Category: North Korean refugee

Defector reporter missing near China-North Korea border region

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A North Korean defector reporter for the Daily NK website has been missing near the China-North Korea border region since Monday morning, two sources familiar with the case confirmed to NK News on Tuesday.

The source could not name the journalist due to the sensitivity of the issue, but said they have known Mr. A for a long time and that he has “no reason to re-defect back to the North,” adding it was possible he had been abducted by North Korean agents.

Yonhap reported that the missing reporter defected to the South in 2011, is 60 years old, works for “internet media”, and reportedly disappeared from Yanji, China on Monday morning.

The South Korean government is aware of the case and investigating the details, an official from the spokesperson’s office of the Ministry of Unification (MoU) told NK News.

[NK News]

North Korean defector: “I’m good at escaping”

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“I’m good at escaping,” says Grace Jo, a slender 25-year-old who managed to flee North Korea and its authoritarian regime not just once but three times, though most of her family was not so lucky.

The first time Grace and her family tried to flee North Korea, she was about 7 years old.

“We walked three nights and four days,” she recalls. “We walked on unpaved roads, and we crossed many mountains until we reached the Tumen River” that separates North Korea from China.

A few months earlier, her father had been arrested and beaten by authorities for crossing the border to buy a bag of rice, and he died on the train taking him to prison. Her grandmother and two younger brothers died of hunger, and her eldest sister had gone off to search for food and never returned.

Living in the northeastern North Hamgyong province, Jo’s family had been trying to survive on wild fruit, crickets and tree bark. Once, she said, she and her little brother would have nothing to eat for 10 days.

But crossing the border did not put an end to their problems. In China, Pyongyang’s main ally, her family’s three survivors were forced to go underground for fear of being sent back to North Korea. Eventually, they were caught, jailed and sent back home.

They managed to flee once again after Jo’s mother bribed a border guard, but once again they were caught and returned.

In 2006 she made her third — and final — escape, this time thanks to an American-Korean pastor who paid members of the Bowibu, North Korea’s omnipotent secret police, $10,000 to secure the three women’s freedom. [continued]

Trump urged to take in more North Korean refugees

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After receiving U.N. refugee status, Grace Jo’s remaining family moved to the United States in 2008, and Jo has since acquired American citizenship — an unlikely turn of events for someone who was taught that “Americans are the biggest enemy” and “we should kill them or report to the officials if we see them.”

Today, Jo is vice president of NKinUSA, an organization founded by her sister to help other North Korean defectors.

“We want President (Donald) Trump to accept more North Korean refugees in the U.S. and allow us to provide resettlement services,” she said.

“Also, President Trump, please tell China, Vietnam and Laos to stop repatriating the refugees. Sending them back to North Korea is returning them to torture, imprisonment or even death,” she added.

Jo says that while the country’s pursuit of nuclear weapons is certainly a potential problem, the millions of people scrabbling to eat enough, “and millions more living with no liberty of any kind, is an actual problem.”

[Japan Times]

North Korean military obligations

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Watching footage of April’s military parades in North Korea — with soldiers marching in formation to patriotic tunes — Lee So-yeon recalls all the steps. She was once one of those soldiers.

The daughter of a university professor, Lee, now 41, grew up in North Korea’s North Hamgyong province. But when famine devastated the country in the 1990s, women — including Lee — volunteered for the military in droves, often for the food rations.

Since 2014, North Korean women have been drafted for seven years of mandatory military service. Men serve 10 to 12 years. For each gender, those are the longest conscription terms in the world.

In the military, Lee says, she witnessed sexual abuse and violence against female soldiers. She tried to defect but was imprisoned and tortured. Finally, in 2008, she managed to sneak across the Tumen River to China.

“I was shocked by freedom — that I didn’t need permission to do anything!” Lee recalls. “I couldn’t believe there was hot water, hair dryers! I could vote for whomever I wanted. And all the food!”

Lee has since become an advocate for female defectors as head of the New Korea Women’s Union, based in western Seoul.

[NPR]

Defectors reflect on North Korean mental conditioning

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From Lee So-yeon’s time in the military, she is able to offer insight into what the North Korean government wants its own people to know. When she was a soldier, state TV blasted nonstop in her office, she says.

“There’s a TV in every army barracks. When there was a nuclear test, state TV told us to feel proud, so we did,” Lee says. “Even when there were peace talks between North and South Korea, state TV told us it was a ploy by the South to take over our country.”

The media in North Korea do not merely report information. Instead, they’re a tool for the regime to stir emotion, especially when it feels threatened — as it does now, says Jeon Young-sun, a professor of North Korea studies in Seoul.

“Outside pressure on North Korea — sanctions or threats of attack — actually help the regime win domestic support,” Jeon says. “North Korea is as always on the defensive, and fear rallies people around their Dear Leader.”

It’s not just soldiers. Defector Lee Hyeonseo was a high school student in 1994, when the Clinton administration came close to a pre-emptive military strike on North Korea’s nuclear facilities. Her school ended classes and sent the students out digging trenches for months.

“We were so scared at the time. We really thought we were going to have a war,” says Lee, 36. “Somehow, we believed we were going to win that war, because our dear leaders Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, they were superior gods who can make everything happen.”

[NPR]

Cybersecurity defector describes North Korea’s ‘hacker army’

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North Korea has an army of up to 3,000 trained hackers and is “100%” capable of having launched the “WannaCry” ransomware attack that paralyzed businesses and government agencies, according to a computer professor who defected from the country.

Kim Heung-kwang, founder and director of North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity, a nonprofit organization promoting North Korean defectors’ rights, told the Nikkei Asian Review that the rogue state has world-class software engineering talent and technology, which it has been nurturing since the 1960s.

“Some people downplay North Korea’s computer technology, but they have top-class software technology manpower,” Kim said during an interview at his office in eastern Seoul. “If you ask me whether they are able to attack using ransomware — yes, 100%.”

Kim was a professor at Hamheung Computer Technology University before he crossed the Tumen River, which marks the border between North Korea and China in 2003 and then came to South Korea in 2004.

Kim said the North Korean government has developed an army of hackers, or “information warriors,” in part to attack “enemies.” But the North’s key interest, he said, is financial. Pyongyang earned $1.5 billion from hacking and other cyber activities in 2016, up from $1 billion a year earlier, making cyber activities a major source of foreign currency for the Kim Jong Un regime.

Pyongyang therefore gives hackers special treatment, Kim said. “Information warriors are treated very well. They are offered nice apartments in Pyongyang, given medals and awarded compensation. They are promoted quickly and allowed to join the [country’s ruling] Workers’ Party.”

He said about 500 top secondary school students are selected as potential hackers every year and sent to college, where they learn computer languages and are put through rigorous training. Some are even given the chance to study abroad in China and Russia — benefits beyond the reach of most North Koreans.

[Nikkei Asian Review]

CIA Director met high-level North Korean defector Thae Yong Ho

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CIA Director Mike Pompeo discussed the potential for fomenting an insurrection against the Kim Jong Un regime in North Korea with a high-level defector, according to U.S. intelligence officials. The meeting between Pompeo and Thae Yong Ho, one of the highest-ranking North Korean officials to defect to South Korea, took place during the CIA director’s visit to South Korea earlier this month. Thae worked as a senior diplomat in the North Korean embassy in London and defected in the summer of 2016.

During the session with Thae, Pompeo discussed whether conditions inside North Korea were ripe for an uprising against Kim by the military, security, or political officials, according to intelligence officials familiar with the meeting. Thae responded that he believed conditions within North Korea were conducive to such an insurrection.

In January, Thae, the defector, told reporters in Seoul the Kim regime is “crumbling” and efforts to control outside information from penetrating the closed system were failing due to official corruption and growing discontent.

Thae advocates using information to break the North Korean regime’s control of outside news to help ordinary citizens overthrow the regime.

Bruce Bechtol, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, said Kim Jong Un’s hold on power is weaker than that of his father, Kim Jong Il, who in turn did not have the same grip on power his father, North Korean founder Kim Il Sung. “Because of Kim’s weaker hold on power than his predecessors, and the powerful internal security services, it is most likely that any insurrection is going to come from members of the elite—not from the bottom up,” he said.

[Washington Free Beacon]

North Korean defectors divided on Seoul detente

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Days before Moon Jae-in was elected president of South Korea on May 9, about 300 people gathered at the national legislature to endorse the former human rights lawyer and advocate of dialogue and engagement with reclusive North Korea. Surprisingly, the group comprised many North Korean defectors, a demographic known for its conservative politics and strong support for sanctions and isolation of Pyongyang.

One high-profile defector, known for his hawkish views, was Ahn Chan-il, a former soldier who defected in 1979. Ahn told the Nikkei Asian Review that attitudes among some 70 defector groups in the South have changed: “Five years ago, 30% supported Moon Jae-in and 70% supported Park Geun-hye, but the spectrum has changed and now it is more like 70% liberal and 30% conservative. A minority oppose Moon but the majority supports him.”

Moon has adopted a dovish stance on the North, pledging to revive some version of the “sunshine” policy of engagement.

Kang Myung-do, another prominent defector and Moon supporter associated with hardline views in the past, said the political right had been discredited by the Park scandal, rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula and the fact that Pyongyang carried out most of its nuclear tests during a decade of conservative rule.

In South Korea and beyond, defectors have often argued for hardline policies to squeeze the Kim family regime. Thae Yong-ho, who became the highest-ranking defector in decades after absconding from the North Korean embassy in London last year, is one of many high-profile regime critics to have expressed skepticism about any cooperation that could prop up an oppressive system.

As well as resenting harsh treatment in their repressive homeland, many defectors retain bitter memories of the “sunshine” years during which liberal governments shied away from highlighting human rights abuses in the North for fear of scuppering inter-Korean reconciliation. The late Hwang Jang-yop, the highest-ranking defector to date and the architect of North Korea’s state ideology known as juche, complained of being gagged by the Kim and Roh administrations to avoid upsetting the northern regime.

[Nikkei Asian Review]

Defectors’ lives indicate that Korean unification will not be easy

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One wonders what might happen when or if Korean unification happens and North Koreans find themselves living in the same state as Southerners.

North Korean defectors are not financially successful in the South, by South Korean standards at least. The average monthly income of a North Korea refugee is roughly $1290 at the time of writing, 65% of the nationwide average. Low salaries and wages often reflect discrimination, but more frequently they are the unavoidable result of the low professional and social skills of refugees.

At the same time, the chances that an average refugee will become a victim of crime are 5.5 times higher than for ‘regular’ South Koreans: 24.3% of refugees report that they have been victims of crime. This is bad enough, but when it comes to a specific type of crime, namely fraud and scamming, the gap is truly huge, and one out of five refugees say that they have been cheated out of money. This is 40 times the nationwide average – an astonishing difference.

Another sign of problems is the astonishingly high level of suicides among refugees. When it comes to suicide, South Korea stands out: its annual suicide rate, 26.5 out of every 100,000 people, is the highest among OECD countries. But the suicide rate among North Korean refugees is three times this nationwide average.

Another indication that not all is well is the relatively new phenomenon of refugees who choose to go back to North Korea. In 2016, during a study of the refugee community, 20.8% said they would like to go back to North Korea. Going to the U.S. is significantly less dramatic than going back to North Korea, but the motivations are still the same: Many refugees want to leave South Korea, even though this is a country where they have little problems with language and are entitled to large aid packages.

All things indicate that refugees – some of them, at least – experience grave problems when they try to adjust to the South Korean society. This makes one wonder how the average North Korean will react to a new lifestyle which is likely to be imposed on them in the event of unification.  Like it or not, the experience of the North Korean refugees confirms that if unification ever comes, it is not going to be easy or cheap, is bound to produce many social problems and, sometimes, genuine human tragedy.

[NK News]

Can South Korea’s Moon make ‘sunshine’ again with defiant North Korea?

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South Koreans are almost certain to elect liberal Moon Jae-in, the son of North Korean refugees who came to the South during the 1950-53 Korean War. Moon has promised to reopen the Kaesong complex, the signature project of the so-called “Sunshine Policy” of engagement with North Korea pursued earlier this century.

But reopening Kaesong could go against the spirit of U.N. sanctions to prevent money from going into North Korea’s banned weapons programs, government officials and experts say. And for Moon to justify a return to engagement, North Korea would first need to at least signal a concession, said Lim Eul-chul, a professor at Kyungnam University in South Korea.

Critics say hundreds of millions of dollars paid to North Korea over the years as wages for workers at Kaesong were used to fund the development of nuclear weapons and missiles. North Korea had demanded that the wages be paid to the state and not directly to the workers.

Jong Kun Choi, who advises the 64-year-old Moon on foreign policy, said the candidate believes better inter-Korean relations is the best way to provide security on the Korean peninsula. Moon, a human rights lawyer who was a top aide to the late president Roh, has Washington worried his more moderate approach could undercut efforts to increase pressure and sanctions on Pyongyang, senior South Korean government officials said.

Moon’s election would also complicate the deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) system. He has repeatedly said the incoming administration should decide whether to deploy the anti-missile system and it should be ratified by parliament.

[Reuters]