What Is the Name of the River That the Kang Family Crossed to Leave North Korea? *
To Reach South korea, He Risked His Life. To Leave It, He Did It Again.
Officials say a Northward Korean who crossed the DMZ in 2020 crossed it once more to become back. His life in the Southward seems to have been i of poverty and isolation.
SEOUL — In November 2020, a North Korean ex-gymnast climbed undetected over 10-foot barbed-wire fences to get into South Korea. When the South belatedly discovered the alienation, information technology began an extensive manhunt. The man was not found until the side by side day, one-half a mile due south of the world's most heavily armed edge.
It was 1 of the Due south Korean military's nearly embarrassing moments in years.
On New year's day'due south Twenty-four hour period, officials say, the man humiliated the armed services once again by making the trip in reverse, climbing the aforementioned fences and crossing the Demilitarized Zone to return to the North.
His boggling feat not simply highlighted South Korean security flaws at the 2.5-mile-wide buffer zone, known as the DMZ, but raised the bewildering question of why someone would hazard his life past crossing information technology twice. The DMZ is lined with spinous-wire fences, minefields and armed sentries. Few North Koreans who defect to the Southward do so past crossing it directly (most go through China), and it is even rarer for a defector to render that fashion.
"Nosotros are sorry for causing concerns to the people," Gen. Won In-choul, the chairman of South Korea's articulation chiefs of staff, told lawmakers on Midweek. "We volition make every attempt so there is no recurrence of like incidents."
Prototype
At the same hearing, Defence Minister Suh Wook confirmed that South korea believed the border-crosser was the former gymnast who defected in 2020. The government has not released his name, but other North Korean defectors have identified him as Kim Woo-joo, 29.
They said he had few friends, and his motive for going dwelling house was still a mystery on Thursday. Some lawmakers have speculated that he was a spy, simply President Moon Jae-in's regime said information technology had plant no show of that.
A series of lapses permit him slip through the DMZ, said Lt. Gen. Jeon Dong-jin, who led the army's investigation into the security breach.
He was first picked upwardly by a armed forces security camera about 1 p.m. on Sabbatum, equally he was walking toward an area just due south of the DMZ, in the eastern province of Gangwon, that is off-limits to civilians. A alert was broadcast over loudspeakers, but the military took no further action afterward the man seemed to change course and head for a nearby village.
Half-dozen hours later, he was climbing the starting time alpine fence on the southern edge of the DMZ. 3 cameras captured the scene, simply a soldier on duty, who was monitoring real-time feeds from nine cameras on a single computer screen, missed information technology. Sensors on the fence triggered an alarm, but a get-go-response team ruled that nix was awry.
Hours after, in the dead of dark, the military'southward thermal observation devices detected the human deep inside the DMZ, on his way to Democratic people's republic of korea.
Of the roughly 34,000 North Koreans who have defected to South Korea, xxx accept mysteriously resurfaced in the North in the past decade. Some are believed to have been blackmailed into returning. Others take fled criminal charges in South korea.
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Still others are idea to take gone back because, after growing up in North korea's highly regimented, totalitarian society, they could not adjust to the hypercompetitive life of the South, where defectors are often treated like second-form citizens. What little is known about Mr. Kim'due south life in the South suggests that he may fall into that category.
Fellow defectors say that Mr. Kim, like nigh North Koreans who come to the South, adopted a new proper name: Kim Woo-jeong. He appears to have had a hard life in both Koreas, according to officials and lawmakers who received briefings from military and intelligence officials.
Similar all defectors, Mr. Kim was debriefed past the South Korean authorities upon inflow. He said he had fled the North to escape an abusive stepfather. At the time, Mr. Kim weighed barely more than 110 pounds; he stood just taller than 4-foot-11.
Crossing the North'south edge with China — the usual route for refugees — had go near incommunicable because of the coronavirus pandemic. To go on the virus out, North korea had profoundly tightened its controls at that edge, reportedly placing its guards nether "shoot to kill" orders. Instead, Mr. Kim crossed the DMZ, where, Southward Korean officials said, his gymnastic skills helped him climb the tall fences.
In South korea, his life seems to take been a difficult one.
He fabricated few friends, officials said. He plant work at cleaning services whose employees worked mostly at night in empty office buildings. He apparently never socialized with his neighbors. Since Sun, when reports first emerged of his return to the Northward, no one in the South has come up forward to say that they knew him personally.
Kang Mi-jin, a Northward Korean who lives in Seoul, said that a defector's early experiences could be crucial. "It's important what showtime jobs they find in the South and how they are treated here," she said. "That's where they acquire whether their dream is supported by reality."
Their first friends are commonly fellow North Koreans, whom they meet during the government'southward 12-week resettlement grooming program. Before the pandemic, when as many as 3,000 defectors were arriving every year, those classrooms were full. But with the North's Chinese border locked down, only 229 North Koreans came to the South in 2020, the twelvemonth Mr. Kim defected.
Paradigm
"He had few classmates and few friends," said Ahn Chan-il, the leader of a defectors' group in Seoul. S Korean churches, where many defectors have constitute communities, have been under restrictions during the pandemic.
If Mr. Kim was suffering from poverty and loneliness in the Due south, he was hardly the but defector who felt that manner.
Nearly a quarter of North Korean defectors — vi times the national boilerplate — are receiving government subsidies for bones necessities considering they are in the lowest income bracket. Those among them who earn wages make lxx per centum of the national average, according to a survey of 407 defectors conducted last year by the Seoul-based Database Center for N Korean Human being Rights.
Thirty-v percent of those defectors reported experiencing depression and despair, and eighteen.5 percent said they had thought of returning to the North, mainly because they missed their families and hometowns, co-ordinate to the survey.
One reason many unhappy defectors endure life in the South is that they tin save money and ship it to their families in the North through middlemen in China, who usually charge a 30 percent fee. But temporary jobs similar the ones held by many defectors were among the outset to be cutting by employers as the pandemic raged.
Living alone in a tiny, $117-a-calendar month flat in northern Seoul, Mr. Kim received $418 a month in welfare support from the regime. He rarely cooked and skimped on gas, water and electricity, and he had unpaid bills for rent and medical insurance, according to the South Korean news agency Yonhap.
"We assistance the Due north Korean refugees resettle when they first arrive, but we accept been miserly in helping them find jobs and make their life here sustainable," Park Soo-hyun, Mr. Moon'due south senior secretarial assistant for public communications, said this week.
For some defectors, the transition to the Due south is like that experienced by a prisoner, released after many years, who cannot readjust to the outside world, said Lee Min-bok, a longtime North Korean refugee.
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"They are strangers to the sudden freedom in the Due south, finding it more hard than life in Northward Korea, which is substantially a prison," Mr. Lee said. "The ostracism they experience in the South is non much different from the discrimination ex-prisoners suffer on the outside."
The civilisation shock is especially difficult for the few who cross the DMZ. Many defectors spend years living in China, which is far more than open to the world than North Korea is. Past the time they come up to the South, they have some thought of what to await.
As of Thursday, North Korea had said zero about Mr. Kim'due south return. It has oftentimes used returning defectors for propaganda, releasing videos and manufactures in which they describe a hellish life in the capitalist Due south.
Mr. Kim left few traces behind. At the fence where he crossed, investigators constitute thin footprints and bits of plumage, which apparently roughshod from his winter glaze when it was torn by barbed wire. Reporters who went to his home plant it empty, with a neatly folded coating put outside for the garbage collector to pick upwardly.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/06/world/asia/north-korea-defector-dmz.html
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