REJECTING NORTHERN REFUGEES
Part 1: South Korea slams the door
By Andrei Lankov

SEOUL - How South Korea loves its misunderstood brethren from the North and extols reunification - it just doesn't want those wretched refugees moving next door in Asia's third-largest economy and the world's 11th-biggest. So disconnect, contradiction - even hypocrisy - are the watchwords when it comes to South Korea's rhetoric about embracing the North.

This was made very evident on Tuesday when South Korean Unification Minister Chung Dong-young said his government does not want to create an impression that it is trying to undermine the stability and leadership of the communist north.

Last summer at least 468 North Korean defectors arrived in South Korea, via Vietnam. No more.

Chung's statement followed the ministry's announcement late last month that it would tighten the screening of defectors seeking asylum at South Korea's foreign missions. mostly in China. The government also strengthened the monitoring of brokers, who guide defectors in return for commissions, and reduced settlement subsidies for North Koreans arriving in the South.

South Korea now actively discourages defections, punishing brokers who arrange them and slashing stipends to those North Koreans who make it to South Korea; the South Korean constitution makes them legal citizens entitled to all rights; except now they get just a third of their previous stipend, the equivalent of US$9,000 instead of $32,000. This is, for all practical purposes, a token payment for somebody who arrives in South Korea, a rather expensive country, empty-handed.

"The North's perception that we are trying to shake the Pyongyang regime by bringing defectors to Seoul is quite different from our policy," Chung said during an MBC radio interview. "We disapprove of the mass defections. There will be no more large-scale arrivals of defectors in Seoul."

Currently there are about 6,000 defectors living in the South. The rising number of arriving refugees hit a record of 1,850 at the end of 2004. Analysts say Seoul intends to curry favor with Beijing and Pyongyang by slowing the embarrassing influx of refugees.

The refugees' lives are not easy, unless they were North Korean elites, military officials or intelligence sources. Most of them are relegated to low-paying jobs or do not have permanent jobs at all. They often face discrimination from their South Korean brethren.

President Roh Moo-hyun, however, has called for a policy of openness and cooperation with the North, following in the footsteps of his predecessor, Kim Dae-jung. Critics have called this benighted revisionism and a failure to reckon with the widespread abuses in the North.

Unification the worst possible nightmare
In 1996 the South Korean Embassy in Beijing was visited by a family of six North Koreans. The father, an exemplary "shock worker", or model worker, was once granted a rare honor - to have his picture taken with the Great Leader and North Korean founder Kim Il-sung himself. The family escaped to China and wanted to proceed to the South. They naively believed that the South Korean Embassy would be of help. Diplomats assessed the situation, advised the family that its officials were unable to do anything for them, then said goodbye and wished the would-be defectors good luck. But they had no such luck - they were arrested, deported back to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, and severely punished.

A 36-year-old military officer from an elite security unit who fled to China in 1996 spent 1996-2002 repeatedly applying for permission to move to the South. He contacted the South Korean Embassy a few times, but every time the diplomats advised him "to be patient and wait".

One of the defectors told a South Korean journalist: "When I first fled the North I thought that it would easy to go to South Korea. With the help of ethnic Koreans I arrived in Qingdao [China] in August 1996. But at the South Korean Consulate on which I had pinned all my hopes, I was told: 'Under the present circumstances, this is difficult.' [I felt as though] the heavens collapsed."

Well, in recent years such stories are less common - not because the South Korean officials are more willing to help, but because North Korean refuges have far fewer illusions in regard to a helping hand from their South Korean brethren. The North Korean refugees in China recently have become well aware that they should not count on any support from the South Korean officials in China in their attempts to defect to the South. Yes, South Korea still accepts defectors and even provides them with minimal financial support upon arrival. But at the same time, the South Korean government does everything to minimize the number of North Korean defectors reaching Seoul.

Gone are the days when South Korean diplomats and intelligence officers would go to extraordinary lengths to help aspiring defectors. Only North Koreans who represent exceptional propaganda or intelligence value can count on official assistance these days.

Are you feeling a righteous disgust with "heartless Seoul bureaucrats"? Alas, it is not so simple to characterize. The South Korean government is sandwiched between two sets of demands, and it has had to choose between the two evils - actually, quite a normal choice for a government and its diplomats.

On one hand, since the inception of the South Korean state in 1948, the Seoul government has maintained that it is the sole legitimate government of the entire Korean Peninsula, including its northern part. From this official legalistic point of view, the North Korean government is merely a bunch of rebels without any legal standing. Incidentally, North Korea adopted the mirror approach, insisting that the only legitimate government of the Korean Peninsula is located in Pyongyang. Of course, nobody has taken these statements at face value for years, and for all practical purposes the South Korean government acts as if North Korea is a foreign country - and not necessarily a hostile one. But the legalistic fiction of the Republic of Korea (ROK) stretching from the Yalu River to Cheju Island cannot possibly be discarded: such a revision would be unthinkable for all political forces in South Korea.This would mean the blatant betrayal of the vision and mission of "national integrity".

Among other things, this view means that every North Korean who comes to the South is automatically eligible for South Korean citizenship, something the South wants to avoid. The Seoul government is not very happy about incoming refugees, and it has a number of reasons for this reluctance to welcome its brethren. The reasons are valid, especially if we see the South Korean government as, well, the government of South Korea, which is responsible to its constituencies and not to some impoverished foreigners from the North who happen to speak the same language.

First, Seoul does not want to destabilize its ex-enemy. The possible collapse of the North Korean state and German-style unification by absorption of vast numbers of refugees would incur enormous financial and political costs; hence Seoul's policy has been directed toward supporting the North and, in essence, postponing unification. Even though the North and South are technically still waging a civil war, Seoul now sees its likely victory in this war as the worst political nightmare coming true.

Second, a large influx of defectors to the South would probably lead to serious social problems and put additional strains on the South Korean budget. The recent experience has demonstrated that most defectors have great difficulties in adjusting to the capitalist South, and are often ostracized and discriminated against by the locals. There are success stories, of course, but nearly all of the successful defectors have come from the former North Korean elite. However, few defectors these days are party cadres, air force colonels or their children - a vast majority of them are poorly educated farmers from northern provinces. Thus they are likely to become a liability, putting additional strains on South Korean budget, not famous for generous social-welfare benefits.

Third, and the most oft-cited (but perhaps least important) factor is the relations between South Korea and China. China carefully maintains its neutrality in the Korean conflict and does not wish to become a transition zone for crowds of refugees heading for Seoul.

All these concerns are by no means unjustified. At the same time, the South Korean government cannot openly admit that defectors are not welcome anymore. Thus official Seoul insists that "our North Korean brothers and sisters are welcome here, of course, as long as ..." and then it adds some conditions that make defections much more difficult.

This contradiction between the official rhetoric and the real policies was, for example, starkly exposed in 1999. At that time the future of a group of North Korean refugees facing extradition from China to Russia was widely discussed within Korea itself. In October 1999, Lim Tong-won, Seoul's minister for unification, stated to the National Assembly that the "government is ready to accept all North Korean refugees, if they want to emigrate to the South". He added: "It is the basic principle of the Seoul government to welcome all North Korean refugees ... it is in line with the constitution to accommodate North Korean refugees."

This statement once again expressed the traditional position of the ROK government that has claimed that the protection of all North Koreans is its legal duty. However, on the same day the Ministry for Unification "clarified" the ministerial statement. A senior official at the Unification Ministry explained to reporters that the minister's remarks referred to a "group of North Koreans who had wrapped up all the necessary procedures for entry into South Korea with the nation's overseas embassies". Such a "clarification" in effect rendered the minister's statement meaningless, since it excluded virtually all of the refugees in China, none of whom have valid passports (and often no identification papers at all), thus making it impossible for them to "wrap up all the necessary procedures for entry into South Korea with the nation's overseas embassies".

From early 2004 the South Korean government has waged a campaign against organized defections. Because of the peculiarities of the current situation, it is very difficult to reach the South without involvement of a professional broker to arrange the defector's trip. In 2004, 83% of all surveyed defectors used the help of the brokers. However, these brokers are now much vilified in pro-government press and in left-leaning media in general, being depicted as predators who are luring the greedy or naive defectors into unnecessary trouble. The left-leaning media run horror stories about defectors locked in small rooms for weeks and mistreated in all imaginable ways - as if the same defectors, if caught, are not subjected to much worse treatments in North Korean prisons or investigation centers.

They often insist that the brokers lure their victims by promise of "arrival money" - as if the average income in the South is not 15-20 times as high as in the North. These days, Seoul officials regularly express their righteous outrage about the perfidious brokers. Indeed, most brokers might be sharks, but without their involvement fewer successful escapes would be possible - which is, in all probability, the government's unstated intention. Of course, this also means that a number of people will undertake badly organized attempts, be caught in process and then extradited from China to the North.

It is worth noting that such an approach to defections is by no means typical to the South Korean left alone. It is based on rational, if cynical, considerations and thus is shared by both the incumbent left-leaning government and right-wing opposition. In spite of heavy rhetoric against "appeasement of Pyongyang dictators", the opposition is not much different in its approach to the North Korean problem, as the entire history of dealing with refugees attests. From the early 1990s the benefits available to defectors were systematically cut down, and these reforms took place under both left- and right-wing administrations.

Nonetheless, a large proportion of 50,000-100,000 North Korean refugees in China want to go South, where they hope to find a better life. A long time ago, a defector told this correspondent: "I think that a janitor in the South lives roughly same material life as a country party secretary in the North." It might be an exaggeration, but only slight. Indeed, the difference in living standards between two Koreas is huge, and this fact is increasingly known north of the 38th Parallel. This situation alone is bound to generate the increase in defections, whether Seoul government want it or not. And one should not think that defections are purely economy-driven, even if political factors are probably less significant than the South Korean right wing want us to believe.

The border crossing itself makes the North Korean refugees into criminals (albeit petty ones) who are certain to be persecuted in the North if caught. It is also true that after exposure to the relative freedoms of China, many refugees are disgusted with the system in their home country, and do not want to go back. Thus they are determined to go to Seoul, against all odds. And the odds are increasingly high.

Next: How they get out

Dr Andrei Lankov is a lecturer in the faculty of Asian Studies, China and Korea Center, Australian National University. He graduated from Leningrad State University with a PhD in Far Eastern history and China, with emphasis on Korea, and his thesis focused on factionalism in the Yi Dynasty. He has published books and articles on Korea and North Asia. He is currently on leave, teaching at Kookmin University, Seoul.

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