superior economy. It then asks North Koreans to ask ethnic Koreans from China, who often visit their country, whether those figures are correct. It also urges them to ask front-line soldiers to confirm that the South Korean fences on the border are awash with blinding lights at night while the energy-starved North is buried in darkness.

Sailing 9,800 to 16,400 feet above sea level, Mr. Lee’s balloons waft across the world’s most heavily guarded border, high enough that North Korean soldiers have little chance of shooting them down. Then his patented “timer” devices click, unfastening vinyl bundles. Leaflets fall out like snowflakes over the North, where Mr. Kim struggles to keep his people under a total information blackout, blocking the internet and prefixing all radio and TV sets to receive only his government’s propaganda-filled broadcasts.

In South Korea, there are 50 “balloon warriors,” many of them defectors from the North like Mr. Lee, who seek to breach the wall with leaflets. Mr. Lee is their godfather. When he started floating large balloons in 2005, with others following suit, he received credit — and blame — for reigniting the leaflet battle. Lee launches between 700 and 1,500 balloons a year, each carrying 30,000 to 60,000 leaflets.

Sending balloons is Mr. Lee’s full-time job. He finances his operation with cash he earns from lectures he gives at churches and elsewhere. Christians also donate, asking him to drop small Bibles and food into the North. A Japanese group contributes with the understanding he will send leaflets urging North Koreans to help find the whereabouts of dozens of Japanese believed to have been abducted to the North.

In 2011, a man was arrested on a charge of plotting to assassinate a balloon activist at the behest of North Korea. Three years later, the North directed anti-aircraft fire into the South Korean sky, trying to down one of Mr. Lee’s balloons. This year, it began retaliating in kind, floating to the South leaflets that called President Park Geun-hye a snake and a prostitute.

[New York Times]

North Korea ‘purges’ top official amid spike in high-level defections

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North Korea has purged a vice foreign minister, punishing the 72-year-old and his family with farm work, South Korea’s JoongAng Ilbo newspaper said. Vice Minister Kung Sok Ung “took responsibility for the management of the embassies in the European region and was purged.”

The daily reports Kung Sok Ung, 72, and four other ranking officials in charge of European affairs were expelled from Pyongyang on the orders of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. It said Kung oversaw relations with Russia and Europe for nearly 20 years.

South Korean President Park Geun-hye recently said, “While the defections by North Korean elites, as well as regular citizens, are on the rise, the motivations for their defections have become varied, with some fleeing their country with a sense of despair about lack of their own prospects or for their children’s future,” Park said.

Before 2001, nearly 70 percent of those fleeing North Korea cited hunger, but now almost 88 percent cite non-economic reasons such as surveillance and fear, the news agency said.

Among those now fleeing to freedom are significant numbers of senior officials. “Since the execution of Kim’s uncle Jang Song Thaek in 2013, defections by the privileged class have risen due to the North’s leader’s reign of terror,” Yonhap on Sunday quoted Sohn Kwang-joo, who heads the South’s defector resettlement agency, as saying.

On Oct. 5, Japan was said to be handling a request for asylum by a senior North Korean official in Beijing. Tokyo denied the reports, while South Korean media said the official’s final destination was likely to be Seoul.

Pyongyang is reported to have executed more than 100 dissenting state, party and military officials since Kim came to power in late 2011.

[Japan Times]

North Korean spy agency official defected to S. Korea last year

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A senior official at North Korea’s spy agency defected to South Korea last year, a source said Wednesday.

The unidentified official who worked for the Ministry of State Security escaped to the South in an unusual defection by a North Korean in charge of gathering intelligence and cracking down on ordinary people.

The source said that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is believed to have been upset by the growing number of elite members defecting.

[Yonhap]

North Korean defectors open up online – Part 2

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north-korean-defector-bj-son-bom-hyangSon Bom-hyang, 29, is a North Korean defector who has been active as a broadcaster for two years. Her turbulent story of how she escaped at the age of 10 — which involves imprisonment in China, a sibling passing away and stealing food from fields to not starve — has over 2 million views on YouTube. Son, too, addresses the audiences’ many curiosities, which range from “Do you really have portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il in every household?” (yes) to “What kind of TV shows do you have there?”

But Son additionally uploads clips of how she’s settled into her life here, often engaging in “meokbang” — where hosts broadcast themselves eating food — with her husband of three years.

“In live streams, we can ask defectors things we’re curious about and get immediate, honest answers,” said Park So-hee, a 25-year-old university student who has seen many of Lee Pyung’s broadcasts. “We’re communicating directly and talking casually, so it feels more real.”

The webcasts have stripped Park of her former prejudices, she said. “I used to think defectors were brainwashed people I had nothing in common with. … I may even have been scared of them being violent or something. But now I understand that they came here because they wanted to. They like the same things I do.”

Hundreds of comments written by viewers online reveal similar responses. One viewer said, “I now want to make an effort to befriend my North Korean defector classmate at school.” Another talked about how interesting it was to peek into everyday life in the North.

Jang Yong-seok, a senior researcher at Seoul National University’s Institute for Peace and Unification Studies, said, “In the long term, I think these activities will contribute to mitigating the tension between the two countries’ peoples, at the very least,” he said.

[Korea Herald]

Top US diplomat to the UN visits North Korean defector in Seoul

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The top U.S. diplomat to the United Nations, Ambassador Samantha Power, visited with a North Korean defector-activist at his home in Seoul.

On Monday, the ambassador met with South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se, and later called on defector Jung Gwang-il, who left North Korea in 2004 after his release from Yodok prison camp after serving 3 years there.

Since resettling in South Korea, Jung and his organization No Chain has launched campaigns to infiltrate North Korea with CDs and flash drives containing South Korean television shows, Hollywood films and other information that is banned by the Kim Jong Un regime.

In a message on Twitter, Power called Jung “heroic” for “smuggling” information on democracy into North Korea.

[UPI]

North Korean defectors to create US-based government in exile

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A group of high-profile defectors are planning to establish a North Korean government in exile in the U.S. early next year, a South Korean newspaper reported Friday, citing one the of the group’s leaders.

The defectors — some of whom are based in South Korea — aim to play a key role in the democratization of North Korea, the DongA Ilbo newspaper said. The move comes amid an increase of high-profile defections and an apparent rise in the number of elite officials in the isolated nation turning against leader Kim Jong Un, the newspaper reported.

According to the report, the government-in-exile would seek to install a democratic political system with a Chinese model for the economy that would attract support from Beijing.

It would be based in the U.S. because South Korea’s constitution includes the North in its territory.

[Bloomberg]

North Korea responds to worst natural disaster in its history

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North Korea has suffered the worst natural disaster in its history but it is blowing its trumpet of revolutionary socialism and trying to turn catastrophe into triumph.

Everywhere you look across dozens of miles of the country’s remote northeast, red flags flutter in the stiff breeze and work gangs toil to fix broken river banks, digging away mud that was piled deep by raging waters in recent floods.

Soldiers and citizens have been given three weeks by their leader Kim Jong Un to rebuild the town of Yonsa and house the 27,000 people who lost their dwellings, before the winter sets in at the end of the month.

It’s no easy task. Where 700 homes once stood, only five remain. To the rousing accompaniment of a military band, they are racing against time to build three-story apartment blocks to house the families.

Helping them are two children — a 13-year-old girl and a 14-year-old boy — whose parents died in floods. They said their “Dear Leader” would be their father now and, while they had lost their parents, they hadn’t lost hope in a better future.

Kim Yong Sil, a mother in her late 30s, described how flood waters had hit their riverside home at two in the morning and swept away her husband who, she claimed, was trying to rescue “portraits of their great leaders” from the collapsing house. If her story sounded scripted, her tears were not.  Read more

[NBC]

North Korean floods a serious challenge for Kim Jong Un

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Battling to rebuild homes damaged by the flooding, North Korean work gangs are filling sacks with rocks — 20 bags every hour, from dawn to dusk. It’s back-breaking labor.

It is a mark of how serious this disaster is that Kim Jong Un has appealed to the world for help and for money to rebuild. South Korea has already refused. North Korea isn’t asking everyone. “I’m not going to reach out my hand to the United States,” said one official, Ri Song Chol. “Not after 70 years of their aggression.”

Many people are putting their trust in their all-powerful commander-in-chief.

“Our Dear Leader Kim Jong Un promised us he would provide new house for us before winter,” said homeless mother Taw Kyung Wha. “So we believe him.”

For Kim, who rules some of the poorest people on earth, it is risky.

He can’t afford to lose popular support as his father did in the early 1990s when a flood was followed by a terrible famine that left hundreds of thousands dead.

[NBC]