Coronavirus shines light on changing face of North Korean defectors

In 2010, the year Ken Eom arrived in South Korea, he was joined by just over 2,400 of his fellow North Korean escapees.

Like many of those who made the difficult and dangerous journey from the authoritarian North to the democratic South, Eom was driven by the desire to see his loved ones again.

"My family escaped from North Korea before I escaped, so I could not get a job in North Korea and was being watched by the North Korean regime," said Eom, who spent a decade serving in the North Korean military before his escape.

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"I needed to follow my family who were in South Korea already."

Last year, arrivals from the North to the South plunged to just 229, down from 1,047 the previous year, as third-generation dictator Kim Jong-un sealed his country's borders in response to Covid-19. The number was the lowest since North Koreans began to flee en masse in the late 1990s, when the North was ravaged by a devastating famine estimated to have cost between 240,000 and 3.5 million lives.

Before the "Arduous March", as the famine is known in the North, defections numbered in the dozens each year, typically involving soldiers crossing the inter-Korean border or workers who were sent to Eastern Europe and then became disillusioned with the state following the dissolution of the USSR.

In the quarter-century since the humanitarian disaster, the flow of people has ebbed and flowed, peaking at almost 3,000 in 2009 before declining to about 1,000-1,500 annually in recent years. Nearly 34,000 North Korean defectors now live in the South, where they are entitled to automatic citizenship and various benefits.

South Korean security guards walk past North Korean defectors at the South Korean Hanawon resettlement facility. Photo: AFP alt=South Korean security guards walk past North Korean defectors at the South Korean Hanawon resettlement facility. Photo: AFP

The type of people fleeing the North - usually through China and onto a third-country in Southeast Asia, before arriving in the South - and their motivations have also changed.

Whereas defectors were once driven by "simply survival", that had changed during the last fifteen years, said Hanna Song, a researcher at the non-profit Database Centre for NK Human Rights in Seoul.

"If you look at the typology of North Koreans who have now resettled in South Korea, it is very diverse," said Song.

"Naturally, as the number of North Korean defectors increases, diversity within them also increases. It's impossible to say now what the 'typical defector' is."

Imesh Pokharel, who runs the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Seoul, said most recent defectors he had encountered were driven by the desire for greater economic opportunity.

"Many people want to earn some money and return to the DPRK because they have family there but eventually they also think of coming to the ROK," Pokharel said, using the acronyms for the North and South (the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the Republic of Korea, respectively). "Basically those who have family members in the ROK, they are more likely to come here directly."

While less common, some wealthy North Koreans also wish to give their families an opportunity to enjoy greater political rights and freedoms beyond the reach of the Kim dynasty, Pokharel said.

"There are some people who are pretty well-off in the DPRK but they wanted a better life, in terms of a more open life, for their kids," he said.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has clamped down at the border. Photo: AFP alt=North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has clamped down at the border. Photo: AFP

Most North Koreans who arrived in the South since the beginning of the pandemic had already been living in China or elsewhere for some time, Pokharel said.

"In the past ... people could pay a bit of money and sneak through the border. It was possible because the lower level officials on the ground did also benefit from that corruption or bribery," he said. "There were loopholes but now the border is completely sealed."

Pyongyang, which has implemented a "shoot-to-kill" policy at the border in response to the pandemic, has officially recorded no cases of Covid-19, although this is widely doubted by experts. The ruling Kim family's stranglehold on information and lack of an independent media make obtaining accurate information from inside the country notoriously difficult and prone to error.

As was the case for Eom, family considerations are an increasingly common factor in the decision to leave, according to activists.

"In the last 10 years, the trend is family-invited refugees," said an activist who helps North Koreans reach the South, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of his work.

"For North Korean refugees who have entered South Korea, bringing their parents and siblings from North Korea to South Korea is the top priority. They work hard to raise money, or they get support from mission agencies or NGOs to bring their family."

Tim Peters, a Christian activist who runs Seoul-based non-profit Helping Hands Korea, said it had become increasingly typical to see single parents or grandparents with children, rather than whole families, make the decision to leave.

"This elderly care of a grandchild has often occurred due to the death of an adult child - parent of the grandchild - or abandonment of the child by the grandparent's adult child or his spouse in North Korea," said Peters. "The grandparent guardian discovers that they are unable to economically survive supporting the grandchild alone in the North, so make the grim decision to seek a menial job in China. A similar phenomenon is observed in single parents, especially women, who've either lost their North Korean husbands due to an untimely death, or through divorce."

Peters said his organisation had seen a rise in disabled defectors seeking assistance in China, where they face detention and deportation, since the start of the pandemic.

"We have learned that the deeply invasive public health care measures used by the Chinese Communist Party have made the disabled North Korean escapees, who fled North Korea in previous years before the pandemic, feel especially vulnerable as their mobility is very limited," he said.

Eom said that for many North Korean defectors today, escaping their homeland was no longer about poverty and hunger, but finding "freedom, like getting more education and a better life".

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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