Defector deaths raising concern in
S Korea By Sunny Lee
BEIJING - A North Korean defector who had
entered South Korea early this year ended her life
by throwing herself from a window of a 10th-floor
apartment in downtown Seoul this week.
Kim
Young-sil, 36, committed suicide in the early
hours on Tuesday, South Korea's Yonhap said,
adding that her death came as a cold shock to some
1,000 North Korean settlers who live in the same
apartment complex.
Kim had been previously
repatriated back to North Korea from
China at least four times in
her attempt to flee the starving country before
she finally made it to South Korea. She was known
to suffer from depression due to her
post-traumatic stress from repatriation.
North Korean refugee groups in the South,
however, vehemently point out that behind her
death lie more fundamental problems such as the
cold attitude and indifference as well as a lack
of accommodative policy in South Korea for North
Korean settlers, all of them acting as a trigger
for her death.
After fleeing from North
Korea, Kim had lived in China, and even had a baby
with a Chinese man. She entered South Korea alone
early this year. Since then, she had had
difficulty in adjusting to South Korean society,
while badly missing the child she had left behind
in China.
After gaining South Korean
citizenship, Kim applied for a visa to visit China
to see her baby. But the Chinese Embassy in Seoul
found out she was a North Korean defector and
repeatedly refused to issue one. North Korean
settler groups in the South claim that's the
direct reason for her suicide, according to the
Yonhap report.
The Korean Church Coalition
for North Korea Freedom, a Korean-American
Christian organization, is campaigning for
improvement of China's treatment of North Korean
refugees in connection with the 2008 Summer
Olympics in Beijing. At its July meeting, attended
by Republican US Congressman Ed Royce, it compiled
a set of requests including that China grant North
Korean defectors legal refugee status, not
repatriate them back to North Korea, and allow
them to exit to a third country.
China can
verify whether a South Korean citizen is a North
Korean defector by checking a social-security
number, which has a certain pattern that provides
a hint for others to identify the person's origin.
For example, the last four digits of the
social-security number indicate where the
identification was issued. North Korean refugees
are issued a code that indicates they are from
Ansung city, the locale of a training center
called Hanawon where all North Korean refugees go
through a few months of settlement training to
adapt to their new life in the South.
Based on this peculiar ID pattern, many
North Korean settlers are often denied a Chinese
entry visa. At the same time, they are also
subject to employment discrimination from South
Korean companies that avoid hiring them because of
their lack of job skills and cultural differences.
The South Korean government abolished the
problematic system in June and initiated a new one
in which North Koreans receive social-security
numbers that show the place of their choice of
residence, not Ansung.
The remedy,
however, is still not perfect. Those who received
their social-security numbers before the launch of
the new system still have to use their old ID, and
it's impossible for them to change their ID
numbers because doing so would require a change of
the relevant law and parliamentary approval.
Sohn Jung-hoon of the Committee for
Democratization of North Korea, a civic group that
has many North Korean defectors as its members,
said: "Kim tried every possible means to obtain a
Chinese entry visa, but to no avail. There are
also quite a number of defectors who say their
life is at a severe disadvantage [in South Korea]
because of their easily identifiable
social-security number."
In South Korea,
as the number of North Korean refugees has
increased recently, financial support and
medical-insurance benefits for them have
decreased. "Kim's death has to do with her not
being able to obtain a Chinese visa, but is
aggravated by the expiration of living allowances
and medical insurance from the government," Sohn
said.
Meanwhile, Sohn's agency sent a
letter to the National Police Agency on Tuesday,
requesting the resumption of a lecture series by
North Korean defectors to South Koreans. The
lecture series was started in the early 1990s by
the police agency to describe to South Korean
citizens what life in the North is like. Annually
until April 2004, when the agency canceled the
lecture series, about 10 North Korean defectors
from different backgrounds toured schools and
government offices talking about their former
lives. But the agency decided the lecture series
was no longer needed and dropped it.
The
letter, signed by Hwang Jang-yup, the highest
North Korean official ever to defect to South
Korea, emphasized the importance of resuming the
lectures. It said, "South Korean people's
awareness of national security is increasingly
slackened and people are turning a blind eye to
the North Korean human-rights situation as well as
atrocities happening there."
On Wednesday,
a coalition of 16 refugee support groups and
non-governmental organizations, including Hwang's,
held a press conference in front of the Foreign
Ministry building in Seoul to demand improvements
in the living conditions of North Koreans who are
currently housed in a refugee camp in Thailand.
They also demanded that Seoul bring them to South
Korea promptly.
"At present, there are
some 400 North Korean refugees housed in a
facility in Thailand that is supposed to hold only
100 people at most. They cannot even lie down
properly to sleep because of crowding, and a
sufficient number of restrooms is utterly lacking.
They are undergoing a grueling life there," the
groups' representatives said.
Last month,
one North Korean refugee died in the camp. The
groups claimed the miserable, cramped living
conditions as the cause. "The [South Korean]
government should demand that the Thai government
not treat the North Korean refugees like animals,"
they said.
In a subsequent meeting with a
Foreign Ministry official, the groups'
representatives said, "If the government continues
to turn a blind eye to the harrowing circumstances
of the refugees, then the 10,000 North Korean
refugees in South Korea will unite to fight for
the improvement of the human-rights conditions of
North Korean refugees abroad."
Sunny
Lee is a writer/journalist based in Beijing,
where he has lived for five years. A native of
South Korea, Lee is a graduate of Harvard
University and Beijing Foreign Studies
University.
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