Category: North Korean refugee

Selling sausages to save North Korean defectors

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Youngae Ma, 53, is a North Korean defector who joined the North Korean army at 17, serving in the country’s State Security Department as an intelligence agent near the Chinese border.

She was responsible for gathering information about South Korea through collecting documents. Based in China, she was exposed to what she called “the outer world,” with radios, a wide variety of cuisine, and Christian churches. When she was found eating the free food offered at a church, she was arrested right away, she said.

Knowing that she would be sentenced to death, Ma decided to escape. She waited for the police car transporting her to slow, and when it did, she threw herself out and ran for her life in the blistering cold.

“I couldn’t feel my toes, I remember three of my toenails falling out while I was running,” Ma said. “I didn’t notice it until I realized that I was leaving a bloody track.”

Ma eventually made it safely to the South Korean Consulate General in Shanghai, where she was given a passport and was escorted to Seoul.

Ma made it to the U.S. and sells Pyongyang sausages to fund her mission to rescue North Korean defectors. She now runs The Kun Jip, in Palisades Park, New Jersey.

Ma is a U.S. permanent resident with a South Korean passport — one that she claims to have fought for more than five years to receive, citing political persecution in South Korea.  Read more

North Korean defector standing up for her faith

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Youngae Ma, who defected from North Korea in 2000, said a meal in the church that she found in China was a life-changing experience. In North Korea, Christianity is considered the equivalent to espionage, she said.

“That’s when I first saw the Bible, and I felt affection from this church community that I’ve never felt before,” she said. “It’s such an abundance I wouldn’t have even imagined existed.”

Ma now leads NK Refugee Mission, working to rescue North Korean defectors that have been detained in various parts of China and Southeast Asia during their journey to escape North Korea.  Currently, Ma’s mission is to rescue two women from China, whose identities she declined to reveal.

“I’m more than willing to be sacrificed while protesting for North Korea’s human rights. … They call me a tick, or a mite when I protest outside the North Korean office,” Ma said, recalling her experiences encountering Pyongyang officials outside North Korea’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York City. She said she would receive phone calls from a blocked or unknown number. She would pick up, she said, and there would be silence for more than three seconds. She knew what was coming next.

“I have a hunch that it’s from the North Korean diplomats, because I can hear a heavy accent. They threatened to chop my head off with an ax, take out all my teeth with a wrench, and endlessly shout in foul [North] Korean language to tell me they’re going to take my life someday,” she said.

She said that the most recent call she had received to stop her activities as a missionary was in early May.

[NBC News]

Yeonmi Park: “We North Koreans can be experts at lying, even to ourselves.”

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Growing up under the repressive regime of Kim Jong-il in North Korea, Yeonmi Park was taught never to express her opinions or ask questions. The dictator, she believed, could read her mind. Her mother gave her a warning: “Even when you think you’re alone, the birds and mice can hear you whisper.”

Now 22 and living in New York, Park has found her voice. So much so, that North Korea published an 18-minute video online, featuring Park’s relatives, in an attempt to discredit her stories of her former home.

“If a dictator hates you, you’re in good shape. You’re a good activist,” Park says.

Park grew up in a small, one-storey house in Hyesan, near the border with China, during the years of the North Korean famine which claimed more than a million lives. Her book recounts the horrifying images that came to seem normal to her as a child. Bodies in rubbish heaps, frozen babies abandoned in allies, desperate people crying out for help on the streets and long queues for fresh water on freezing days.

“Maybe deep, deep inside me I knew something was wrong. But we North Koreans can be experts at lying, even to ourselves,” Park writes.

On a dark and cold night in early 2007, Park, then 13, and her mother made the dangerous journey across the border to China guided by human smugglers. Nearly two years later, Park and her mother escaped and crossed the Gobi Desert to Mongolia and then flew to South Korea.

It was Park’s emotional speech about her experiences delivered at the One Young World summit in 2014 that garnered global attention. The video of her speech has been viewed more than 2 million times on YouTube.

[Sydney Morning Herald]

Aunt of Kim Jong Un living a secret life in the US

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The aunt of Kim Jong Un, who has been living a secret life in the U.S. after defecting from the regime 18 years ago, is speaking out for the first time.

Ko Yong Suk, and her husband Ri Gang, fled North Korea in 1998, fearing they would lose their privileged status, when Ko’s sister –the mother of Kim Jong Un – became sick with terminal breast cancer.

“My friends here tell me I’m so lucky, that I have everything,” Ko Yong Suk, as she was known in North Korea, told The Washington Post. “My kids went to great schools and they’re successful, and I have my husband, who can fix anything. There’s nothing we can envy.” Her husband Ri Gang adds, “I think we have achieved the American Dream.”

The couple’s new names and home state were kept hidden to protect their three children. The Post reported the couple lived several hours away from New York City.

The 60-year-old, who runs a dry-cleaning business with her husband also acts as an informant on North Korea to the CIA, the newspaper adds. The couple claimed CIA operatives sometimes would arrive in their town to show them photos of North Koreans and ask who they were. The CIA declined to comment.

Ri Gang now says he wants to visit Pyongyang again to help ease the tensions between the U.S. and North Korea. “My ultimate goal is to go back to North Korea. I understand America and I understand North Korea, so I think I can be a negotiator between the two,” he said.

“If Kim Jong Un is how I remembered he used to be, I would be able to meet him and talk to him.”

Activist use drones to deliver information into North Korea

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Stealthy drones have been delivering SD cards and flash drives to North Korean residents hungry for entertainment and information from the outside, a North Korean defector and activist says.

Jung Gwang-il, founder of the group No Chain, said the drones have been delivering the contraband since early 2015. The SD cards and USB flash drives contain Western and South Korean films, TV shows, music and internet-free access to Wikipedia — media that will help get outside information to North Koreans, who are kept behind an invisible wall that cuts them off from outside influence.

It’s the first time a North Korean activist group acknowledged that it had been secretly using them to make deliveries to North Korea. Holding up a USB flash drive, Jung said, “I believe this has power to bring freedom to my country.”

No Chain and the Human Rights Foundation have quietly delivered more than 1,000 SD cards and flash drives to the communist country via hexacopter drones, they said.

The groups chose to send media because of its power to show outside life to North Koreans, said Human Rights Foundation President Thor Halvorssen. “The regime is trying to stop soap operas, Hollywood films, and things like K-pop. … They’re certainly quite fearful of something as simple as cartoons and TV programs. This challenges their iron grip of the North Korean people,” he said.      Read more

Drones gaining ground as choice delivery system into North Korea

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For decades, efforts to bring outside information or entertainment into North Korea have been decidedly low tech.

Radio programs made for North Koreans can get their frequencies jammed. Balloons carrying pamphlets, SD cards and USB flash drives have been released in hopes that the wind would carry them over into North Korea. Sometimes, the balloons drift off course into the sea or back into South Korea. Traders and activists have hired smugglers to carry goods such as Chinese cell phones, media and other goods over the North Korean border. But relying on a network of people in the secretive state is risky and dangerous to the individuals involved.

However, drones can follow a specified route and drop off their payloads in a specific area. Human Rights Foundation President Thor Halvorssen said his organization is able to load several pounds of SD cards and flash drives on one drone.

After months of testing in secrecy, Jung Gwang-il, founder of the group No Chain, and Halvorssen decided to make their activities public in order to “encourage other civil society organizations to take advantage of new technologies. … With more and more other actors, it could have a big impact in increasing quantity of info getting in,” Halvorssen said.

[CNN]

Young North Korean Defector remembers chasing after flyer balloons

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Kim Kyoung-ok still remembers chasing after the flyer balloons, alien care packages raining from the sky, filled with Korean noodles and letters from children like her. She did not know yet that there could be a better life than the one she was born to in North Korea.

But as the years passed, her mother, Kim Tae-hee, had experienced a comparatively better quality of life in China where she was one of the approximately 50,000-60,000 North Koreans permitted to work abroad—an opportunity granted to citizens considered loyal to the regime.

Kyoung-ok was only 12 when her mother decided to make a dream of a better life a reality, fleeing with her youngest daughter to China. Now 21, Kyoung-ok detailed the treacherous journey of defecting from North Korea.

It was 2007 and Beijing was preparing for the 2008 Olympic Games. Kyoung-ok explained that the crackdown on North Korean defectors had intensified ahead of the games, with China repatriating those suspected of attempting an escape to South Korea. She and her mother were forced into hiding, living in Chinese caves before traveling through Vietnam and Cambodia with the assistance of a paid broker. The pair sought asylum at a Cambodian Christian church before arriving in South Korea in 2008.

Kyoung-ok has adjusted well to her life in the South, and has developed a close friendship with a fellow refugee she met at resettlement camp and who asked not to share her last name. The relationships built in her new home have proven vital to Kyoung-ok, who has lived on her own in Seoul to attend school since age 13, while her mother, a music teacher, worked in the southern part of the country.

[Excerpted from TIME]

Second group of North Korean defectors expected in Seoul shortly

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A second group, as yet an unspecified number, of North Koreans working at a restaurant outside North Korea have escaped their workplace and will come to South Korea, South Korean officials said Tuesday.

The announcement follows earlier South Korean media reports that two or three female employees at a North Korean-run restaurant in China fled and went to an unidentified Southeast Asian country.

It’s the second known group escape by North Korean restaurant workers dispatched abroad in recent weeks. In April, a group of 13 North Koreans who had worked at a North Korean-run restaurant in the eastern Chinese city of Ningbo defected to South Korea. After the 13 workers – a male manager and 12 waitresses – arrived in Seoul in April, Pyongyang claimed they were kidnapped by South Korean spies and repeatedly demanded their return. South Korea said the workers chose to resettle in the South on their own.

New Focus, a Seoul-based online news outlet run by a North Korean defector, was among the first to break the news Monday. It said the group comprised three women in their 20s who had worked at a North Korean-run restaurant near Shanghai.

[Associated Press]

Activist says ordinary North Koreans have little respect for Kim Jong Un

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Kim Jong Un has yet to earn the grudging respect of ordinary North Koreans, according to North Korean defector and activist Jeong Kwang-il. Jeong says most North Koreans who do not curry favor with the regime do not refer to him as the “General” or the “Supreme Leader.”

In the past, North Korean leaders were addressed with honorifics, Jeong said. “But nowadays when I speak to North Koreans on the phone, they just call him ‘Jong Un,’ the way one would refer to a friend,” Jeong said.

That trend could be frustrating to the young Kim, who recently was declared “Chairman” during North Korea’s Seventh Party Congress. But the lack of reforms and improvement to people’s lives could be having a greater effect on perceptions of Kim in the country.

Jeong also said that defector activism, including the delivery of South Korean videos such as films of resettled defectors in the South, flash drives of western movies and memory cards for mobile phones, are making an impact on North Korean understanding of the outside world.

Disillusioned with the regime after viewing the media, some North Koreans have started to call the leader “that guy Jong Un” or sometimes “that kid,” according to Jeong.

There’s evidence North Koreans are no longer afraid to breach rules of conduct, the activist said.

[UPI]

13 North Korean defectors healthy and want “to be forgotten”

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An attorney at the South Korean intelligence office said all of the North Koreans who defected after working at a restaurant in China are all healthy, dismissing North Korean government’s argument that they were abducted and protesting with hunger strikes.

Park Young-sik, who serves at the North Korean refugees protection center under the National Intelligence Service (NIS) as a human rights defender, discussed the individual interviews she carried out with the 12 female defectors over the weekend.

“I can say clearly that all of the 13 defectors are all healthy, don’t have any problem,” said Park. Park emphasized that the defectors hope “to be forgotten” by the public.

“What’s going to happen for a defector’s family if the defector’s motivation and process of defection is revealed?” Park told the Chosun Ilbo on the same day.

[NK News]