by Ralph Hassig
The most common term in English for a person who does not return to his or her country is defector, which first came into use after World War II to distinguish Soviet soldiers who took up residence in the West from the millions of refugees who did so. In this sense, defector, which the dictionary defines as one who leaves his or her country for political reasons, is not an appropriate term for the majority of North Korea border crossers because they are fleeing primarily for economic reasons—although by the very act of fleeing they are committing a political crime in the eyes of their government.
Until about 1997, South Koreans usually referred to defectors as gwisun, meaning “someone who has surrendered after seeing the light.” Beginning in the mid-1990s, talbukja, meaning “a person who has left the North,” became popular. Tal does not imply any motivation or value judgment for leaving; it simply expresses a change in one’s location. More recently, the term favored by the government of the Republic of Korea (ROK) is saetomin (“new settler”). Some defectors prefer to be called by other expressions, such as jokugul ttonan saram (“person who left the motherland”), kohyangul dengjin saram (“person who deserted his hometown”), silhyangmin (“person who lost his hometown”), or monjo ttonan saram (“person who departed earlier”). In English, defectors are also referred to as escapees, refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, deserters, border crossers, and displaced persons. The majority of those leaving North Korea would prefer to return to their homeland if economic and political conditions improved, so in this sense they are only sojourners in a foreign land. In the absence of a completely satisfactory term to describe them, these people are referred to in this book as “defectors” or “former North Koreans.”
Defectors are a valuable source of information about what is happening in North Korean society, although their testimony must be used judiciously. Because defectors are usually paid for giving interviews, they may be tempted to exaggerate their experiences in North Korea to make their testimony more marketable. More worrisome, their memories of life in North Korea may become confused with information they have obtained since coming to the South. However, when numerous defectors tell similar stories with different details, their testimony becomes quite credible.
Who Defects?
In the years immediately following the liberation of Korea from the Japanese, many Koreans moved between the northern and southern parts of the country. Between 1946 and the beginning of the Korean War, an estimated 580,000 people came down from the North, and another 400,000 to 650,000 came south during the Korean War.3 After the war, the border between the two Koreas was tightly shut, and not until recent years has an appreciable number of North Koreans tried to defect—by way of China, not through the DMZ. Only 219 North Koreans arrived in South Korea from 1953 to 1959, and 212 came in the 1960s—probably fewer than the number of pro-communist South Koreans who fled to the North. During the entire decade of the 1970s, when economic conditions in North Korea were about the same as in South Korea, fifty-nine defectors arrived in the South. In the 1980s, when North Korea began to show signs of strain but the Great Leader Kim Il-sung was still at the helm, defectors numbered only sixty-three, although the trickle of South Koreans defecting to the North virtually stopped.
In the 1990s, as economic conditions deteriorated in the North and word of South Korea’s wealth started reaching the people, defections increased to 533, the number rapidly rising at the end of that decade and into the 2000s: 71 in 1998, 148 in 1999, 312 in 2000, 583 in 2001, and 1,139 in 2002. If hunger was the primary reason for leaving, the number of defections should have declined after the end of the 1995–1998 famine, but according to defectors, by 1998 people were losing hope that the North Korean economy would ever prosper. After 2002, the number of defections continued to increase, although not exponentially. Some 1,281 people defected in 2003, 1,894 in 2004, 1,387 in 2005, 2,019 in 2006, 2,544 in 2007, and 2,809 in 2008.
An important factor contributing to the outflow of defectors in the latter half of the 1990s was the loosening of restrictions on travel within the country and across the border into China. The authorities realized the people needed to go somewhere to get food, and border guards accepted bribes from travelers for permission to cross the river. Those who did not return from China were listed by local authorities as “missing.” At the same time, churches and brokers in China became more experienced in helping defectors transit China to South Korea. Since the turn of the century, enforcement along the border has waxed and waned according to the variable policies of the North Korean and Chinese governments.
Before the 1990s, defectors were hailed in South Korea as yongsa (“national heroes”), and upon their arrival the government proudly presented them in press conferences during which they praised South Korea and criticized North Korea. When Kim Dae-jung became president in 1998, the welcome mat was withdrawn. His administration’s policy goal was to achieve reconciliation with the Kim regime, and to do so he believed South Korea must avoid angering Kim Jong-il. Defectors were kept away from the public for several months after their arrival, during which time they underwent debriefing, training, and indoctrination. Kim Dae-jung’s presidential successor, Roh Moo-hyun, adopted the same policy, and defectors continued to be amazed at how supportive their new government was of the Kim regime they had just escaped.
A few defections have warranted front-page news coverage. In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, South Korea collected three MiG-15s from defecting North Korean pilots.4 In February 1983 a North Korean pilot flew his MiG-19 fighter down to the South, earning a commission in the ROK air force and a substantial monetary reward; another MiG-19 arrived courtesy of a defector in 1996. A handful of North Korean government officials began defecting in the 1990s. For example, in May 1991 Koh Young-hwan, a North Korean diplomat serving in the Congo, defected. Kang Myong-to, the sonin-law of Premier Kang Song-san, North Korea’s third-highest government official, arrived in South Korea in May 1994. Hwang Jang-yop, a former cabinet secretary and author of the Juche ideology, along with his associate Kim Tuk-hong, the former chairman of a North Korean government trading company, escaped from their minders while on a trip to Beijing in February 1997. In August of that year, the North Korean ambassador to Egypt defected to the United States with his family. Several members of Kim Jong-il’s extended family have defected, including his second wife, Song Hye-rim, her older sister, Song Hye-rang, and Song Hye-rang’s son and daughter, Yi Han-yong and Yi Nam-ok. Other North Korean elite cadres may have defected to South Korea and other countries and remained out of public view because they are considered prime intelligence assets.
North Koreans sometimes defect in groups. In 1987 a family of eleven reached Taiwan, from where they were sent on to South Korea. In the spring of 1994, the ROK media reported that over one hundred North Korean loggers in Siberia had escaped from their camps and made it to the ROK embassy in Moscow (the North Korean government claimed the loggers had been kidnapped by South Koreans). In 2002, North Koreans began staging group defections into foreign embassies, consulates, and schools in China.
Following prolonged government-level negotiations, 468 refugees who had separately trekked across China and taken refuge in Vietnam were deported in a group to South Korea in two Korean jumbo jets in July 2004. Although it was an open secret that they were arriving from Vietnam, to avoid further provoking the Kim regime, the ROK government asked the media not to disclose this fact. North Korea’s Committee for the Peaceful Unification of the Fatherland, a party front organization, charged that the airlift was a “premeditated abduction and terrorism in broad daylight.”5 The committee added that “South Korea should bear the responsibility for the consequences of this mishap, and all concerned parties will also pay for this,” presumably referring to the Vietnamese government. Like most North Korean threats, this one came to nothing. After the Vietnam defection, ROK unification minister Chong Tong-yong asked South Korean organizations to stop aiding North Korean defectors in China, and ROK foreign minister Ban Ki
-mun, who would go on to become the secretary-general of the United Nations, signaled South Korean government reluctance to accept defectors by saying that “if North Korean defectors in China go to third countries after lengthy travel through China, we would have little opportunity to deal with them. … It would also be difficult for us to bear infinite responsibility for the North Korean defectors.”6
Most early defectors were soldiers or spies—people who knew how to escape and had the special means to do so—but later people from all walks of life found ways to leave. In the 1990s, defectors also included farmers and laborers (44 percent), students and unemployed workers (39 percent), diplomats and international traders (7 percent), and party and government officials (6 percent); only 4 percent were soldiers.7 More defectors came with their families, which meant that a larger proportion of defectors were women and children. Since 2002, women defectors have outnumbered men by about three to one. Women find it easier than men to defect because they are less likely to have state-assigned jobs, so when they disappear they are not pursued, and the local police simply list them as “missing.” Women also have more job opportunities in China—from housekeeping to waitressing to prostitution. The majority of defectors come from the provinces close to the Chinese border, especially North and South Hamgyong provinces and Yanggang Province—all in the poverty-stricken northeast corner of the country and convenient to the narrow and shallow Tumen River.
It might seem surprising that only a few of the several thousand North Korean diplomats and businesspeople who live overseas have ever defected. Of course, the people sent abroad are the most politically trustworthy members of the core class or they would never be issued a passport. Moreover, members of the State Security Department (SSD) accompany them to keep an eye on their movements and report their activities to Pyongyang. Perhaps a more powerful constraining influence is their knowledge that if they defect, family members, friends, and colleagues back home will be punished.
North Koreans who defect while on a foreign assignment usually do so because they have been called home unexpectedly, a sure sign that they are in trouble with the party. A case in point is the 2002 defection of a North Korean official who managed a joint venture company in Eastern Europe.8 One day he overheard a telephone conversation between Pyongyang and his vice president, who worked for the SSD, complaining that the manager was bringing his wife to business meetings (she served as an unofficial translator) and suggesting this was not a good idea. The manager heard Pyongyang say that he would be recalled immediately, and that was enough for him. On a previous assignment an early recall had resulted in his spending two years at hard labor, and not wanting to go through this again, he secretly purchased a plane ticket to South Korea for himself and his wife. Luckily for him, European immigration officials did not notice that his passport was from North rather than South Korea, and he flew into Seoul, where the Korean immigration officials were so surprised to see a North Korean disembarking from the plane that they at first thought someone was playing a joke on them.
Even when North Koreans return from successful foreign assignments, they are usually sent to a farm or factory to spend a few months doing manual labor, as a reminder to them that in North Korea they are ordinary workers. They are treated well during this “reeducation period,” but it is an unpleasant change of status from their relatively luxurious lifestyle abroad.
The decision to defect is not an easy one. Family members must be left behind to the mercy of the North Korean police, who will henceforth classify them as politically disloyal. Until the 1990s most defectors said they left for political reasons, which usually meant that they had run afoul of the North Korean authorities in one way or another, for example, by being overheard criticizing the regime. Other defectors said they had gotten caught up in bureaucratic power struggles and become scapegoats. It is highly likely that some defectors who claimed to be fleeing for political reasons had committed civil crimes instead.
In the latter half of the 1990s, most defectors were motivated by hunger. After watching friends and family members die, they decided that fleeing to China offered the best hope of survival. As the famine subsided in the late 1990s, but with malnutrition still widespread, many North Koreans left for a better economic life, even though they could survive in North Korea. In a 2004 survey of four thousand defectors, 55 percent said they had left North Korea due to economic difficulties, whereas only 9 percent cited political oppression. Another 20 percent said they left in order to reunite with family members who had already defected, an indication of how the number of defectors could cascade in the future.9
The knowledge that foreigners, even Chinese, are living a better life than North Koreans is becoming a major impetus for defection. Some defectors don’t intend to go to South Korea; they simply cross the border into China to make a living for a few months, and once there watch South Korean television and learn that what they had been told about the South is totally false. At this point, they become curious (and sometimes angry about having been fooled all their lives) and decide to go to South Korea to see for themselves.
One of the first things most defectors do when they arrive in South Korea is to make plans to bring out family members left behind. In 2006, 44 percent of defectors arriving in South Korea said they had defected with the help of family members who had already made the trip.10 In one highly publicized case, a seventy-five-year-old South Korean prisoner of war succeeded in defecting on his third try after learning that his family in South Korea was still alive. He then contacted his wife back in North Korea and managed to get her out the next year. Later that year, his daughter and her husband defected. Their three-year-old son, whom they had left with relatives, was soon retrieved by his mother, and another daughter and her two-year-old son defected in the following year.11
Defectors who have already made it to South Korea entrust the task of rescuing family members to brokers working in China, some of whom are Korean Chinese, while others are North Korean defectors who decided to go into business and live illegally there. To finance the operation, defectors may turn over their bankbooks to the brokers, who then become entitled to withdraw money that the ROK government deposits for the defectors’ welfare.
Occasionally a defector returns to North Korea personally to retrieve family members, although it is a dangerous undertaking. In July 2007 a South Korean newspaper published a report of a man who defected three times.12 He first defected in 2003 by crossing the Tumen River into China, where he met his mother and older sister, who had previously crossed over, and the three then went to South Korea by way of Mongolia. After settling in the South, the man missed his wife, so he went back to North Korea and lived with her for eight months. He then crossed over to China and returned to the South, but when his wife gave birth to a daughter, he once again returned to his home. The following year he again defected, taking along his wife and child and several neighbors.
Crossing into China
The bare statistics of defection mask the danger, hardship, and suffering that North Koreans experience when they flee their country.13 Those who are captured in the act of defecting run the risk of arrest, torture, imprisonment, years of hard labor, and in some cases a lingering death in prison camps. Defectors leave family members behind, knowing that they may be banished or sent to prison camps as punishment for the defection. Many spend years hiding out in China and working as virtual slaves. And those who ultimately arrive in South Korea face a life of second-class citizenship in a strange land.
Only one of the three escape routes available to defectors is practical.14 The most direct, and by far the most difficult, route is through the minefields and fences of the four-kilometer-wide DMZ. Few are known to have made the trip successfully, and they have been North Korean soldiers familiar with the zone. In February 1998 a captain in the Korean People’s Army (KPA) crossed the border, and in June 2005 another KPA soldier made the trip and went undetected for several days before South Korean officials found him l
iving in a stolen car. In separate incidents, two KPA officers made it through the minefields in 2008.
Only slightly less dangerous is an escape by sea, either navigating down the coast directly to South Korea while trying to evade North Korean patrol boats along the maritime border line, or striking out across the West Sea to reach China two hundred miles to the west (but much closer if the boat just crosses the North Korea–China border), or sailing across the East Sea some five to six hundred miles to Japan. Successful sea escapes involve several people because an individual sailor would have great difficulty navigating such distances in a fishing boat.
The first known case of defectors escaping by boat directly from the North to the South (rather than by way of China) was in May 1997, when two families comprising fourteen people left the West Sea city of Sinuiju, just south of the Chinese border, and mingled with a fleet of Chinese fishing boats before heading south. In August 2002, twenty-one North Koreans arrived in South Korea on a fishing boat they had commandeered in North Korea. The boat’s engineer claimed he had not been in on the plan, and at his request he was returned to North Korea. In April 2003 three family members in a motorless fishing boat drifted south in the East Sea for five days before being rescued by a South Korean boat. In March 2006 five defectors, including four family members, crossed the maritime border on the East Sea and drifted for two days before reaching South Korea. And in 2008 a family of four made a three-hour trip directly down the West Sea coast into South Korean waters. In light of the fact that thousands of North Korean fishermen go out to sea in boats of all sizes, it may seem surprising that so few have fled to the South by boat. One explanation is that fishermen who work for themselves make more money than most North Koreans.
