Here is an update on the North Korean soldier defector who was shot while fleeing across the JSA to defect to the South. His story is very similar to other defectors who are surprised how hard one has to work in South Korea to earn money:
North Korean defector Oh Chong-song, whose bold dash across the heavily armed border in November last year made global headlines, has been struggling in South Korea since he was released from hospital.
“I took a job as a construction worker to feed myself,” Oh (not his real name) told the Chosun Ilbo Wednesday. “I experienced how hard it is to make money in the South.” Oh left Hanawon, a halfway house that helps North Korean defectors adjust to life in South Korea, in June after a long hospital stay to treat his many gunshot wounds and clear him of a mass of parasites in his stomach.
He now lives in Seoul. “I couldn’t work too long on the construction site due to my bad back, and I now work part-time at a social enterprise,” he said.
Oh denied a media report that he bought two cars and ended up selling them after running out of money. “That’s not true,” he said. “What I was given when I left Hanawon was W4 million in settlement support money and am entitled to live in public rental housing,” he said. “I didn’t have much money left after I bought furniture and a refrigerator (US$1=W1,130).”
Oh now looks no different than many young South Korean men in their 20s. He is slender and around 177 cm tall. Dressed in a navy-blue suit and white shirt, he had also dyed his hair light brown. Because he was born and raised in Kaesong close to the inter-Korean border, he does not have a distinct North Korean accent.
Oh insisted he had been misquoted in an interview with Japan’s Sankei Shimbun last weekend. The right-wing Japanese newspaper stirred up controversy by quoting Oh as saying that the South Korean military is a joke.
“I was misquoted and what I said was lost in translation,” he claimed Wednesday. “I watched video footage of South Korean soldiers crawling to save me,” he added, raising his voice as his emotions ran high. “I served in the North Korean military and do not know much about South Korean military life. You serve 10 years in the North Korean military and two years in the South Korean military, and all I said was it must be easier in the South.”
“But what I was quoted as saying made it sound like I laughed at the South Korean military.” Oh claimed the Sankei sent him a message apologizing for mistakes by the interpreter. [Chosun Ilbo]
You can read more at the link, but apparently there is a lot of disinformation being put out about him. I would not be surprised if the disinformation campaign against him is a coordinated effort by ROK leftists to discredit him as much as possible.
This undated file photo shows Minister of Unification Cho Myoung-gyon (Yonhap)
Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon held meeting with defectors in Seoul on Wednesday where he apologized for his controversial decision to prevent a defector-turned-journalist from covering recent inter-Korean talks, a participant said.
Cho had a lunch meeting with representatives of three North Korean defector groups at a Seoul restaurant to explain his position on the controversy and listen to defectors’ opinions on pending inter-Korean issues.
One participant said after the meeting, “Minister Cho said sorry and made an apology for excluding a defector-turned-journalist from the coverage of inter-Korean talks.”
The minister recently caused a stir by excluding a defector-turned-journalist of the conservative Chosun Ilbo daily newspaper from the pool of reporters covering high-level inter-Korean talks held at the truce village of Panmunjom on Oct. 15. [Chosun Ilbo]
Seriously? South Korea agreed to enforce the North's writ against defections? Isn't that essentially China's refugee policy & an agreement to tear up the 1951 Refugee Convention? https://t.co/LMeHeXmuKT
I met a group of NK defectors from SK recently. Asked whether I should refer them as "defectors" or "new settlers" they said smiling: "freed people." https://t.co/I3nupZ52Yu
It didn’t take long for the North Koreans to use the proposed family unions as leverage against the South Korean government:
North Korea’s state-run media released a string of articles on Friday that criticized the South Korean government, hinting that planned reunions for families split between the two nations could be canceled. An editorial in the official state newspaper of the North Korean ruling party, Rodong Sinmun, argued that South Korea had been exaggerating its role in denuclearization talks between Pyongyang and Washington. South Korea’s role in the talks does “not even amount to that of an assistant,” the editorial stated. The same article described comments made by South Korean President Moon Jae-in in Singapore last week as “presumptuous” and “flippant.” [Washington Post]
You can read more at the link, but it appears the North Koreans are trying to put the ROK government back in its place as being subservient to the Kim regime with the denuclearization talks solely between the US and North Korea.
Here is the main reason they are threatening the cancelation of the family reunions:
In another attack against the Moon administration, Uriminzokkiri, a North Korean propaganda website, urged it to repatriate a dozen North Korean restaurant workers who came to the South in 2016.
The 12 had worked at a North Korean restaurant in China. Pyongyang claims they were abducted by South Korean authorities. The South has said the workers defected of their own free will.
Uriminzokkiri said there could be an “obstacle” in the planned reunion of families divided by the 1950-53 Korean War next month if the workers are not returned.
It lashed out at Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon by name, accusing him of “siding with” the former government which it said plotted the workers’ defection. [Reuters]
I think even for a left wing administration like President Moon’s, this will be politically very difficult to do. Could you imagine the backlash of forcibly removing these defectors from South Korea and handing them over to the Kim regime?
It looks like the Kim regime has made good progress on getting the restaurant workers returned to North Korea:
A former North Korean restaurant manager who defected to South Korea in 2016 together with a dozen female workers claimed Sunday that Seoul’s spy agency had lured and blackmailed him into defecting.
Ho Kang-il’s claim, made in a phone interview with Yonhap News Agency, corroborates suspicions that the high-profile defection was not voluntary and the then-government of President Park Geun-hye orchestrated it behind the scenes.
During the interview, Ho claimed that the South’s National Intelligence Service had tried to persuade him to defect, saying it would help him open a restaurant in a Southeast Asian nation, but the spy agency didn’t make good on the promise.
“Originally, I was a cooperator of the NIS and brought information to them,” Ho said. “But they lured me, saying that if I come (to the South) with my employees, they would get us to obtain South Korean citizenship and then they would open a restaurant in Southeast Asia that could also be used as an NIS hideout. They told me to run the restaurant there with the employees.”
Ho claimed NIS agents blackmailed him when he hesitated.
“They threatened that unless I come to the South with the employees, they would divulge to the North Korean Embassy that I had cooperated with the NIS until then,” Ho said. “I had no choice but to do what they told me to.”
He also said that the restaurant employees had thought they would be going to a restaurant in Southeast Asia, and it was only after they got on board the flight that they learned they were headed to the South.
Questions about their defection first arose in May after a local cable broadcaster aired an interview with the restaurant manager. Pyongyang has demanded their return, saying they were abducted by South Korean intelligence, but the South Korean government has claimed that all of the North Koreans defected voluntarily.
Last week, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in North Korea, Tomas Ojea Quintana, called for a “thorough” and “independent” investigation after he met with some of the defectors.
“It is clear that there were some shortcomings in regards to how they were brought to South Korea,” Quintana told reporters. “From the information I received from some of them, they were taken to the Republic of Korea without knowing they were coming here.” [Yonhap]
First of all the ROK intelligence service should be asking North Koreans if they want to defect, however I don’t believe they should not be blackmailing them. With that said we don’t know if the blackmail claims from the restaurant manager are true. Remember these allegations from the restaurant manager only came up after the Moon administration came to power. Is the Moon administration putting him under intense pressure and allowing the North Koreans to contact him with threats against his family back in North Korea?
Remember these restaurant workers could have easily have made statements to the media that they were kidnapped before Moon became President or even over the first year of the Moon administration. It was only this past May when JTBC, Pyongyang’s favorite South Korean news channel, was allowed to interview the restaurant manager did these claims come up. It is going to be interesting to see if the Moon administration ups the pressure on the restaurant workers to voluntarily return to North Korea to keep the current peace process moving forward.
This is why South Korea dreads a collapse of the Kim regime:
Sammy Hyun is now a US citizen and has lived in the US since 2007 – and he considers himself to be ‘lucky’. Photograph: Noah Smith for the Guardian
When Chang Ho Kim was living in North Korea, information trickled in from China about the world outside the closed country. Through the lens of pirated movies, he says, America had looked to Kim like “a very rich and luxurious place”.
Defectors from the North automatically become South Korean citizens after a mandatory three-month transition that is part debriefing, part re-education. Most North Korean defectors in the South stand out, and the Kims were no exception. They have distinct accents, and are often shorter and slighter with darker, sallow skin from years of malnutrition. It’s hard to avoid South Koreans’ prejudice and suspicions that North Koreans are spies.
Remembering the Hollywood images of the US, the Kims decided to make their way to the US illegally through a broker.
But for the Kims, and others like them, life in the US is not necessarily easier.
The American celluloid dream comes with skyrocketing price tags. North Koreans arrive with little or no experience of bills, rent, and no means to cope with the lack of social services and health insurance that illegal immigrants must navigate.
“American life is so hard. Money, money, money,” said Pastor Young Gu Kim, an evangelical South Korean immigrant who helps defectors. “Some defectors told me, ‘Oh pastor, sometimes I miss it over there.’”
Like Chang Ho Kim, many North Koreans enter illegally and settle in Los Angeles, amid the large population of ethnic Koreans. Nearly 200 former North Koreans live in Los Angeles, advocacy groups say, but exact numbers are unknown. [The Guardian]
You can read more at the link, but North Koreans are not socialized to live in a western society that largely demands individual initiative to work hard and make money to support ones self. Imagine if millions of North Koreans showed up in South Korea instead of the small trickle that currently exists if the regime was to collapse. The social problems this would cause would be enormous and thus why the ROK government is pushing a policy of gradual reunification instead of regime collapse.
I wonder how much effort the Moon administration is putting into stopping these phone calls from Kim regime operatives to North Korean defectors?:
As North Korea makes increasingly aggressive calls for the return of a group of restaurant workers in China who defected en masse to South Korea in 2016, it has come to light that the regime is also making efforts to persuade other defectors in South Korea to return to the North.
“Anti-espionage agents from the provincial Ministry of State Security offices are calling up defectors in South Korea in an effort to get them to return to the country,” said a Ryanggang Province-based source to Daily NK on May 23.
“The agents tell the defectors point-blank that they will be met by agents in China and even give them telephone numbers to call once the defectors arrive in China. They are trying to bring them back to the country.”
A “Lieutenant Colonel Choe” of the Ryanggang Province Ministry of State Security (MSS) Anti-Espionage Unit is calling defectors living in South Korea on a frequent basis, according to the source. The agent tells defectors that “they will not be asked about their past history and will be guaranteed the same position they had when they left the country.” He also tells them that they should “[…] relax and return home. The motherland will always accept you if you decide to come back.”
The Ryanggang Province source provided details about how MSS agents are conducting calls with the defectors in South Korea. When a defector reaches out to brokers in North Korea to send money back to their family, sometimes these brokers are arrested by the MSS.
The MSS becomes aware of defectors the brokers have had contact with during the interrogation process and collects information such as their phone numbers. The MSS agents then directly contact the defectors to threaten or entice them to return to North Korea. A defector who was contacted by MSS agents recalled that, “[The agents] were really persistent in sending text messages and making phone calls.” [The Daily NK]
South Korea's Unification Minister confirms what we already knew — that the Ningpo 13 came to SK of their own free will. Now let the SK government do its duty to protect their privacy & safety. 조명균 ˝탈북 여종업원, 자유의사로 한국 왔다˝ https://t.co/L1As6VMm92
