Category: North Korean refugee

North Korean defectors must be returned for Korean family reunions to resume

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North Korea wants a number of defectors returned as a precondition to resuming reunions of families separated by the Korean War, according to Japanese wire service Kyodo on Sunday.

North Korea and South Korea began diplomatic talks last week for the first time in two years. North Korea agreed to send a delegation and two athletes to the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, next month during the talks.

Negotiations between the two countries hit a snag went it came to family reunification, according to Kyodo. The two countries have held family reunions for people divided by the Korean Wars over the years, but North Korea wants 13 people who defected to South Korea in 2016 and one woman who defected in 2011 returned before having more reunions.

The people who defected 2016 were 12 waitresses and their manager, who worked at a state-owned restaurant in China. At the North Korean restaurant, the women doubled as entertainers — singing and dancing in addition to serving food. The woman who defected in 2011, Kim Ryon Hui, has expressed that she wants to return to North Korea. She traveled to China to receive treatment for liver disease and then traveled to South Korea to make more money to afford the treatment. In an interview with CNN, she said she didn’t realize once she came to South Korea and renounced her North Korean citizenship she would not be able to return home. It is illegal to cross back into North Korea once in South Korea.

North Korea maintains that the waitresses were abducted by South Korea’s National Intelligence Service and that their manager tricked them into defecting. The women and their manager are under close supervision of the National Intelligence Service and have undergone a different and much longer integration process than other defectors. The United Nations sent an investigator to research the women’s situation and whether they had come to the country of their own volition.

[Kyodo]

More on North Korean defectors being targeted in mobile espionage campaign

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Malicious APK files are being used to attack North Korean defectors and journalists. According to the McAfee Mobile Research team, threat actors are sending malicious links via KakaoTalk and other social network services, such as Facebook, in a targeted campaign. The links claim to connect to either something called Pray for North Korea, or BloodAssistant, which is a fake health care app.

In both cases, they redirect to a dropper mechanism.

The dropper phishes the victim to turn on the accessibility permissions, and then installs an espionage Trojan with a range of malicious functions, including saving SMS messages, contact information, GPS location, phone call logs, installed apps and contacts; it can also record phone calls. Further, the attackers can easily extend the Trojan’s malicious functionality without needing to update the whole malware.

Researcher Jaewon Min, wrote in his blog, “This malware campaign is highly targeted …and appear to want to spy on North Korean defectors and on groups and individuals who help defectors. …and the actors are familiar with South Korea.”

[InfoSecurity Magazine]

Android trojan targets North Korean defectors and their supporters

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North Korean defectors, along with those who help them, are being targeted by a hacking operation which aims to infect their devices with trojan malware for the purposes of spying.The campaign apparently uses social networks and chat applications to directly interact with selected victims in South Korea and plant spyware onto their smartphones.

Researchers at McAfee have attributed the attacks to an operation they’ve dubbed Sun Team, named after deleted files used to help carry out the attacks. The attacks used applications including KakaoTalk – a popular chat app in South Korea – and popular social media services including Facebook to aid efforts of distributing trojan malware to the Android devices of victims.

If successful in being dropped onto a device, the malware uses a phishing attack to trick the victim into turning on the accessibility settings they require to gain full control of the infected device. Once successfully installed on the target device, the trojan uses cloud services including Dropbox, Google and Yandex as a control server, as well as a hub for uploading stolen data and receiving commands.

Not much is known about the mysterious group behind the attacks, but researchers at McAfee have speculated that they must be very familiar with the Korean language and South Korean culture, because names of the account names associated with their cloud accounts are from Korean television – including the name of soap characters and reality show contestants.

Researchers also note that one word found associated with the attackers – ‘blood type’ – is used in a way associated with North Korean spelling, rather than in the South Korean equivalent. North Korean IP test log files were also discovered on some Android accounts used to spread the malware. However, McAfee notes that this isn’t enough to draw any conclusions about the location of the attackers because “Wi-Fi was on so we cannot exclude the possibility that the IP address is private”

[Read full ZDNet article]

A tale of two defectors – Part 1 – Sun-sil Lee

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As delegates met in the no man’s land of Panmunjom yesterday, raising anew the prospect of reunification for families separated by the Korean War, two North Kor­ean defectors — one fearful of reunification, the other desperate to return — illustrate the deep ­divisions that scar the peninsula.

Last month, Sun-sil Lee moved into a new apartment outside of Seoul — a landmark moment for the 50-year-old who 12 years ago was starving on the streets of a North Korean border town, ­begging for food for herself and her three-year-old daughter.

The former army nurse, who gave birth on the streets after fleeing an abusive marriage, tried eight times to defect before succeeding at a terrible cost in 2005. Ms Lee had been determined to give her daughter a life without hunger but says human traffickers pounced soon after she stepped into China, carrying her child in a rucksack on her back. Over her own screams, and the little girl’s frightened pleas to her mother, they auctioned her off to the highest bidders among a group of people gathered for the sale.

“My daughter was grabbing hold of my hand as they took her away. She kept saying to me; ‘Mummy, I will never say I am hungry again. Please take me with you,’ ” she recalls.

Ms Lee herself was sold to a local Chinese wheat farm but escaped and eventually made her way into South Korea with help from a well-established defection ­network. She has never found her daughter, despite years of searching.

“People here [in South Korea] live in so much abundance and happiness, that they just cannot imagine the horrors that millions endure daily just two hours away by car,” she said.  [Continue story]

A tale of two defectors – Part 2 – Kwon Chol-nam

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For Kwon Chol-nam, yesterday’s talks were the best news he has had in years. The 44-year-old North Korean made the risky crossing through China in 2014 after his marriage disintegrated, but says after years of discrimin­ation and loneliness in the south, he just wants to go home to his wife and son.

“I came because I thought I could build a better life here but one has to ride a horse to know whether it’s a good one or not,” he said.

“You go to work, you remain ­silent all day and then you come home. Defectors can’t speak of their feelings here because you never know who might report you as a North Korean spy. People here think we are ignorant fools.”

Like all defectors, Mr Kwon has been granted South Korean citizenship but the country’s national security act prohibits all citizens from making any contact with the North without permission. Mr Kwon has managed to do so, paying hefty commissions to brokers to funnel money to his wife and connect them by telephone. He believes there is an “80 to 90 per cent chance” of reviving his marriage if he returns.

But there is no legal way to do so and last June he was jailed for two months after intelligence agents got wind of his plans to ­reverse-defect. He reckons at least 60 per cent of defectors feel as he does but are scared to speak up.

“It feels unfair that I can’t go back,” he says. “Why stop me from going back to the place I was born and raised, where I want to be?”

[The Australian]

The North Korean “Tunnels of Aggression”

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The U.S. Army has reportedly stepped up training efforts for North Korea’s massive network of underground tunnels amid ongoing tension and threats of a military conflict from both nations. The Army is training thousands of soldiers while the Pentagon is buying up gear that would specifically help troops fight in the North’s tunnels, NPR reported Tuesday morning citing unnamed U.S. officials.

The well-documented tunnel system, possibly around 5,000 of them, in the isolationist state reportedly contains not only pathways for troops across the demilitarized zone but also artillery and nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. One such tunnel was discovered a mere 32 miles away from Seoul, the South’s capital city.

The tunnels, dubbed Tunnels of Aggression, were first discovered in 1974 after North Korean defectors warned the South of their existence. The defectors claimed North Korea’s founder Kim Il-Sung had ordered the tunnels built in an effort to possibly invade the South with one tunnel supposedly capable of funneling 30,000 troops per hour, according to The New York Times.

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis are reportedly pushing for diplomacy, while national security adviser H.R. McMaster is encouraging a “bloody nose” strategy involving a minor military strike rather than a full-out conflict.

[Newsweek]

Christian life in North Korea

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While the capital Pyongyang does boast several churches, these buildings are essentially empty shells used to sell foreign visitors a vision of religious tolerance. Instead Christians throughout North Korea are forced to practice in secret.

Kim Sang-Hwa, whose name has been changed for her own safety, is a North Korean defector now living in South Korea, told Open Doors: “Our house was very small, so we all slept in the same room. When I was about 6, I saw my father and mother under the blanket and I could hear the soft noise of the radio. Later I learned they were listening to a broadcast from a Christian radio station.

“In our house was a hidden closet. When I was 12, I accidentally found it. I started to feel inside the cabinet with my hand and I felt a book. I pulled it out, opened the Bible and began to read the first chapter of Genesis. …From that point on Ms Kim became a practicing Christian, albeit in absolute secrecy.

She said: “Sometimes my father met people in a secret location. Among the people visiting the secret meetings were some non-believers too, even spies.

“When one of those visitors was dying, my father went to see him on his death bed. He confessed ‘I know everything about you, your family and your faith. I was a spy and ordered to watch you. You are a good man. I never told anyone you were a Christian. Tell me how I can become a Christian too.’”

[Express (UK)]

North Korean defector numbers slumped in 2017

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Fewer than 100 North Koreans a month defected to the South last year, the lowest for 15 years as Pyongyang and Beijing both tighten controls on movement. A total of 1,127 North Koreans came to the South last year, down 21 per cent from 2016, according to data from the unification ministry. It was the lowest figure since 2001.

The vast majority of defectors from the impoverished North go first to China. They sometimes stay there for several years before making their way to the South, often via a third country.

Defections across the heavily guarded Demilitarized Zone that divides the Korean peninsula are very rare, but this year there have been four.

Pyongyang has been bolstering border controls since the second half of 2015, putting up more guards and setting up high-tension wires to prevent its citizens from fleeing to its giant neighbor.

“On top of that, China has drastically strengthened crackdowns on North Korean escapees, repatriating them recklessly whenever they find them”, Seo Jae-Pyong, an official of the Association of North Korean Defectors, told AFP.

[AFP]

US and China joint plan on North Korea

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Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson let slip last week a few tantalizing details about one of the nation’s most secret military contingency plans: how the United States would try to race inside North Korea to seize its nuclear weapons if it ever saw evidence that Kim Jong-un’s government was collapsing.

For years, American diplomats have been trying to engage their Chinese counterparts in a discussion of this scenario, hoping to avoid a conflict between arriving American Special Forces — who have been practicing this operation for years — and the Chinese military, which would almost certainly pour over the border in a parallel effort.

And for years the Chinese have resisted the conversation, according to several former American officials who tried to engage them in joint planning. The Chinese feared that if news of a conversation leaked, Beijing would be seen as conspiring with the United States over plans for an eventual North Korean collapse, eroding any leverage that Beijing still held over Kim Jong Un.

So it was surprising to Mr. Tillerson’s colleagues when, in a talk to the Atlantic Council last week, he revealed that the Trump administration had already provided assurances to China’s leadership that if American forces landed in North Korea to search for and deactivate nuclear weapons, the troops would do their work and then retreat.

North Korea has defied past predictions of collapse, and one does not appear imminent. But if a collapse were to occur, the aftermath could present grave dangers. American officials have envisioned that North Korean officers, fearing the end of Kim’s government, might lob a nuclear weapon at South Korea or Japan as a last, desperate act — or detonate it on North Korean territory to make occupation impossible.

Mr. Tillerson said at a conference on the Korea crisis that the United States and China “have had conversations about in the event that something happened — it could happen internal to North Korea; it might be nothing that we from the outside initiate — that if that unleashed some kind of instability, the most important thing to us would be securing those nuclear weapons they’ve already developed and ensuring that they — that nothing falls into the hands of people we would not want to have it.”

[New York Times]

Two more North Koreans defect directly to South Korea

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Two North Korean men defected to South Korea via the East Sea on Wednesday, the South Korean unification ministry (MOU) confirmed to NK News on Thursday.

The men were found in seas roughly 100 km from the Dokdo islets, a ministry spokesperson said, and are two of three North Koreans to reportedly cross into the South in the past two days. They were discovered in a small wooden boat, the spokesperson said, and told the navy that they wanted to defect to South Korea.

A South Korean marine policeperson declined to give further details about the identity of the two escapees, though said they are “not that old.”

2017 has seen 11 defectors come to South Korea by crossing the maritime border between the two countries, the MOU said.

Defections across the inter-Korean border are relatively rare: North Koreans are much more likely to cross at the country’s border with China before seeking asylum in third countries.

[NK News]