Category: North Korean refugee

Kim Jong Un’s power is growing say North Korea defectors

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More and more North Korean defectors in the South think Kim Jong Un is strengthening his grip on power, and more than a quarter of those surveyed think Kim’s rule will continue for at least 30 years.

According to the Institute for Peace and Unification Studies at Seoul National University, a recent survey indicates more defectors are less confident the Kim regime is weakening, South Korean newspaper Munhwa Ilbo reported.

At the same time, nearly 70 percent of those surveyed said they think Kim is doing his job poorly, an indication the North Korean ruler has been able to consolidate his position without necessarily gaining the approval of the people.

But Suh Bo-hyuk, the South Korean researcher who oversaw the survey, said Kim had proved himself by growing the economy despite his pursuit of nuclear weapons.

The survey also shows more defectors are less confident about prospects for unification. More than half of the respondents, or 55.7 percent, said they “believed unification to be impossible” when they lived in the North. Only 26 percent said they think unification is possible “within 10 years,” significantly down from 45 percent in 2016, according to the research.

[UPI]

What North Koreans miss out on

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Chloe, a North Korean defector now living in Seoul, wants to be an advertising manager and needs to learn English for that to happen. While most South Koreans already learn or are engaged in advanced English studies, it is rare for North Koreans to understand English. They are told what they will learn at university, or what career they will undertake. Chloe said while school was free in her homeland, many people bribed teachers for extra tutoring or to learn what they needed. She said her memories of North Korea were mostly happy but her mother’s decision to escape was based on wanting a better life for them.

For Jenna, another defector, the one thing she misses most is the grandmother who raised her, following the death of her father and the defection of her mother. She knows she is unlikely to ever see her grandmother again. “I really miss my grandmother,” Jenna said, admitting she found aspects of life on the south side of the 38th parallel hard. “South Korea has many academies and people study all the time.”

Many North Koreans faced discrimination and once in South Korea are stuck in poverty unable to get better qualifications or a job due to the highly competitive education and job markets. English was just one of the minimum requirements needed to succeed.

Associate Professor Bronwen Dalton, from the University of Technology, Sydney, says defectors learn some South Koreans view their northern neighbors as a burden. “They are not seen as working as hard or they are not as refined or can’t be trusted,” she said.

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Life on the other side for North Korean defectors

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While life in Seoul sounds like heaven compared to life under a brutal dictator in Pyongyang, North Korean defectors know firsthand, life isn’t all sweet and rosy on the other side.

“When I first moved to South Korea, I had spare time, I didn’t know what to do with it” James said. We never had that in North Korea.”

“I found it difficult to identify,” he said. “In North Korea most communication is face-to-face, in South Korea it’s done over the internet.”

James is one of five students studying English in Sydney as part of a scholarship program at the University of Technology Sydney, specifically aimed at former North Koreans. He is the first to admit he doesn’t miss the day to day life in North Korea, but he does long to see friends and family he left behind.

The group explained that they not only found discrimination in the competitive South Korean world, but also faced the challenge of having to catch up on years of education.  James said most students not only study during the day, but also take up extra tutorial in the evenings just to get ahead.

Enormous difficulties adjusting to their lives in the south including how to use the internet and things like using the train service or topping up a travel card. These simple life skills are all learned during a three-month stay at the Hana Foundation, a defector mentoring program.

 [news.com.au]

Malnutrition in the North Korean military

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In a video from South Korean Digitalsoju TV, women defectors who formerly served in North Korea’s military sit down with a South Korean host.

One defector explained that all North Korean women must serve in the military for six years, in addition to all men being required to serve for 11 years.

During her time in the military, one of the female defectors said she was fed only three spoonfuls of rice at mealtimes. “I weighed just around 81 pounds and was about 5’2,” said the defector. Her Body Mass Index, though not a perfect indicator of health, works out to about 15, whereas a healthy body is considered to have a BMI of about 19-25.

Unsurprisingly, malnutrition is widespread across all sectors of North Korea. And the defector still said that is even the case within the military. Soldiers are poorly paid, and withhold or steal each other’s state-issued goods like military uniforms.

A second defector said that the officers in charge of uniform and ration distribution would often leverage their position to coerce sex from female soldiers.   Read more

Sexual abuse by superior North Korean officers

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A female defector speaks of her time in the North Korean military: “The Major General was this man who was around 45 years old and I was only 18 years old at the time,” she said. “So one day he tells everyone else to leave except for me. Then he abruptly tells me to take off all my clothes,” she said. The officer told her he was inspecting her for malnutrition, possibly to send her off to a hospital where undernourished soldiers are treated.

“So since I didn’t have much of a choice, I thought, well, it’s the Major General. Surely there’s a good reason for this. I never could have imagined he’d try something,” she said. But the Major General then asks her to remove her underwear and “then out of nowhere, he comes at me,” she said.

[When she resisted] the Major General then proceeded to beat her. When she screamed, he covered her mouth. She said he hit her so hard in the left ear that blood came out of her right ear. She said the beating was so severe her teeth were loose afterwards.

“How do you think this is going to make me look?” the Major General asked her after the beating. He then instructs her to get dressed and tell no one what happened or he would “make [her] life a living hell.”

“There wasn’t really anyone I could tell or report this too,” she said. “Many other women have gone through something similar.”

“I don’t know whether he’s dead or alive, but if Korea ever gets reunified, I’m going to find him and even if I can’t make him feel ten times the pain I felt, I want to at least smack him on the right side of his face the same way he did to me,” she said.

[Business Insider]

The moment he knew he had to escape the brutal North Korean regime

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Joo-il Kim grew up thinking North Korea was paradise.

Then he learned that his two-year-old niece, who was so hungry she had eaten uncooked corn and washed it down the mouthfuls with water, died after it expanded in her stomach and killed her. He would later learn that when he visited his family, they would feed him the only food they had in the house rather than let him know they had nothing for themselves.

It took him a long time to consider that the messages that he had been indoctrinated with since birth may be false. His mind changed after a new role in the military gave him the rare privilege to travel freely around the country. He was tasked with rounding up deserters, and it exposed him to the widespread starvation during the height of a four-year famine that killed an estimated three million people.

He recalls seeing piles of emaciated corpses outside health centers, in a country where supposedly no one went hungry. ‘I started to question whether the country existed for the people or for the dictator,’ he added. ‘I decided to escape North Korea to find the answer in the outside world.’

At age 32, armed with a knife that he would use to slit his throat if caught, he slipped into the heavily-guarded Tumen River in Hoeryong under the cover of darkness and swam to China. Fearful his status as an illegal immigrant may get him deported back to the regime and certain death, he pressed on to Thailand where he met a group that specializes in helping North Koreans find asylum.

He opted for London, where he now lives in New Malden with hundreds of other defectors, in a larger Korean community.

[Metro.uk]

The influence of activists fighting North Korea with balloons, TV shows and leaflets

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Some send up plastic leaflets that weigh less than a feather and which flutter down from the clouds with calls for democracy, or blurry cartoons ridiculing North Korea’s ruler.

Some send flash drives loaded with South Korean soap operas, or mini-documentaries about the vast wealth of southern corporations, or crisp new US dollar bills.

One occasionally sends his empty food wrappers, with stained labels showing noodles slathered in meat sauce, so northerners can see the good life they would find in the South.

They are self-proclaimed soldiers in a quiet war with North Korea, a disparate and colorful collection of activists taking on one of the world’s most isolated nations, mostly using homemade hot-air balloons.

“The quickest way to bring down the regime is to change people’s minds,” said Park Sang Hak, a refugee from the North.  Mr. Park now runs the group Fighters for a Free North Korea from a small Seoul office, sending tens of thousands of plastic fliers across the border every year.

Scholars and North Korean refugees say the outside information has helped bring a wealth of changes, from new slang to changing fashions to increasing demand for consumer goods in the expanding market economy.

[AP]

Criticizing Kim Jong Un leads to life in a prison camp

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A North Korean defector explains that people in the North Asian country feel they have no other choice but to show allegiance to Kim Jong Un because of the consequences that would follow if they don’t — namely being sentenced to hard labor in the notorious prison camps.

“[In the camps] you are forced to labor and you live a life no better than a dog or a pig,” said the defector, who spoke with Sky News but did not reveal his identity as his daughter is still inside the isolated Pacific country. “It is better to die.”

He noted that in private, people are critical of their dictator, but do not dare to make those views public. “If you criticize Kim Jong Un you will go to a prison camp and not come back,” the man said. “In North Korean society you can do everything but criticize the Kim family. If you are caught, even if you have money, you won’t be able to survive. It’s a frightening system.”

“We don’t follow the system because we like it, we are only following because we are scared of it.”

“Essentially, North Korea is the most oppressive regime in the world; it is certainly the most closed, isolated country in the world. It’s a regime that stands accused by the U.N.’s own Commission of Inquiry of crimes against humanity,” Benedict Rogers, East Asia Team Leader at Christian Solidarity Worldwide, told The Christian Post in an interview in March.

“Those crimes against humanity include the incarceration of 100,000 to 200,000 prisoners, who are jailed because of political crimes, and are subjected to the worst forms of torture, slave labor, denial of medical care, sexual violence, and in some instances execution,” Rogers added.

[Christian Post]

A refugee girl in South Korea

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Kim looks like any other 16-year-old girl when you see her shopping in the street in Seoul.

But like 28,000 other refugees, she has escaped from North Korea. One morning in 2011, her mother could no longer bear the misery, lack of freedom and food deprivation, so she and her daughter escaped. Kim was 10 and had to leave the rest of her family, her friends and her school without even having the chance to say goodbye.

They fled their country in secret by crossing by night the river making up the border with China. After making it to China, her mother used her meager savings to pay smugglers to enter Laos, Thailand and finally South Korea eight months later in 2012.

Kim now lives in a dormitory, while attending school. Kim decided on the YeoMyun school, which is run by a Christian association, alternative education suitable for young defectors. Among other things, teachers know that their students have been through trauma when they fled the North, so they deserve special attention.

Like all children in the North, Kim was taught music at school, so she is as comfortable playing drums as electric guitar.

On the weekend, the girls from the dormitory reunite with their families while Kim often stays behind, alone. She uses the opportunity to rest and read Korean mangas. She enjoys preparing a surprise meal for her friends when they return. She loves to cook with aloe but her guilty pleasure is ice cream. She loves buying a 5-litre container to share with her friends while watching a DVD on Sunday night, before resuming the work week.

Kim barely ever talks about her past with her co-tenants. They all have a painful or buried secret they refuse to talk about.

[The Mirror]

High-level North Korean defector says Kim Jong Un could be overthrown within 10 years

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Thae Yong Ho, the highest-level diplomatic official to defect from North Korea, told South Korea’s JoongAng Daily that while North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was “actually very clever,” his days at the top of the regime are numbered.

As North Korean propaganda dominates outsiders’ perception of its citizens’ lives, Thae, who was the country’s deputy ambassador to the UK before defecting last year, provided a glimpse into a heavily policed but ultimately fragile system.

“Over the past decades, there were a myriad of anti-Workers’ Party, anti-revolutionary events in North Korea … something close to a pro-democracy movement,” Thae said. He added that “ordinary citizens” were “very much against” the leadership, adding that although the North Korean regime could execute people for watching South Korean media, virtually every North Korean did.

“The chasm between the Kim Jong Un regime and the general public is widening every year, and some day, the two sides will ultimately break like a rubber band,” Thae said. “I think that day will come within the next 10 years.”

However, Rodger Baker, the lead analyst of the Asia-Pacific region for Stratfor, a geopolitical consulting firm, previously told Business Insider that North Korea’s government might be stronger than we think.

“A lot of the West’s vision of North Korea is from defector testimony, which is going to have a political bent,” Baker said. He added that the idea that air-dropping South Korean DVDs and music into North Korea would eventually sway the population against Kim “overestimates the draw of material goods over nationalism and national identity.”

[Business Insider]