Category: North Korean refugee

Escaping the ‘cruel, sad, and dark’ world of North Korea – Part 2

Posted on by
1

On her seventh birthday, Grace Jo crossed the Tumen River with her mother and sister and entered into China. Weak and malnourished, Grace’s eyes were opened to the world beyond her country’s borders. She saw a family with a pet dog that ate better than she ever had. “Even the animals here live better than we do,” Grace recalled thinking at the time.

Grace, her older sister, and her mother lived in China intermittently for 10 years. They were always on the run, hiding from the Chinese police. They also had to evade North Korean agents who had been dispatched to hunt down their family. They weren’t able to avoid capture; all three were repatriated multiple times.

After being caught and repatriated in 2001, young Grace spent many months in a North Korean prison facility. “The soldiers liked to kick and punch people. They liked to practice boxing on the prisoners,” Grace explained.

“From this moment on, you are no longer human beings, you will be treated like animals,” the North Korean soldiers barked.

“We could not look them in the eye. We had to stare at their feet. If we moved or looked up, they would punish all of us,” she said.

North Korean prisons are notoriously brutal, with some previously imprisoned defectors reporting seeing guards beat people mercilessly. Some said that the soldiers would sometimes attack pregnant women, kicking them in their stomachs repeatedly.

In this harsh and unforgiving environment, Grace was always terrified that she would never see her family again. Read more

Escaping the ‘cruel, sad, and dark’ world of North Korea – Part 3

Posted on by
1

After bring caught defecting and sent to a North Korean prison, Grace Jo was eventually set free. She made her way back to China, where she was reunited with her mother and sister. The family met Korean-American missionary Pastor Phillip Buck who helped take care of them.

But they were caught again in 2005, and Grace spent a year in a Chinese prison. In 2006, the Chinese turned her and her mother and sister over to the North Koreans. They were held in the National Security Agency, where they were interrogated and tortured.

The North Koreans found out that they were Christian and knew Christian missionaries — crimes punishable by death in North Korea. To spare them, Buck paid $10,000 to North Korean security officers. The family was charged with lesser crimes and set free on the condition that they remain in North Korea.

They immediately fled the country to China, where they quickly applied for United Nations’ refugee status.

While waiting for approval, Grace and her family stayed in an apartment with around 20 other defectors in Beijing. There was a constant lingering fear among the residents that they would be sent back. Grace explained, “We couldn’t leave the house. Even though we had a kind of protected status, there was always the possibility that the Chinese police would grab us and send us back to North Korea.”

After receiving refugee status, Grace, Jinhye, and their mother came to the U.S. in 2008. Grace became a U.S. citizen in 2013.

[Daily Caller]

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by
1

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

Posted on by

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]

Changing the stereotypes of North Korean defectors

Posted on by

A trendy haircut, eyebrow piercings and a tattoo sleeve on his arm — nothing about online personality Lee Pyung’s current appearance betrays the fact he was born under a totalitarian regime. But he was, Lee reveals in his live webcast series, 23 years ago in the city of Chongjin, North Hamgyong Province, North Korea.

Lee is one of a handful of 20- and 30-something North Korean defectors who have recently begun telling their stories on Afreeca, an online streaming platform where broadcasters earn money according to the number of viewers. Lee’s live streams tell candid stories of life above the peninsula’s 38th parallel and aim to “relate to young people.”

“South Koreans’ perceptions of North Korea are a lot different from what I know about the country,” said Lee in a webcast last month, also uploaded to YouTube. He has received all sorts of questions from viewers, including “Do North Koreans really eat human flesh?” and “Is everybody trained to be a spy?” which he’s called “outrageous.”

Lee began streaming online because he “wanted to change the stereotypes of North Korean defectors, especially among the younger South Korean generation who are less familiar with North Korea.”

He hated that many South Koreans seemed prejudiced against defectors, viewing them as “poor” or “fanatical communists.”

The young escapee’s stories seem to have found an audience. Since his online debut in May, Lee has made on average 5 million won ($4,460) per month, with last month’s earnings soaring much higher. His YouTube video detailing how he escaped has attracted over 1 million views. He works out of a streaming studio, equipped with a computer, camera and microphone. Read more

North Korean defectors open up online – Part 1

Posted on by
1

north-korean-defector-bj-lee-pyung23-year-old Lee Pyung made it to South Korea in 2004, after bribing North Korean border guards, crossing into China, being imprisoned there, hiding in the Mongolian plains and being picked up by the National Intelligence Service at the Korean Embassy in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia — alone at the age of 11. In Seoul, Lee reunited with his parents who had defected when he was 3.

In his videos, Lee answers viewers’ questions about the North. Some clips feature lighthearted anecdotes on catching dragonflies in undeveloped fields as a child and growing up in Chongjin, the country’s third largest city (“It has buildings and everything”), and lessons on North Korean words. Others detail how people are forbidden from wearing contact lenses or miniskirts, and how the North’s educational propaganda depicts South Korea as “a bad place full of refugees and gangsters.”

Some stories relay the more gruesome reality of the world’s most isolated state. As a child, Lee frequently witnessed public executions that took place in his schoolyard — “I’ve seen countless bodies. Seeing people dying, seeing corpses was an everyday thing,” he said.

Since settling in the South, Lee has “fit in extremely well” with his peers, he said. With a keen interest in fashion, he learned hair-styling at a college before becoming a full-time BJ (broadcasting jockey).  Read more

North Korean defectors open up online – Part 2

Posted on by
1

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]

South Korean President urges preparations for mass North Korean defections

Posted on by

South Korean President Park Geun-Hye on Tuesday told her government to prepare for large-scale defections from North Korea, just days after direct appealing to its citizens to flee their country.

In an address to mark Armed Forced Day earlier this month, Park had vowed to “keep the road open” for future escapees and urged North Koreans to “come to the bosom of freedom in the South.”

Pyongyang’s response was to call Park a “bare-faced and impudent bitch” in a commentary carried by the ruling party newspaper, Rodong Sinmun.

Speaking at a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Park reiterated her defection appeal, and stressed the importance of preparing the ground for any new arrivals. “Defectors are like unification that has arrived early, and a test bed for unification,” Park said. “I hope we can swiftly secure sufficient system and capacity to accommodate North Korean citizens who come seeking freedom,” she added.

The government currently runs two resettlement centers for defectors with a combined capacity of around 1,100 people. South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo reported Saturday that the government was planning a two trillion won (US$1.8 billion) project for building a defector camp that would hold up to 100,000 people. Citing an unnamed government official, the report said closed-down schools and new buildings would be used to accommodate an influx of North Korean refugees that could be triggered by any sudden shift in the dynamics of the North-South border.

[AFP]

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

Posted on by

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]