NK Defector Speaks Out About Life in South Korea

The Chosun has an interesting interview with a North Korean defector who has been constantly harrassed for the past 10 years by both the Korean government and the North Korean fifth column allowed to operate freely in South Korea:

Next month, Hwang marks 10 years since he risked his life coming to the South and left his family behind. He is not a man whose resolution is easily shaken by threats from North Korea or its fifth column. But what must be unbearable is the persecution he has been subjected to by the South Korean government, in the very country he came to in search of freedom. For most of the 10 years he has lived in the South, he has lived the life of a virtual person non grata, unable to meet people he wanted to see and say what he wanted to say. He published a newspaper for North Korean refugees that criticized the government’s North Korea policy, only to be stopped by the National Intelligence Service. How bitterly disappointed he must have been to find that somehow Constitutional rights did not apply to him.

When he visited the U.S. in 2003, agency minders shadowed his every step to check whom he met and what they talked about. There were even scuffles when staffers of an American congressman attempted to push them out of an office where the legislator was meeting with Hwang.