North Korean Divorce Story

This is a sad story:

Song will soon be able to get a divorce. The question is, will his wife ever find out?  Song is a 49-year-old defector from North Korea who left a wife and two children behind him, took up with a Russian mother of three and brought them to South Korea. But so impenetrable is the iron curtain between the two Koreas that there’s no way of communicating. There are no phone, mail or Internet connections.

This area of marital law is a legal minefield for South Korea which is likely to be cleared in March when a law is enacted permitting defectors to obtain a divorce from a South Korean court. But not all the mines will be defused.

Read the whole story on your own but basically this NK defector worked at as guest laborer at a lumber mill in Russia in 1998.  He was caught saying bad things about the NK government and was going to be arrested.  So he hid within Russia. While hiding in Russia he met an ethnic Mongolian Russian and she sold everything she had to flee with him and her kids to South Korea.  She has now given birth to their child, but is in South Korea on a tourist visa.  The defectors wants to get married so she doesn’t get deported, but first he must divorce his wife in North Korea.

According to the article 223 defectors have tried to get divorced in South Korea, but only one has ever been successful.  Hopefully for the sake of his new family he can get divorced and married before the authorities deport his wife and children.