North Korean defectors share their experiences with South Korean high school students

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Jae, a 23-year-old North Korean defector, stands nervously in front of the crowd of South Korean high schoolers. “Do North Korean students often date each other?” one student wants to know. Jae, a tall North Korean defector, grins. They do, he says, but secretly. Because students are reprimanded for showing affection, he explains, “if you like someone you often say, ‘Let’s become friends,’ which is basically the same thing as ‘Will you go out with me?'”

When asked about food shortages, Jae explains he became so hungry as a child that he had taken to eating tree bark.

Jae grew up in a North Korean town that bordered the DMZ separating the countries; once in a while, thick balloons from South Korea would drift through the sky and land on the ground. They were sent by human rights activists in the south and filled with USB drives and pamphlets condemning the dictatorial regime in Pyongyang. The police would snatch them up as soon as they reached the ground. But when Jae went into the mountains, away from people, he would see dozens of balloons snagged in bushes and trees.

The questions keep coming, among them, “Do you want to go back?” Jae responds to the question diplomatically. He wants to visit his extended family, but he probably wouldn’t want to live in North Korea again “because of the bad memories.”

Jae has found that many South Korean high schoolers remain fascinated by the prospect of meeting a defector from the north, but have no clue that 25,000 of them now live in their country.

[Mother Jones]

North Korea: Who’s provoking who?

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The chorus of condemnation over North Korea’s nuclear test carried calls for strong action from China — but Beijing continues to back its reclusive neighbor.

Many in Beijing see American steps to neutralize the North Korea nuclear issue as a “cover” for pushing ahead with another objective: containing China. The planned deployment of an American missile-defense shield — THAAD to South Korea has served to fan those fears.

Academics and the Chinese general public appear split over what comes next, largely because there are two competing views when it comes to the risks. “One view is that destabilization and regime collapse in North Korea and chaos along the border with China is the main danger to China’s security, the other view is that the escalating nuclear program of North Korea and the prospect of nuclear war is an even bigger danger to China,” Zhang Liangui, a regional expert at China’s Central Party School, explained.

It doesn’t help matters that Beijing views U.S. and South Korean actions — like joint military exercises — as exacerbating the issue by ramping up North Korea’s fears of attack. Meanwhile the US is raising the stakes. Two American B-1B bombers flew over the Korean peninsula this week in a show of force intended to demonstrate U.S. resolve against North Korean aggression.

Many in China view the North Korea issue as a dispute exclusively between Pyongyang and the U.S., according to Zhang. “For China to exert too much pressure on North Korea is tantamount to helping the U.S.,” Zhang explained. “But after the recent fifth nuke test, this point of view is losing ground.”

“Washington and Seoul take the view that the North’s provocations require more military exercises, whereas Beijng is of the view that it’s the military exercises that are encouraging [North Korea] to accelerate its nuclear program,” explained Timothy Stafford, a research fellow at PacificForum-CSIS.

That was reflected in a recent editorial in China’s official People’s Daily newspaper, which called the U.S. a troublemaker with no right to lecture about taking responsibility for keeping North Korea in check. The United States is doing less and less for the public good in international affairs, “but its vigor for trouble-making has not diminished an iota,” the newspaper said in the commentary.

[NBC]

South Korean bias in hiring North Koreans

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Ms. Lee, who works as a dishwasher in South Korea, received a vocational college degree in public health and nutrition [while living in her native North Korea] and worked as a chef at a resort facility. However, South Korea generally does not recognize degrees that are earned in North Korea, because the content and standards of education are very different.

Ms. Lee had decided to leave her home town when her husband, recently discharged from the military, was unable to get a job because her younger brother had fled to China. Her husband and his side of the family bitterly complained that his wife’s brother had ruined them—which he probably had, thanks to the North Korean government policy of blacklisting the entire family when one member departs without permission for China. She decided to escape from her uncomfortable home life and go to China to look for her brother.

The biggest problem with this plan was that she had a six year old son, but on one snowy winter day she embarked on her uncertain journey to China. She managed to get to China and eventually reach South Korea, using her savings and selling her wedding ring. She was now diligently saving up the $5,000 it would cost to hire a broker to retrieve her son.

My first question to Ms. Lee was, “What is the most difficult thing to bear living in South Korea?” “Missing my son, surely. My job at this large Korean restaurant is dish washing, which is not difficult, but what I hate more than anything is that we throw away tons of food, including meat and rice that would be a delicacy in the North. Whenever I throw this food away, I cry thinking of my son, who rarely had a chance to eat meat and rice.”

A few days later, I happened to visit a coffee shop whose owner was a wealthy Korean who had studied in the United States and opened the café in order to meet interesting people. When the owner complained that it was difficult to find a reliable person to manage the café, I told the owner that I might be able to find her a good manager, describing Ms. Lee’s qualifications and the owner sounded interested. Then I added, “The only difference between this candidate and others is that she is a North Korean defector.”

The owner almost shouted at me, “You must be kidding. Look at our café. The place is filled with valuable porcelains and paintings and antique furniture, and I have a very sophisticated clientele. How can I trust a defector, who may steal things and alienate my customers?”

The next morning I received a call from the owner. “I apologize. I’ve been thinking about your candidate and our mutual friend has convinced me that I should interview her for the job.”

Ms. Lee got the job, and a year later when I visited the café I couldn’t recognize her at all. She wore a smart new hairstyle and dressed in a stylish but conservative manner. The owner thanked me profusely. “Since she came here we have more customers and are making more money. Everybody loves her. She is a great asset.” When I talked with Ms. Lee, she was equally satisfied. “I love my job. People are very kind to me. I appreciate my new life in the South these days.”

[The Brookings Institution]

North Korean defectors the “small unification” of Koreas

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Over 18,000 defectors from North Korea now live in South Korea. Objectively, their living conditions are much improved over what they were in the North. They needn’t worry about finding food, adequate housing or transportation. They can go wherever they want and associate with whomever they wish.

Yet, they feel something is terribly wrong with life in their new society.  Especially in the first year, most defectors suffer from a combination of suspiciousness, anxiety, and depression—a reaction that is typical of new immigrants in any society. They badly miss the families they left behind, and feel guilty for having left them at the mercy of officials who will persecute them for having a family member who left the fatherland.

Defectors don’t feel they are fully accepted by their new society. Whenever the media report bad news from North Korea, defectors feel ashamed and guilty about their origins. On a personal level, they suffer from loneliness because it is difficult to make new friends and find romantic partners. Because they speak a different dialect of Korean in which traditional words are used instead of foreign-loan words, they are easily identified as North Koreans and usually looked down upon as country bumpkins. As one defector said, “I was a member of the elite cadre circle and now I’m a computer-illiterate senile old man.” And another, “I graduated from a good college but now I’m enrolled in a vocational computer school with youngsters.” And yet another, “I was a relatively wealthy foreign trader for the government but now I drive a pick-up truck and sell vegetables.”

Defectors bitterly joke that they left one class society in the North and now find that South Korea is equally class conscious, and the defectors are not members of a favored class.

Most South Koreans just don’t want to bother with defectors, although they favor their arrival in principle. They don’t understand the larger issues of cultural acclimation that prevent the defectors from becoming integrated into South Korean society.

Someday, perhaps years or decades in the future, the 23 million people in the North will join the 46 million citizens of the South under one government. However, unless the South Korean government and people learn how to deal with the several thousand defectors each year participating in what Assemblyman Park Jin has called “small unification,” national unification will be unimaginably difficult.

[The Brookings Institution]

Devastation from floods in North Korea

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North Koreans living along the Tumen River border with China described a hellish ordeal as the river rose swiftly, leaving many people scrambling for safety in a flood that has claimed at least 200 lives and devastated a wide swath of country’s poorest region.

“The floods came through with such force that the Tumen River, which borders China, swelled rapidly,” Dong Nam Kim, a North Korean defector and representative of the Free North Korea Global Network, told RFA’s Korean Service as he relayed descriptions of the disaster from inside the country.

The floods ripped through the area as Typhoon Lionrock lashed Northeast Asia from August 29 to September 2. The floods may have hit the provinces in the north harder after North Korean authorities opened up the floodgates in the hydroelectric facilities upstream. It’s unclear why the North Korean government decided to open up the floodgates, but the North Korean defector said that with the rain falling at nearly four inches per hour caused the authorities to fear that the dams would burst, causing even more damage.

At least 140,000 people are in urgent need of assistance, the OCHA said in a statement. It estimated 100,000 people have been displaced and water supplies to about 600,000 people have been cut.

Of the more than 35,500 houses that were damaged, nearly two-thirds were destroyed. A further 8,700 buildings, including schools and public buildings, were damaged, and 16,000 hectares (39,540 acres) of arable land inundated, the OCHA said.

The government of North Korea, which called the deadly natural disaster the “the strongest storm and heaviest downpour” the country has experienced in decades, issued an unusual appeal for international help.

North Korea’s appeal for help could not have come at a worse time, coming after the country conducted its second nuclear test in eight months on September 9, that was widely condemned and is expected to draw more economic sanctions from the international community.

[Radio Free Asia]

North Korean defector now a London graduate student

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sungju-lee-north-korean-defectorSungju Lee is a graduate student in London today. During his childhood, his father was in North Korea’s military and they lived in Pyongyang …where Lee enjoyed a rather lush life: excellent Taekwondo classes, good schools, and plenty of food on the table.

One day, “my father came to the house and then just told me that we’re going to the northern part of North Korea for vacation,” Lee said. He realized something was amiss because they had to change trains at one point. “The condition of the second train was really bad,” he told VOA’s Asia Weekly podcast. “It was smelly. He said, “There weren’t even any proper chairs on the train. It was packed with people.”

Life in Gyeong-seong was rough and his family struggled. After a year, his father left, making his way to China, later followed by his mother. Without any way to provide for himself, he found himself on the streets, forming a gang with other kids in order to pickpocket, steal food, or earn money by taking men to see “night flowers,” a euphemism for prostitutes. Lee knew stealing wasn’t right, but remembered, “The first time stealing was really, really difficult. The second time got easier. The third time was much easier. And then after fourth time, fifth time …it became my job.”

He was on the streets for four years, moving from town to town, because staying too long in one place would mean merchants would recognize them and stop them from looting. He returned to Gyeong-seong in February 2001 and went to the train station, looking for a mark to steal from when an elderly man approached him. The man said he knew Lee and wanted to take him home. Unbeknownst to him, Lee was plotting to rob him of everything of value he had.

“[When] I entered his house, … my eyes went to the wall. There was my mother’s wedding picture. [The man] was my real grandfather.”

In October 2002, a man came to his grandfather’s house, sent by his father. The man helped Lee defect to South Korea and ultimately reunite with his father.

Sungju Lee’s complete story can be read in the new book Every Falling Star.

[VoA]

After rains and severe flooding, North Korea makes rare public appeal for relief

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North Korea usually projects itself to the world as a fully functioning worker’s paradise. Yet severe flooding in the country’s northeast has resulted in a rare admission that all is not so well.

According to a report published Sunday by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) — North Korea’s official state media — the country’s northeast has been affected by the “heaviest downpour” since 1945, with “tens of thousands” of buildings destroyed and people left homeless and “suffering from great hardship.”

Figures released by the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs confirmed the natural disaster. So far, 133 people have been killed, 395 people are missing and 140,000 people are in “urgent need of assistance.”

The KCNA report stated how the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) had sent a public appeal to party members and service personnel of the Korean People’s Army to pool their efforts toward recovery operations to help those in the worst-hit regions. According to the report, the WPK even redirected a nationwide 200-day mass mobilization campaign aimed at boosting the economy toward helping flood victims.

Chris Staines, the head of a Red Cross delegation to North Korea, said he witnessed how the floods had “destroyed everything in their path” during a government-led trip to North Hamgyong province between September 6-9. Shelter will be a major concern in the coming months, Staines said in a statement. “Thousands of homes will need to be rebuilt before winter sets in and by the end of October overnight temperatures can plummet to sub-zero,” he added.

[CNN]

North Korea, far from crazy, is actually quite rational

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Is North Korea irrational? Or does it just pretend to be?

Political scientists have repeatedly investigated this question and, time and again, emerged with the same answer: North Korea’s behavior, far from crazy, is all too rational.

Its belligerence, they conclude, appears calculated to maintain a weak, isolated government that would otherwise succumb to the forces of history. Its provocations introduce tremendous danger, but stave off what Pyongyang sees as the even greater threats of invasion or collapse.

When political scientists call a state “rational”, they are not saying its leaders always make the best or most moral choices, or that those leaders are paragons of mental fitness. Rather, they are saying the state behaves according to its perceived self-interests, first of which is self-preservation.

North Korea’s actions abroad and at home, while abhorrent, appear well within its rational self-interest, according to a 2003 study by David C. Kang, a political scientist now at the University of Southern California. At home and abroad, he found, North Korean leaders shrewdly determined their interests and acted on them.

Victor Cha, a Georgetown University professor who served as the Asian affairs director on George W. Bush’s National Security Council, has repeatedly argued that North Korea’s leadership is rational. Savage cruelty and cold calculation are not mutually exclusive, after all–and often go hand in hand.

North Korea’s seemingly unhinged behavior [is based on its creation] of permanently imminent war, issuing flamboyant threats to attack, staging provocations and sometimes deadly attacks. Its nuclear and missile tests, though erratic and often failed, stirred up one crisis after another. This militarization kept the North Korean leadership internally stable. It also kept the country’s enemies at bay.

And over time, the government’s reputation for irrationality has become an asset as well. Scholars ascribe this behavior to the “madman theory”–a strategy, coined by no less a proponent than Richard M. Nixon, in which leaders cultivate an image of belligerence and unpredictability to force adversaries to tread more carefully.

[New York Times]

North Korea’s nuclear “desperation theory”

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North Korea’s nuclear program, some analysts believe, is designed to halt an American invasion by first striking nearby United States military bases and South Korean ports, then by threatening a missile launch against the United States mainland. While North Korea does not yet have this ability, analysts believe it will within the next decade.

This is the culmination of North Korea’s rationality, in something known as desperation theory. Under this theory, when states face two terrible choices, they will pick the least bad option.

In North Korea’s case, that means creating the conditions for a war it would most likely lose. And it could mean preparing a last-ditch effort to survive that war by launching multiple nuclear strikes, chancing a nuclear retaliation for the slim chance to survive.

North Korea’s leaders tolerate this danger because, in their calculus, they have no other choice.

The rest of us share in that risk–vanishingly small, but nonzero–whether we want to or not.

[New York Times]

Why China refuses to block North Korea’s nuclear ambitions

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China’s latest diplomatic crisis began with an earthquake in a region not known for seismic activity [caused by North Korea’s nuclear test.]. And China analysts don’t expect Beijing to do much. Concerned about the implications of a North Korean collapse, China shows little appetite for confrontation.

“The reason North Korea dared to conduct this nuclear test is because it knew the Chinese are very much handcuffed,” said Tong Zhao, an associate at Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy in Beijing.

China is the only lifeline for leader Kim Jong Un. The bigger neighbor accounts for 90% of North Korea’s trade, much of it along the Yalu River, which serves as a border between the two countries.

Leaders worry that economic upheaval in the totalitarian nation could flood northeastern China with millions of refugees, Zhao said. But they fear much more the loss of a buffer between China and U.S.-backed South Korea, with its nearly 30,000 American troops.

China already is incensed at a July agreement between Seoul and the U.S. to deploy a missile defense system, known as Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, to protect the South from any Pyongyang attacks. Beijing sees the equipment as a threat to its own national security.

The tensions threaten efforts at any unified strategy toward North Korea. And they likely handed the unpredictable, 32-year-old Kim a greater opportunity to flout international sanctions. Many doubt China will approve stronger sanctions.

“For China, North Korea is a necessary evil,” said Zhang Baohui, the director of the Center for Asian Pacific Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. “China has to maintain the survival of the North Korean regime. That’s its fundamental quagmire.”

“From China’s point of view, North Korea’s real weapon of destruction is chaos,” said Euan Graham, former charge d’affairs at the British embassy in Pyongyang and current international security program director at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Australia. “The fear of chaos runs so deep in the Chinese psyche that it’s this overriding fear [that dominates] rather than one of a freelancing and uncontrollable ally.”

So far, Beijing has agreed only to push for multi-country talks that stalled seven years ago.

Beijing now kicks the ball to the U.S. and South Korea. States Zhang, the Hong Kong professor, “China has accepted the reality of a nuclear North Korea.”

[LA Times]