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2 Defectors reveal hard road to Korea
reunification By Sunny Lee
BEIJING - For more than a decade, Jeon
Woo-taek has been a "sought-after" figure by the
media, including CNN, to comment on North Korean
issues related to unification and refugees. He was
also invited as a speaker to numerous
international forums, including one in which
German and South Korean scholars brainstormed
their ideas for unification. Jeon is not a
political strategist. Nor is he a researcher with
a think-tank. He is a shrink.
The
psychiatrist at Yonsei University Medical School
in Seoul has
pioneered the study of North
Korean defectors' mental health for 15 years. He
has studied as many as 600 North Koreans now
living in South Korea, and has become a strong
advocate for the "unification of hearts" as the
prerequisite for political and geographical
unification of the two Koreas.
North and
South Koreans "think that they know each other
very well. It's their mistake," Jeon said in a
telephone interview with Asia Times Online.
Even though the Korean people had lived as
a single nation state for more than 1,300 years
before they were divided into two countries at the
end of World War II, Jeon believes the difference
created during the ensuing 60 years is significant
and damaging enough to require serious attention
and concern.
To get to the bottom of the
North Korean psyche, Jeon had to ask them
questions. But how? North Korean settlers in the
South were usually reluctant to talk about their
stories to others - much less to a psychiatrist -
as they feared that they were under suspicion and
surveillance by the South Korean government. It is
a mentality and old habits they transferred from
North Korea. Some defectors frequently change
their phone numbers to avoid contacts with other
people.
"This is one reason why
questionnaires and superficial interviews had
little success," Jeon said, implicitly panning
some of the approaches by non-governmental
organizations.
In fact, one of the most
striking characteristics of the defectors, Jeon
said, is their suspicious attitude toward people.
And that caused a particular problem for him.
Understandably, all defectors interviewed by him
were reluctant to sign the consent paper and
equally reluctant to be recorded or filmed. So
Jeon and his team had to make an extra effort to
build rapport and earn their trust first. The
researchers also assured them they were not
government agents.
Only then was Jeon's
team able to proceed with the interviews. But the
results were striking. For example, in one study,
Jeon found close to half (48%) of the North Korean
settlers in South Korea responded "no" to the
question: Do you think North and South Koreans
will easily understand each other and get along
well after unification?
That's a very
important result, and something that Jeon said the
South Korean government should heed, because the
North Korean defectors are regarded as a "litmus
test" for a unified Korea. Defectors are also seen
as a window to the North. The ways they behave and
think are seen as general examples of how South
Koreans believe all of their Northern counterparts
act.
For their part, the North Koreans
cited such significant problems for unification as
the South Koreans' "different way of thinking" and
"individualistic behavior" (65.6%) and the
economic disparity between the North and South
(25%), while 13% mentioned the lack of mutual
understanding and prejudice as barriers.
Interestingly, however, they pointed out
that cultural differences (42%) were a bigger
problem than political differences (11%).
During the interviews, Jeon's team also
found that some well-meaning South Korean sponsors
only make the situation worse by taking
well-meaning but ultimately wrong-headed
approaches toward integrating North Koreans into
Southern society. For example, most sponsors for
the North Korean refugees in South Korea come from
religious organizations, but because they don't
understand the official atheistic policy of
Pyongyang, they encourage the defectors to begin
attending church regularly.
"Taught in the
North that religion is evil and exploitative, the
North Koreans felt that they were being forced to
attend church and were reminded of the ideological
indoctrination sessions in the North. This put
considerable strain on the relationship between
the North Koreans and their Southern sponsors,"
Jeon said in a report.
In the report,
North Korean settlers also displayed an ambivalent
attitude toward capitalism's ultimate symbol -
money. Taught that money is the instrument of
slavery in a capitalist society and a symbol of
selfishness and evil, as many as 78% of Jeon's
interviewees revealed an ambivalent attitude
toward wealth.
As one defector put it: "I
do not want to be a slave to money. But at the
same time, I desperately need money to live in
this society. At first, when I received money
after my first anti-communism
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