Tag: refugees

Defector Says He Misses North Korea Because He Can No Long Oppress People

| April 5, 2016

I wonder if it is too late to send this guy back to North Korea if he misses oppressing people so much?:

A middle-aged man is walking through a quiet Seoul neighborhood when he suddenly stops. He lights a cigarette, cupping his hands to shield the flame from the winter wind, and takes a deep draw, remembering how things used to be. He’s a former policeman, a broad-shouldered man with a growling voice and a crushing handshake.

Back where he came from, he says, he was someone who mattered.

“In North Korea, people were afraid of me,” he says. He says it wistfully, almost sadly, like a boy talking about a dog he once had. “They knew I could just drag them away.”

That fear meant respect, and bribes, in the North Korean town where he lived, a place where the electricity rarely worked and the Internet was only a rumor. It meant he could buy a TV, and that he had food even as those around him went hungry. It meant that when he grew exhausted by the relentless poverty and oppression around him, and when relatives abroad offered to advance him the money to escape, he had connections to a good smuggler.  [Mashable]

The article features stories about other defectors, but here is the passage that I found of the most interest; just think if unification comes there will a whole country of people thinking just like this that South Korea would have to integrate:

“I knew that South Korea was a capitalist country, that it was very rich. I thought that if I can just get there, I can work less but earn a lot of money,” he says.

He grimaces when he thinks of his naivete.

Few North Koreans have the work ethic and competitiveness needed to succeed in South Korea which is another reason why instant unification would be a disaster for the ROK.

South Korea Begins Accepting Refugees from Myanmar

| December 28, 2015

This just goes to show there are many more refugees out there that are not from Syria that need help:

When Kh Too landed on domestic soil Wednesday at Incheon International Airport, one of his first messages to local media was as modest as wishing to “be ordinary.”

For a man who fled Myanmar in 1993 and had spent the past two decades living in a refugee camp, it was perhaps the best he could possibly hope for.

The 43-year-old arrived in Korea in the morning with his wife, five children and a niece as part of the first group of refugees to be resettled here through an initiative led by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

“I feel alive. I deeply thank Korea for inviting us, and for embracing us,” said Kh Too, who only goes by one name, as he took his first step as an F-2 visa holder.

For the next six to 12 months, he and his family will be under care of the Korea Immigration Service and receive job training and Korean-language courses.

Korea on Wednesday became the 29th country in the world and second in Asia after Japan to accept refugees through the Refugee Act, which stipulates that the government accept refugees recommended through the program led by the UNHCR.

The Justice Ministry said in April that it would accommodate 30 refugees annually in the next three years as part of a pilot program.   [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read the rest at the link.

Many North Korean Defectors Become Prostitutes in South Korea

| November 30, 2015

This really should not come as much of a surprise since the vast majority of North Korean defectors are women and when they arrive in the South they have few job skills to make a living with.  Turning towards prostitution to make ends meet is something that women with financial issues have done for centuries.  Additionally many of these North Korean women had to turn to prostitution while refugees in China in order to make money to get to South Korea in the first place:

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A considerable number of female defectors from North Korea have become sex workers here after experiencing difficulties adjusting to life in the South, according to media reports.

KBS, a state-run broadcaster, aired a program on Sunday night about the plight of some 40 to 50 female defectors who work at “ticket dabangs,” coffee shops that illegally sell sex, in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province. Some of these places are owned by North Korean defectors.

The women are usually in their late 30s to mid 40s. The clients, mostly in their 50s to 70s, are not only residents of Hwaseong, but travel to the town from other regions.

The women spend time with clients in karaoke and go to motel rooms with them as well as delivering coffee, which is the ostensible business activity.

A female defector told the program that each client pays 25,000 won ($22) per hour for singing together in karaoke rooms. Another woman asked for a more than 100,000 won to provide sexual services when a member of the production crew disguised as a client contacted her.

It was already known that ticket dabangs recruiting female North Korean defectors are also prevalent in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province.

The women said that they used to work at normal companies or work as waitresses in restaurants after they defected, but their monthly salaries of some 1.3 to 1.7 million won was not enough to maintain their livelihood and support their family members left behind in the North. [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link.

Refugee Describes How South Korean Culture Has Infiltrated North Korea

| October 7, 2015

A North Korean refugee recently gave a radio interview to PRI.org which focused on why North Koreans like South Korean clothes and beauty products as well as the importance of black markets in the country:

Would you wear skinny jeans if they were illegal?  As it turns out, the answer is yes, at least for one young North Korean woman.

Listen to this story on PRI.org »

Danbi and I are browsing through a South Korean market, when she stops to admire a pair of slim fitting pants. “Girls just love these back home!” she declares. By home, she means a city in far-off North Korea.

She flips her hair dramatically, and laughs heartily, as she tries on a sparkly hair clip. She recalls, “We all wanted to be able to run our fingers through our hair like this. Like we saw in a South Korean TV show. But we couldn’t. Because we didn’t have enough shampoo in North Korea, so your fingers would just get stuck!”

Danbi is a 24-year-old North Korean refugee, who paints a picture of the totalitarian regime that’s quite different from the one we’re used to seeing, but an account supported by other defectors and those working with North Koreans. Yes, the country is rife with human rights abuses and grinding poverty. But Danbi, who took on her new name after fleeing, is from a city near the Chinese border — which has become surprisingly porous, and so she’s grown up in this presumably closed nation with a window to the outside world.

She says she shopped in black markets with smuggled foreign goods and watched American and South Korean TV shows, via smuggled USB sticks, since she was a kid. So by the time she entered junior high, Danbi says what she learned in school — that Americans can’t be trusted and South Koreans are poor — she doubted its truth. [Global Voices]

You can read the rest at the link.

Should South Korea and Japan Allow In Syrian Refugees?

| September 12, 2015

Both South Korea and Japan are being criticized in an opinion piece in the USA Today by a UN staffer for not allowing in Syrian and other refugees fleeing violence in the Middle East.  However,the article seems to be less a criticism of accepting refugees and more a criticism of Korea not wanting to become a multicultural nation.  I just do not see how it is in South Korea or Japan’s interest to accept thousands of refugees who cannot speak the language, will be culturally isolated, and will likely become long term wards of the state?  South Korea already has the burden of accepting thousands of refugees from North Korea who have their own problems integrating with South Korean society and the UN thinks refugees from the Middle East would do any better?

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Japan and South Korea are like estranged fraternal siblings. Both have more in common than they care to admit: an aging population, abysmal birthrates and gender inequality. Both are in danger of losing their workforces unless they open their doors to migrants and refugees. Yet both face resistance from populations that have long taken pride in their ethnic homogeneity and are wary of the outside world.

Whenever a boat overloaded with refugees turns up on other countries’ shores, there are sighs of relief in Seoul and Tokyo that it is happening elsewhere.

South Korea and Japan are both signatories to the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, which obliges them to protect and provide refugees with basic rights and social services. Even so, their records of accepting asylum seekers are appallingly low. Last year, South Korea granted refugee status to 94 asylum seekers — a bump from 57 in 2013 — out of some 2,900 applicants from Asia, Africa and the Middle East (this doesn’t include North Korean defectors, who are considered South Korean citizens by law).  [USA Today]

You can read more at the link.

North Korea Reportedly Resettles 10,000 Homes to Make Highway Along Chinese Border

| June 10, 2015

Eminent domain is something used in the US as well that forces people to relocate thus North Korea probably should not be criticized for forcing people to move for a public works project like a highway.  However, the article is probably accurate that the highway is being built to make it a little more difficult to defect to China:

The North Korean regime has resettled some 10,000 households to build a 270 km highway section along the Chinese border, a source said last Friday.

“The aim is to prevent people from fleeing the North,” the source said. Construction of the highway, which runs from Hyesan, Ryanggang Province to Musan, North Hamgyong Province, is nearly complete.

The regime reportedly forced the residents out because the border regions along the Apnok and Duman rivers are notoriously porous, and defections and smuggling are rife.  [Chosun Ilbo via reader tip]

You can read more at the link.