North Korean refugees leave
intrigue behind By Andrei
Lankov and Peter Ward
North Korea is often
described as a black hole, a place that we know,
and can know, next to nothing about. South Korea
is today host to 24,000 refugees from the North,
but sceptics continue to assert that these
refugees are not a trustworthy source. They are
allegedly disinformation agents of the South
Korean intelligence services, or liars who will
say anything to defame the regime north of the
border in order to live well. In other words, they
are carpet baggers, who are not to be trusted, or
consorted with in polite company.
People
with such views in the main just conform to old
stereotypes which go back to the days of the Cold
War, when North Korean defectors were a very
politicized crowd indeed. These stereotypes,
though, do not work with North Korean refugees of
the 1990s and 2000s. These people cannot be more
different from the Cold War
defectors both in their motivation and world view.
Admittedly, Korea saw its share of
high-profile defections which sometimes were
reminiscent of the clock-and-dagger romance of the
Cold War era. In February 1997, for example, an
aging North Korean walked into the South Korean
embassy in Beijing. The visitor's name was Hwang
Jang Yop, and he once used to be the personal
mentor of the then current North Korean dictator
Kim Jong-il. Hwang was also known to be the chief
North Korean ideologue and the actual creator of
the juche (self-reliance) philosophy. So,
one can imagine the shock of the South Korean
diplomats and intelligence officials at the
embassy when they learnt that their illustrious
guest had decided to defect.
Hwang's
defection attracted much attention at the time.
However, in the history of defections Hwang is a
very rare exception. As of January 2012, there
were 23,260 North Korean refugees living in South
Korea (by now, their number has exceeded 24,000),
and most of them are very different from Hwang
Jang Yop in terms of their background, as well as
in the reasons for leaving North Korea.
To
start with, these people can hardly be described
as "defectors" since this word implies political
motivation which is almost always completely
absent in their case. The authors between them
have met hundreds of refugees, and it appears that
almost none of them left North Korea because he or
she was unhappy about the system and wanted to
challenge or change it.
Some of them have
indeed escaped persecution, since they got
themselves in trouble with the North Korean
government. For example, one refugee said to his
fellow workers that "European pigs eat better than
North Korean miners". His wife soon learned that
this factually correct remark had been reported to
a local secret police operative, so as a result
the family decided to be proactive and immediately
fled to China.
In many other cases,
however, refugees are driven by purely economic
motivations. Northeast China is by no means a
paragon of prosperity, but compared to the poverty
of North Korea, the region looks almost like a
paradise. Therefore it is only natural that many
North Koreans, especially those who live in the
borderland areas are willing to illegally migrate
to China for work. Many of them see this move as
provisional and assume that in a few months, or at
most a few years, they will return home with
pockets filled with money.
As a matter of
fact, this is what frequently happens, even though
their Chinese dream does not always work out as
initially intended, so in some cases they came
back home without a single yuan (especially if
they are apprehended by the Chinese police, and
extradited back to North Korea).
So, most
people leave North Korea because they want to make
good money in China doing hard, unskilled labor
and then come back. There are, though, a
substantial minority who find ways to travel to
South Korea from China. Such trips are not cheap,
and usually require the help of a professional
guide/fixer, known as a broker, whose service is
not free. Therefore in most cases, the successful
escapees are financially assisted by their
relatives in South Korea and other countries. At
any rate, politics is largely absent in their
motivation to come South. They come instead to
enjoy prosperity and a measure of social security
which is beyond their reach in North Korea or
China.
This background has much impact on
the composition of the North Korean refugee
community in the South.
To start with,
most refugees are women (69% in January 2012).
This imbalance largely reflects the fact that a
majority of North Koreans hiding in China are
women too - and the refugee community is China is
the major source of refugees in South Korea.
Refugees can usually get unskilled and poorly paid
jobs, and most of these jobs are of the type
deemed suitable for women - for example, cleaning
and washing dishes in restaurants, taking care of
the sick. It also helps that women can resort to
cohabitation with local Chinese males as a way to
achieve a modicum of protection - an option which
is used by at least half of the female refugees.
Most of the refugees are also not well
educated. Currently, only 8% of the refugees in
South Korea are college graduates - roughly half
of North Korea's nationwide average. In other
words, unlike the defectors/refugees from the
communist bloc of the Cold War days, they are
worse, not better educated if compared average
fellow countrymen. It would be just a minor
simplification to assert that the average
defectors from Eastern Europe was a young,
brilliant Jew chess player. By contrast, the
average North Korean refugee to the South is a
woman in her 40s or 50s often with an incomplete
secondary education.
As we mentioned
above, it is often said that North Korean refugees
are politically biased and generally cannot tell
us anything trustworthy. This view is especially
strong among left-leaning intellectuals in the
South, many of whom have residual sympathy for the
North Korean regime - which they mistake for being
a socialist country, in the idealized sense of the
phrase - and a reflexive aversion to
anti-communism, the official ideology of the
dictatorships in the South in the 1950s-1980s.
Admittedly, their suspicions are not
completely unfounded. Some defectors/refugees
clearly have axes to grind. For example, the case
of Hwang Jang Yop is a difficult one, his
testimony while fascinating should be treated with
the greatest caution. He is though not comparable
with a typical refugee, typically a poor farmer's
wife from a remote village near the Chinese
border.
It seems to be true that refugee
testimony cannot teach us much about high level
politics in Pyongyang - even though some of the
rumors the refugees repeat be proven correct
eventually. Stories of factional strife and power
struggle at the apex of power indeed sell papers,
but it is nigh on impossible to confirm or at
corroborate such stories at the present stage.
One also has to be careful when listening
to how refugees generalize about the political
mood in the North. They indeed might be inclined
to exaggerate the opposition-mindedness of the
average North Korean. They may also tend to be
unusually harsh in their judgement of the Kim
family regime. As the sceptics point after all,
they are indeed part of a very small minority who
did decide to abandon the loving bosom of the
Leader and Marshall.
But let's pause for a
moment to discuss what they might be able to tell
us. North Korean refugees are not just political
machines, they are normal people, who have
experienced great poverty and hardship, but
nonetheless, they eat, they sleep, they have
children, they read, they make things, they smoke.
They provide us with window into the daily lives
of North Koreans, they can tell much more than
official literature or films about the life of
rural and small-town North Korea.
The
oft-repeated accusations of political bias are
irrelevant if you ask North Korean refugees about
how to run a business north of the de-militarized
zone, how to get your daily rice, how much a pair
of shoes would set you back, or whether the people
around you would judge you for having sex before
marriage. The accusations look positively silly if
one keeps in mind that usually it is a number of
defectors who are confronted with the same
questions. Even the most paranoid sceptics are
unlikely to suggest that the defectors have
secretly conspired to provide false information on
which movies were shown in a local cinema and how
many guests would normally attend a middle class
wedding (well, perhaps some would still argue that
there are officials in the South Korean
intelligence services with nothing better to do
than to debrief North Korean refugees on how to
answer questions on many people attended their
nephew's second wedding).
These indeed are
far less glamorous topics than we usually
associate with North Korea. The nuclear program,
the missile tests, the romantic dalliances of the
god-kings in Pyongyang indeed are more
titillating, and anyone who purports to be a
source on such things should of course be treated
with great skepticism. But instead we can learn
how many cigarettes a North Korean teenager can
make in an underground bootleg tobacco factory, or
how one goes about stealing a little land in a
forest on a mountain to farm some corn to live.
These stories would not sell papers, perhaps, but
they provide a glimpse into how normal people can
live productive lives in a very inhospitable
environment.
When someone tells you that
you can't trust a North Korean refugee, just
remember that most North Korean refugees care more
about food, clothes and shelter than about
stockpiles of weapons-grade plutonium or the
alleged struggle between hawks and doves in
Pyongyang.
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.
Peter Ward
is a student of Korean History at Korea
University. He has been a keen observer of North
Korea for many years and his articles have been
published at Daily NK, Ceasefire Magazine and on
The Three Wise Monkeys blog.
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