North Korea calls defection of 13 North Koreans from China an "unprecedented kidnapping incident" https://t.co/ShDR2iPJuc
— Elizabeth Shim (@GlobalAsianista) April 12, 2016
I guess we will see if the mass defection of 13 overseas workers from a North Korean restaurant will become a trend or not. I would think the regime after this defection would really tighten the controls on their overseas workers by threatening their families back in North Korea:
Future mass defection by North Koreans working abroad cannot be ruled out following the recent escape of 13 people, South Korea’s unification ministry said Sunday.
Speaking to reporters, a ministry official explained that considerable pressure to send back hard currency to Pyongyang in the face of tough United Nations sanctions played a part in the restaurant workers’ defection.
The government hinted earlier that the defectors were fearful that they would be punished if they were unable to send back money to North Korea. Many restaurants have been forced to close due to a drop in patrons, with estimates placing roughly half of them unable to send money back to the North.
The official who spoke on condition of anonymity, said one restaurant serving staff testified that with tough sanctions taking hold, people felt there was no hope for the North Korean regime.
He said a second worker confirmed she watched South Korean TV dramas and knew about life in the South, while another said she realized what happiness was really like while living abroad, and did not want to go back to the North.
“They expressed a desire to live their lives as South Koreans and believed the joint action was their last chance to get away from the North,” the official said. He added the defectors had Internet connection to the outside world, which is not possible inside their isolationist homeland.
“Such information (about the world at large) caused them to crave freedom,” the official claimed. [Yonhap]
You can read more at the link.
This is actually pretty amazing that an entire restaurant staff would defect because the selection process for the job is relatively stringent so it isn’t like the workers are coming from desperately poor families in North Korea. It is also pretty impressive that the entire staff was able to coordinate with each other to do this without fear of one of them informing on them back to regime minders:
Thirteen North Koreans working in a state-run restaurant outside the country have defected to South Korea, a government official in Seoul said Friday.
The South Korean government estimates that Pyongyang rakes in around $10 million every year from some 130 restaurants it operates — with mostly North Korean staff — in 12 countries, including neighbouring China.
Last month, while unveiling a series of unilateral sanctions on Pyongyang over its January nuclear test, Seoul had urged South Korean citizens overseas to boycott any such establishments, saying their profits funded the North’s nuclear weapons programme.
The defectors, one male manager and a dozen women, arrived in the South on Thursday, Unification Ministry spokesman Jeong Joon-Hee told reporters.
He declined to identify the country where the restaurant they had been working in was located.
There have been defections by individual restaurant workers in the past, but this is the first time so many staff from one restaurant have defected en masse.
Jeong quoted one of the defectors as saying that everyone had been “on the same page” about escaping to South Korea. [AFP]
You can read more at the link.
With prices to pay brokers to assist people defecting from North Korea skyrocketing due to the border crackdown during the Kim Jong-un era; it only makes sense that defector families already in South Korea would have to pool their meager resources to get the rest of their family members out:
First came Kim Yong-shil, in 2006. Then her husband, her two grown daughters, her teenaged son. Two years later, out came her mother, then one brother, then in 2012, the other.
One by one over the past decade, the members of this family have escaped from North Korea, the ones who made it out first earning money and meeting brokers so they could bring out the others.
This process — called “chain defection” — is almost the only way to escape from North Korea now, as security along the border has tightened dramatically since Kim Jong Un took control of the state four years ago.
In the past 20 years, some 29,000 North Koreans have fled hunger and repression at home by escaping across the river that forms the country’s border with China. The flow of refugees had been tracking steadily upward until plummeting during Kim’s first year in power. By last year, fewer than 1,300 people had escaped, less than half of the peak recorded in 2009. [Washington Post]
You can read much more at the link.
I wonder if it is too late to send this guy back to North Korea if he misses oppressing people so much?:
A middle-aged man is walking through a quiet Seoul neighborhood when he suddenly stops. He lights a cigarette, cupping his hands to shield the flame from the winter wind, and takes a deep draw, remembering how things used to be. He’s a former policeman, a broad-shouldered man with a growling voice and a crushing handshake.
Back where he came from, he says, he was someone who mattered.
“In North Korea, people were afraid of me,” he says. He says it wistfully, almost sadly, like a boy talking about a dog he once had. “They knew I could just drag them away.”
That fear meant respect, and bribes, in the North Korean town where he lived, a place where the electricity rarely worked and the Internet was only a rumor. It meant he could buy a TV, and that he had food even as those around him went hungry. It meant that when he grew exhausted by the relentless poverty and oppression around him, and when relatives abroad offered to advance him the money to escape, he had connections to a good smuggler. [Mashable]
The article features stories about other defectors, but here is the passage that I found of the most interest; just think if unification comes there will a whole country of people thinking just like this that South Korea would have to integrate:
“I knew that South Korea was a capitalist country, that it was very rich. I thought that if I can just get there, I can work less but earn a lot of money,” he says.
He grimaces when he thinks of his naivete.
Few North Koreans have the work ethic and competitiveness needed to succeed in South Korea which is another reason why instant unification would be a disaster for the ROK.
In other (good) news: Unemployment amongst North Korean defectors continues to decline. pic.twitter.com/Dm2z32aLvZ
— Sokeel Park 박석길 (@Sokeel) March 18, 2016
Successful defections peaked in 2009 at 2,914.
Since then decreased by > 50%, particularly in KJU era, mostly due to increased border sec.— Sokeel Park 박석길 (@Sokeel) January 11, 2016
You would think she should just be happy she has refuge in the United States after being part of the Kim regime’s inner circle and would want to keep a low profile:
The US-based aunt of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un filed a defamation suit in South Korea on Wednesday against three defectors from her reclusive homeland.
Ko Yong-Suk, who looked after Kim for years when he was at school in Switzerland, said the three defectors, who escaped the North and settled in South Korea in the 1990s, were guilty of repeatedly “spreading false information” about her and her family.
Ko took asylum in the United States in 1998 with her husband, and the suit was filed on her behalf by her Seoul-based lawyer, Kang Yong-Seok.
The younger sister of Kim’s mother, who died in France in 2004, Ko is seeking a total of 60 million won ($51,900) for remarks the defectors made on South Korean TV talk shows between 2013 and 2014.
Kang said the defamation allegations covered claims that Ko once managed a secret fund for Kim’s late father, Kim Jong-Il, that her father collaborated during Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule over the Korean peninsula and that she had plastic surgery after defecting to the US.
“The defectors made groundless remarks without really knowing about her life,” the lawyer told AFP. [AFP via reader tip]
You can read the rest at the link.
This really should not come as much of a surprise since the vast majority of North Korean defectors are women and when they arrive in the South they have few job skills to make a living with. Turning towards prostitution to make ends meet is something that women with financial issues have done for centuries. Additionally many of these North Korean women had to turn to prostitution while refugees in China in order to make money to get to South Korea in the first place:
A considerable number of female defectors from North Korea have become sex workers here after experiencing difficulties adjusting to life in the South, according to media reports.
KBS, a state-run broadcaster, aired a program on Sunday night about the plight of some 40 to 50 female defectors who work at “ticket dabangs,” coffee shops that illegally sell sex, in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province. Some of these places are owned by North Korean defectors.
The women are usually in their late 30s to mid 40s. The clients, mostly in their 50s to 70s, are not only residents of Hwaseong, but travel to the town from other regions.
The women spend time with clients in karaoke and go to motel rooms with them as well as delivering coffee, which is the ostensible business activity.
A female defector told the program that each client pays 25,000 won ($22) per hour for singing together in karaoke rooms. Another woman asked for a more than 100,000 won to provide sexual services when a member of the production crew disguised as a client contacted her.
It was already known that ticket dabangs recruiting female North Korean defectors are also prevalent in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province.
The women said that they used to work at normal companies or work as waitresses in restaurants after they defected, but their monthly salaries of some 1.3 to 1.7 million won was not enough to maintain their livelihood and support their family members left behind in the North. [Korea Times]
You can read more at the link.
Jae Jin recently reached freedom through our networks. Read his story: https://t.co/HYUsSNGwws pic.twitter.com/UP9umkQkUW
— Liberty in North Korea (@LibertyinNK) October 30, 2015
