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Quotes of the Day:
“Security underpins prosperity, prosperity creates power and pays for security, and a well-functioning society reduces economic and security risks.”
- Gordon de Brouwer
“We must believe in the power and strength of our words. Our words can change the world.”
- Malala Yousafzai
“Fear is one of the main sources of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.’ -
- Bertrand Russell
1. S. Korea, U.S., Japan hold missile defense drills in East Sea after N. Korea's ICBM launch
2. S. Korea to supply Ukraine with more mine detectors, demining equipment
3. Torrential rains leave 37 dead, 9 missing (South Korea)
4. Yoon sends strong message of solidarity with NATO, Ukraine
5. Yoon wraps up European trip securing stronger bonds with NATO, Kyiv
6. Landslides and floods kill at least 33 as South Korea battered by torrential rains
7. Time to reset S. Korea-China ties ahead of summit: experts
8. Sino-US rivalry intensifies in Global South, Korea
9. Children trapped in limbo between North and South Korea
10. Escaping North Korea: Harrowing tales of survival, strength
11.Inside the school teaching North Korean defectors how to live in the outside world
12. The question I'd most like to ask Kim Yo-Jong, North Korea's doyenne of despotism
13. On Balance: Offensive And Defensive Missile Capabilities On The Korean Peninsula – Analysis
14. A North Korean defector captivated U.S. media. Some question her story.
1. S. Korea, U.S., Japan hold missile defense drills in East Sea after N. Korea's ICBM launch
The ability for the alliance(s) to conduct these exercises is due the high levels of readiness that have been attained over the past year+.
This is the new normal. These exercises are not a tit for tat response to the ICBM launch. They are able to be conducted because the assets are in theater and because the alliance(s) are maintaining a high level of readiness. We are prepared to defend against north Korean missile attacks.
S. Korea, U.S., Japan hold missile defense drills in East Sea after N. Korea's ICBM launch | Yonhap News Agency
en.yna.co.kr · by Chae Yun-hwan · July 16, 2023
By Chae Yun-hwan
SEOUL, July 16 (Yonhap) -- South Korea, the United States and Japan staged a trilateral missile defense exercise in the international waters of the East Sea on Sunday, Seoul's Navy said, after North Korea's launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) last week.
The drills took place as the three countries have been reinforcing security coordination amid Pyongyang's continued saber-rattling this year, highlighted by the firing of a Hwasong-18 solid-fuel ICBM last Wednesday.
The exercise featured three Aegis-equipped destroyers -- the South's ROKS Yulgok Yi I, the U.S.' USS John Finn and the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force's JS Maya, according to the armed service.
Under a scenario of a ballistic missile launch by North Korea, the exercise focused on practicing procedures to detect and track a computer-simulated ballistic missile target, and share related information, it said.
"This exercise served as an opportunity to enhance our military's response capabilities against ballistic missiles and improve security cooperation among South Korea, the United States and Japan," a Navy official was quoted as saying.
"Based on our military's powerful response system and trilateral coordination, (we) will effectively respond to North Korea's nuclear and missile threats," the official added.
The three countries last held such a three-way missile defense exercise in April. Sunday's exercise marked the fourth one under the Yoon Suk Yeol administration, which has made efforts to bolster trilateral cooperation against Pyongyang's military threats.
In a show of force against the North's ICBM launch, South Korea and the United States also staged combined air drills Thursday, involving a U.S. B-52H strategic bomber.
This file photo, provided by Seoul's Navy on April 17, 2023, shows South Korean, U.S. and Japanese warships taking part in a missile defense exercise in the international waters of the East Sea. (PHOTO NOT FOR SALE) (Yonhap)
yunhwanchae@yna.co.kr
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en.yna.co.kr · by Chae Yun-hwan · July 16, 2023
2. S. Korea to supply Ukraine with more mine detectors, demining equipment
Per other major media reporting on Ukraine, mines are one of the major contributing factors to Russia's defense against the Ukrainian offensive.
S. Korea to supply Ukraine with more mine detectors, demining equipment | Yonhap News Agency
en.yna.co.kr · by Lee Haye-ah · July 16, 2023
By Lee Haye-ah
WARSAW, July 16 (Yonhap) -- South Korea will supply Ukraine with more mine detectors and demining equipment as part of its assistance package for the war-torn nation, a presidential official said Sunday.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv on Saturday and agreed to provide the country with a package of security, humanitarian and reconstruction assistance under the name "Ukraine Peace and Solidarity Initiative."
The initiative is made up of nine pillars -- three for each type of assistance -- including the supply of additional safety equipment, according to Principal Deputy National Security Adviser Kim Tae-hyo.
"We plan to expand assistance in mine detectors and demining equipment, as Ukraine's demand for them is desperately large," he told reporters. "We will expand military supply support, and in the mid- to long term plan and design cooperation in defense projects between South Korea and Ukraine."
Ukraine also asked for South Korean business investment in the construction of rechargeable battery and electric vehicle plants, he said.
Yoon's surprise visit to Ukraine came at the end of a two-nation tour that took him to Lithuania and Poland last week.
The trip from Poland on Friday night took 14 hours via air, land and train, and 13 hours back, while Yoon stayed in Ukraine for only 11 hours, Kim said.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol (L) holds talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the presidential palace in Kyiv on July 15, 2023, in this photo provided by South Korea's presidential office. (PHOTO NOT FOR SALE) (Yonhap)
hague@yna.co.kr
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en.yna.co.kr · by Lee Haye-ah · July 16, 2023
3. Torrential rains leave 37 dead, 9 missing (South Korea)
Imagine what may be happening in the north. It might be some time before we get reports. (if any).
(3rd LD) Torrential rains leave 37 dead, 9 missing | Yonhap News Agency
en.yna.co.kr · by Oh Seok-min · July 16, 2023
(ATTN: UPDATES throughout with latest info)
SEOUL, July 16 (Yonhap) -- Flooding and landslides caused by heavy rains have killed 37 people nationwide and left nine people missing, while thousands have evacuated their homes due to rain damage, authorities said Sunday.
The Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasure Headquarters said 37 people had reportedly been killed in the aftermath of the heavy rains that have pounded the country since last week, while nine others remained missing as of 6 a.m.
The death toll includes nine bodies authorities recovered from a bus trapped in a flooded underground tunnel in the central town of Osong.
The 685-meter-long underground roadway was flooded in Osong, North Chungcheong Province, the previous day when a nearby river overflowed after an embankment was brought down by rising water levels due to heavy rain.
Casualties from the underpass flooding are expected to rise further as a rescue operation continues for 15 vehicles and several people believed to be trapped inside the tunnel.
A bus emerges from a flooded underground tunnel on July 16, 2023, in a search and rescue operation in the central town of Osong. (Yonhap)
A rescue operation is under way in the county of Yecheon, North Gyeongsang Province, on July 15, 2023, after a landslide buried five houses.
Most fatalities were reported in the southeastern province of North Gyeongsang, where 19 people died largely due to landslides and housing collapses, and eight others remained missing.
One more person remained missing in the southern port city of Busan, the office said. Some 35 people have also been injured nationwide as a result of the recent downpours.
Nearly 20,000 hectares of farmland had been inundated as of 6 p.m. Sunday, the size of around 28,000 football fields combined, and more than 561,000 animals, including chickens and ducks, were killed, according to the agriculture ministry.
Nearly 9,000 people from 14 cities and provinces had evacuated their homes, including 2,581 in North Chungcheong Province, and of them, 5,541 have not returned home yet due to safety concerns, authorities said.
A total of 419 public and private property damage cases have been reported, including 80 cases of destroyed or swept-away public roads, 59 cases of collapsed river embankments and 82 cases of flooded homes.
Heavy rains had also left 220 roads closed as of 6 p.m.
All train operations have been suspended, although KTX bullet trains on some sections resumed operations. The Korea Railroad Corp. said the suspension will continue through Monday to check railways and take necessary steps.
Rice paddies in the southern city of Iksan, North Jeolla Province, remain submerged on July 16, 2023 after heavy rain. (Yonhap)
Downpours have also left 20 national parks across the country closed.
As of 6 p.m., heavy rain warnings had been in place in southern inland areas of Gangwon Province, the Chungcheong provinces, southern regions and Jeju Island. Coastal regions of South Jeolla and South Gyeongsang provinces have been forecast to experience heavy rains of up to 50 millimeters per hour.
The weather agency said the central Chungcheong provinces and the southern Jeolla and Gyeongsang provinces may experience up to 300 mm of additional rain through Tuesday.
Landslide warnings across the nation, except on Jeju Island, have also been escalated to the highest level of "grave."
Evacuees take shelter at a university in Gongju, South Chungcheong Province, on July 15, 2023. (Yonhap)
Officials inspect the site of a collapsed embankment near a stream in the aftermath of heavy rains in the central county of Cheongyang on July 15, 2023. (Yonhap)
Prime Minister Han Duck-soo vowed prompt government efforts to rescue those who remain missing.
"The government will speedily step up operations to search and rescue those missing," Han said at a government response meeting, instructing officials to make the utmost efforts to ensure the safety of the people.
During the meeting, the defense ministry reported that 472 military personnel and 69 pieces of government equipment have been deployed to help with the disaster response operations.
President Yoon Suk Yeol held a videoconference with Han and relevant ministers, as he was to return home from a weeklong trip to Europe, and called for swift measures to support victims, his office said.
Since around June 25, when the monsoon season began in South Korea, the central region has received 489.1 millimeters of rain on average, some 30 percent more than that of previous years, according to the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA).
The figure for the southern region was also 38.8 percent higher, coming to 473.4 mm, the KMA added.
Prime Minister Han Duck-soo (R) presides over a government response meeting in Seoul on July 16, 2023, after heavy rains left at least 32 people dead. (Yonhap)
pbr@yna.co.kr
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en.yna.co.kr · by Oh Seok-min · July 16, 2023
4. Yoon sends strong message of solidarity with NATO, Ukraine
(News Focus) Yoon sends strong message of solidarity with NATO, Ukraine | Yonhap News Agency
en.yna.co.kr · by Lee Haye-ah · July 16, 2023
By Lee Haye-ah
WARSAW, July 16 (Yonhap) -- South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol wrapped up a weeklong visit to Europe on Sunday after sending a strong message of solidarity with like-minded nations championing the values of freedom and democracy and underscoring his commitment with a surprise visit to Ukraine.
What began as a two-nation, five-day swing through Lithuania and Poland ended as a three-nation, seven-day trip to the two countries and Ukraine in the strongest show yet of South Korea's support for Kyiv in its war against Russian aggression.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol (L) shakes hands with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy after holding a joint press conference at the Mariinskyi Palace, the official residence of the president of Ukraine, in Kyiv on July 15, 2023, in this photo provided by South Korea's presidential office. (PHOTO NOT FOR SALE) (Yonhap)
During a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Yoon promised to provide the country with a package of security, humanitarian and reconstruction assistance, dubbed the "Ukraine Peace and Solidarity Initiative," which would include additional military supplies larger in scope than last year's and US$150 million worth of humanitarian aid, or $50 million more than last year.
Zelenskyy thanked South Korea for its continued security and humanitarian assistance, saying he hoped for South Korea's participation in the construction of a recovery center in Ukraine.
The war in Ukraine was a recurring theme during Yoon's visits to Lithuania and Poland as well.
In Vilnius, where he attended a summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Yoon held bilateral meetings with 13 leaders and in each agreed to work together to quickly end the war and restore peace in Ukraine.
Yoon also sought to deepen security cooperation with NATO by announcing Seoul's decision to increase military information sharing with the alliance through the Battlefield Information Collection and Exploitation System, which helps members share military secrets and determine the next steps based on the information.
In addition, South Korea and NATO adopted the Individually Tailored Partnership Program to institutionalize bilateral cooperation in 11 areas, ranging from antiterrorism and nonproliferation to emerging technologies and cyberdefense.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol (C) and his wife, Kim Keon Hee (2nd from R), take a stroll in the Old Town of Vilnius, one of the best preserved in Northern Europe, which was inscribed onto the World Heritage List in 1994, in the Lithuanian capital on July 10, 2023. Yoon arrived in the European country to attend a summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. (Pool photo) (Yonhap)
A highlight of the Lithuania visit was a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida that was closely watched in the wake of the International Atomic Energy Agency's approval of Japan's plan to release treated radioactive water from the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant into the ocean.
Yoon asked Kishida to include South Korean experts in monitoring the discharge.
After wrapping up a three-day visit to Vilnius, Yoon traveled to Warsaw for a three-day official visit that the presidential office said was equivalent in protocol to a state visit, given state visits do not exist in the Polish government system.
Poland is the first European nation Yoon has traveled to on a bilateral visit.
Ukraine featured prominently in Yoon's summit with Polish President Andrzej Duda, with Yoon telling a joint press conference afterward the two leaders agreed their countries can become "optimal partners" for Ukraine's reconstruction.
The reconstruction effort is expected to be a massive project worth at least $1 trillion, and Poland's proximity to Ukraine has made it a natural hub for businesses seeking their share.
Yoon and Duda also discussed enhancing bilateral cooperation in nuclear energy, arms and infrastructure as part of efforts to deepen the two countries' strategic partnership established in 2013.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol (L) and Polish President Andrzej Duda shake hands as they hold a joint press conference following their summit talks at the presidential palace in Warsaw on July 13, 2023. (Yonhap)
hague@yna.co.kr
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en.yna.co.kr · by Lee Haye-ah · July 16, 2023
5. Yoon wraps up European trip securing stronger bonds with NATO, Kyiv
President Yoon cannot catch a break. A good overseas visit that enhances the security and reputation of the ROK is overshadowed by a national disaster at home.
Excerpts:
Despite presidential office efforts, public sentiment is focused more on the heavy rain and subsequent damages than Yoon's NATO diplomacy. The opposition is calling into question Yoon's decision to extend his trip and visit Ukraine despite the domestic disaster.
"In a situation of disaster where dams overflow, mountains collapse, roads are severed and people are buried or losing their lives due to heavy rain across the country, the president, who should have canceled his schedule and returned immediately, extended his official visit," main opposition Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) Rep. Kang Min-jung wrote on Facebook.
A senior official at the presidential office said Yoon canceled some of the events scheduled in Ukraine due to the heavy rain and issued orders on the government's emergency response.
"If Yoon did not visit Ukraine at the time, there would be no chance of him visiting Ukraine until the end of the war," the official said. "Even if Yoon rushes to back to Seoul, there is no room for him to change the situation with the weather, so he tried his best in Ukraine."
Yoon wraps up European trip securing stronger bonds with NATO, Kyiv
The Korea Times · by 2023-07-15 16:13 | Foreign Affairs · July 16, 2023
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol enters the 2023 NATO Summit at the Lithuanian Exhibition and Convention Center in Vilnius, July 12 (local time). Joint Press Corps
Domestic downpour overshadows president's trip to Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine
By Nam Hyun-woo
WARSAW, Poland ― President Yoon Suk Yeol wrapped up his trip to three central European nations, Sunday (local time), during which he signaled Seoul's stronger bonds with NATO and Ukraine.
While Yoon was attending the 2023 NATO Summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, North Korea launched an intercontinental ballistic missile on Tuesday in yet another act of defiance.
Following the summit and attending engagements in Poland, Yoon paid a surprise visit to Ukraine to discuss cooperation in reconstructing the war-torn nation.
Yoon attended the summit session between NATO members and their Indo-Pacific partner countries, Tuesday, stressing that the security of the Indo-Pacific and Atlantic regions is inseparable, and claiming that North Korea's nuclear and missile ambitions are also a threat for European nations.
The campaign gained momentum in the wake of the North's latest missile launch with Yoon noting that the missile could strike even Vilnius, calling on participating countries to raise their voice against the provocation. NATO also adopted its own communique expressing a strong condemnation of the North for the launch.
On the sidelines of the NATO Summit, Korea signed renewed partnership programs with NATO and announced its plan to join NATO's intelligence-sharing framework, known as Battlefield Information Collection Exploitation System (BICES).
Yoon had bilateral meetings with leaders from 13 countries, including Japan. During the summit with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, Yoon requested Japan to let South Korean experts participate in the process of Tokyo's planned release of treated wastewater from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.
Yoon then made an official visit to Poland, Wednesday, where he focused on expanding South Korea's partnerships with Poland in the fields of defense, nuclear energy and cooperation for Ukraine's post-war reconstruction projects.
During his summit with Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda, Thursday, the two countries signed an MOU on their partnership in supporting Ukraine's reconstruction projects. The leaders both attended business forums to encourage exchanges between companies of the two countries.
The highlight of the trip, however, came after Yoon finished his preannounced six-day schedule, as he redirected his itinerary to Ukraine.
Yoon was invited to visit Ukraine during Ukrainian first lady Olena Zelenska's visit to Seoul in May, and the presidential office had been reviewing this while preparing for the NATO summit. Yoon made the decision during his trip and reportedly asked for Poland's help for his visit to Ukraine during the summit with Polish President Duda, who offered a safe route via train to Ukraine.
Yoon vows comprehensive support for Ukraine at summit with Zelenskyy
Only a limited number of presidential staff knew about this as it was kept secret even to most staffers until just hours before his departure to Ukraine.
During his summit with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Yoon expressed Korea's empathic support of Kyiv and promised expanded military, humanitarian and educational aid to the country. Zelenskyy responded by asking for South Korea's participation in the country's restoration projects.
The summit became a diplomatic gesture to showcase to the world that South Korea is part of the international community supporting Ukraine and condemning Russia, which Yoon has reiterated in his diplomatic addresses in recent months. Also, it was seen as a proactive move to show Seoul's strong interest in Kyiv's post-war reconstruction projects, which are anticipated to incur huge capital injections.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, left, shakes hands with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy after their summit at Mariinskyi Palace in Kyiv, Saturday (local time). Courtesy of Korea's presidential office
Uncomfortable way back home
Despite the achievements, however, Yoon left Europe with domestic issues ahead of him, due to the torrential rain that has killed at least 37 people so far and caused thousands to evacuate their homes across South Korea.
The Korea Railroad Corp. suspended all regular trains and some KTX high-speed trains that run through the country's central inland region due to heavy rains before resuming KTX train services in some sectors later Saturday.
In response, Yoon held a videoconference with Prime Minister Han Duck-soo directly after his summit with Zelenskyy in Kyiv and asked to "mobilize all assets of the military, police and the government to minimize damage."
President Yoon Suk Yeol speaks to his aides during a meeting on Korea's heavy downpour on a train from Ukraine to Poland, Saturday (local time). Courtesy of presidential office The presidential office also released photos of Yoon holding an emergency meeting with his aides while in transit back to Poland, with the intention of sending a message to the public that the president is paying attention to the domestic situation.
Despite presidential office efforts, public sentiment is focused more on the heavy rain and subsequent damages than Yoon's NATO diplomacy. The opposition is calling into question Yoon's decision to extend his trip and visit Ukraine despite the domestic disaster.
"In a situation of disaster where dams overflow, mountains collapse, roads are severed and people are buried or losing their lives due to heavy rain across the country, the president, who should have canceled his schedule and returned immediately, extended his official visit," main opposition Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) Rep. Kang Min-jung wrote on Facebook.
A senior official at the presidential office said Yoon canceled some of the events scheduled in Ukraine due to the heavy rain and issued orders on the government's emergency response.
"If Yoon did not visit Ukraine at the time, there would be no chance of him visiting Ukraine until the end of the war," the official said. "Even if Yoon rushes to back to Seoul, there is no room for him to change the situation with the weather, so he tried his best in Ukraine."
Controversy over a Lithuanian media report that Korea's first lady Kim Geon Hee visited a number of luxury boutiques in Vilnius and purchased multiple goods during Yoon's attendance at the NATO Summit has also become a headache for the presidential office.
The presidential office said Kim stopped by a boutique upon the recommendation of one of the boutique's employees while she was returning from an event, but she did not buy anything.
The Korea Times · by 2023-07-15 16:13 | Foreign Affairs · July 16, 2023
6. Landslides and floods kill at least 33 as South Korea battered by torrential rains
Landslides and floods kill at least 33 as South Korea battered by torrential rains
Days of heavy rains have caused landslides, building collapses and train derailments in cities across the country, with thousands left without power.
NBC News · by The Associated Press
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korean rescue workers pulled seven bodies from a flooded tunnel where around 15 vehicles were trapped in muddy water, as days of heavy rain triggered flash floods and landslides and destroyed homes, leaving at least 33 people dead and forcing thousands to evacuate, officials said Sunday.
Nearly 400 rescue workers, including divers, were searching the tunnel in the central city of Cheongju, where the vehicles, including a bus, were swamped by a flash flood Saturday evening, Seo Jeong-il, chief of the city’s fire department, said in a briefing.
Photos and video from the scene showed rescue workers establishing a perimeter and pumping brown water out of the tunnel as divers used rubber boats to move in and out of the area.
South Korean emergency workers search for survivors after a landslide hit a small village in Yecheon on Saturday.AFP - Getty Images
Yang Chan-mo, an official from the North Chungcheong provincial fire department, said it could take several hours to pump out all the water from the tunnel, which was still filled with 13 to 16.4 feet of water dense with mud and other debris. Workers were proceeding slowly with the work to prevent any victims or survivors from being swept out, Yang said.
Nine survivors were rescued from the tunnel and 11 others were believed to be missing based on reports by families or others, but the exact number of passengers trapped in vehicles wasn’t immediately clear, Seo said.
South Korea has been pounded by heavy rains since July 9. The rainfall had forced more than 6,100 people to evacuate and left 27,260 households without electricity in the past several days while flooding or destroying dozens of homes, the Ministry of the Interior and Safety said. At least 22 people were being treated for injuries.
President Yoon Suk Yeol, who is on a trip to Europe, discussed the rain-related casualties and damages during an emergency meeting while traveling to Poland on a train after visiting Ukraine on Saturday, according to his office. Yoon called for officials to mobilize all available resources to respond to the disaster.
NBC News · by The Associated Press
7. Time to reset S. Korea-China ties ahead of summit: experts
Time to reset S. Korea-China ties ahead of summit: experts
koreaherald.com · by Choi Si-young · July 16, 2023
South Korea and China should use this year’s three-way summit with Japan as momentum to reshape their somewhat rocky ties, experts said Sunday following the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Regional Forum, Asia’s biggest security gathering attended by foreign ministers in the region.
Talks held on the sidelines of the two-day forum that ended Friday between South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin and Wang Yi, China’s top diplomat, came at a time when Seoul and Beijing were at odds over Korea’s efforts to hew closer to the US amid its intensifying rivalry with China. Wang, foreign policy chief for the Chinese Communist Party, outranks Foreign Minister Qin Gang, who cited health reasons for his absence.
Stressing deepening ties, the dialogue left out details over how to bring about such a lasting thaw, though the high-level engagement itself eased resurfacing tension, experts said.
“And we start building on that in the run-up to the potential three-way summit,” said Kang Jun-young, a professor of Chinese studies at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies and the director of Hankuk University’s Center for International Area Studies.
Kang was referring to talks involving South Korea, China and Japan, a regular meeting suspended over the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019. As this year’s host, Seoul is pushing for a resumption of the talks before the end of the year. The dialogue usually centers on economic ties.
“China has all the more reason to take part in the event now that Korea is not only closer to the US but also Japan. It’s in Beijing’s interest to put the brakes on that,” Kang said, noting Seoul in the meantime could work to reel in Beijing to discuss economic ties, a less sensitive topic for the three countries to engage in for cooperation.
Hwang Jae-ho, a professor of international studies at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, said the Yoon administration should step up efforts to reopen the talks, though he described the meeting as “still uncertain” because Seoul-Beijing ties are affected by how China’s relations with the US pan out.
Last week, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen met with senior officials in Beijing to ease tensions, the latest meeting between the two superpowers where Washington “aired significant disagreement” according to Yellen. China’s Finance Ministry called on the US to take “practical action” in response to its concerns about sanctions on Chinese firms.
“Korea will have to look at how Washington-Beijing ties evolve. Seoul has limited resources to reshape its relations with Beijing on its own,” Hwang said.
Meanwhile, Chung Jae-hung, director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the Sejong Institute, warned of “no resumption at all,” referring to the three-way dialogue.
“China doesn’t have ‘all the more reason’ to take part in a meeting where Seoul and Tokyo, the two US allies, are closer than ever,” Chung said. “Beijing doesn’t want a part in an event that could potentially endorse the US-led reshaping of the region.”
Further, China is still upset over how Korea has maintained its position over Taiwan and the US-led chip alliance, Chung added, saying that unless Seoul reverses opposing changing the status quo on the self-ruled democratic island China claims as its own and compromises on the chip alliance, China will not easily give into what Korea hopes to achieve.
Hosted by Indonesia this year, the annual regional forum is a rare chance for not only the 10-member ASEAN nations, but also the 27-member European Union as well as the US, Russia and India to discuss security and economic policy.
By Choi Si-young (siyoungchoi@heraldcorp.com)
koreaherald.com · by Choi Si-young · July 16, 2023
8. Sino-US rivalry intensifies in Global South, Korea
Sino-US rivalry intensifies in Global South, Korea
The Korea Times · July 16, 2023
By Kim Sang-woo
The Chinese government's criticism of South Korea reached its peak on June 8 when Chinese Ambassador Xing Haiming said that "those who bet on China's loss will surely regret their decision in the future." This statement that was made during a meeting with Lee Jae-myung, the leader of the Democratic Party of Korea, sparked a diplomatic firestorm and public outrage.
President Yoon Suk Yeol directly criticized Ambassador Xing for pursuing political incitement rather than trying to build bridges between the two countries. The ruling People Power Party called on the government to declare the Chinese ambassador persona non grata.
On June 18, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made a visit to Beijing in an effort to establish "guardrails" on the intensifying U.S.-China rivalry. His meetings, however, did not result in a breakthrough in relations, and the two sides do not yet appear to have established a common understanding of how to manage the competition.
Daniel Kritenbrink, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs, visited Seoul on June 21 to explain Blinken's two-day meetings in Beijing. He told Deputy Foreign Minister Choi Young-sam that the U.S. sought to maintain high-level communication channels with China to prevent any miscalculation from leading to an unwanted conflict.
President Xi Jinping, China's most powerful leader in decades, has pushed to expand Beijing's role on the world stage with an increasingly assertive foreign policy that has fueled tensions with many of its neighbors and the West.
In recent years, the Biden administration has stepped up efforts to unite allies and like-minded partners to counter China's rising influence in the Indo-Pacific. The trilateral ties between South Korea, the U.S. and Japan are further strengthened by security concerns about North Korean missile threats. They have also issued joint statements against tensions in the Taiwan Strait.
Beijing could try to drive a wedge in South Korea-U.S. relations by punishing Seoul for moving closer to Washington. China's economic retaliation against the 2017 decision to allow the U.S. to deploy a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery in South Korea is still clearly remembered. South Koreans are also disappointed at the U.S. making no effort to defend South Korea against China's coercion.
Moreover, to compete effectively with China, Washington must work with its allies and partners to take the concerns of Global South countries seriously, respond sincerely to their development needs and reinvigorate the multilateral system as a source of legitimacy for global leadership.
The U.S. and its allies and partners emphasize preserving the rules-based international order as if the system is working well. But the inconvenient truth is that the current international order is stagnant, with world bodies like the United Nations and the World Trade Organization incapable of reforming itself to meet the needs and challenges of the 21st century.
Now, China proclaims itself as the champion of the Global South. Speaking at last month's Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu made a call for "fairness and justice" in world governance.
Neighboring countries that have been bullied or coerced by China, scoff at its hypocrisy. Yet from Beijing's perspective, not only are its grievances legitimate, given its concerns over U.S. efforts to thwart China's rise, but such grievances may resonate in the Global South.
While the West, in terms of public opinion and policy toward China, has become negative and even hostile, Beijing is confident about finding many like-minded partners in the Global South to form coalitions to reshape the international system in accordance with its own values and interests. China has invested enormously in South-South cooperation not only in trade, investment and infrastructure financing but also in development aid, knowledge exchange and multilateral institution building.
Just as economic and technological decoupling and estrangement between China and the West are gaining ground, China is leveraging its economic power to initiate its own coupling with the Global South in economic, geopolitical, institutional and normative terms.
To many in the developing world, globalization has only served to perpetuate inequalities between the Global North and the Global South. China's South-South cooperation exploits these historical and contemporary grievances toward a "rest versus West" binary, constructing a simplistic narrative between the aggrieved majority and the privileged few led by the U.S. and Western countries. This creates the image that the Chinese approach to global governance is inclusive and legitimate while the Western approach is exclusive and non-representative.
Although China now attempts to set itself apart from the West and presents its success as the result of its own efforts, the truth is that China is probably the largest beneficiary of globalization, not its victim. By various measures of power and influence, including technology, finance and position in global governance, China is more a part of the Global North rather than the Global South.
Beijing's economic engagement with the developing world follows the tradition of advanced capitalist economies before it, as seen in its acquiring of natural resources, as well as, mercantile and exploitative practices that create a subservient economic relationship between China and Global South countries.
In regard to a number of potential reforms of global governance to make the world more "just and fair," such as the expansion of the permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council, China has been more of an obstacle than an enabler.
Perhaps, South Korea can contribute to rallying the Global South countries in joining the "rules-based" international order. South Korea, once a member of the Global South, can share its own experiences, and as the "rags to riches" and "autocracy to democracy" success story, can provide the necessary support to Global South countries and complement South Korea's "global pivotal state" strategy.
Kim Sang-woo (swkim54@hotmail.com), a former lawmaker, is chairman of the East Asia Cultural Project and a member of the board of directors at the Kim Dae-jung Peace Foundation.
The Korea Times · July 16, 2023
9. Children trapped in limbo between North and South Korea
Complicated issues the ROK government must resolve.
Children trapped in limbo between North and South Korea
The Korea Times · July 16, 2023
North Koreans hold cards to make an image depicting North Korean children during a mass game performance of "The Land of the People" at the May Day Stadium in Pyongyang, North Korea, in this June 25, 2019 photo. Human rights activists in South Korea have called on policymakers to better protect North Korean defectors' children who were born in third countries before coming here. AP-Yonhap
Human rights activists call for better protection of those born in third countries
By Jung Min-ho
North Korean women escaping oppression in their country cross the border to China in search of freedom and a better life. What awaits them there, in many cases, is the opposite ― even less freedom and a life of constant fear of deportation.
Without a legal identity, such women are not allowed to work, which makes them vulnerable to human trafficking, sexual violence and other crimes. As a means of protecting themselves, many end up marrying a Chinese citizen, while others are coerced into such relationships by marriage brokers.
Lee Su-min (not her real name), 41, was one of those women. Before arriving in South Korea in 2019, she had spent six years in China.
"If you want to survive, you must marry a Chinese man," her broker told her. So she did, and lived there until the window of opportunity finally opened for her to leave for her ultimate destination ― South Korea ― with her daughter, Su-young, now five years old.
But unlike her peers who were born in North Korea before escaping to the South, Su-young is not eligible for any of the benefits for North Koreans, including special college admissions and vocational training, because she, legally speaking, is South Korean.
"My child is one of the lucky ones," Lee told The Korea Times on Friday. "Third-country-born children, who arrived here after spending their early years in China or other countries, have more difficulty adjusting because of the language issue."
According to government data, the number of third-country-born children of North Korean defectors enrolled in South Korean schools outnumbered young North Korean defectors for the first time in 2015. Today, they represent nearly 70 percent of the total.
Such children face unique challenges in South Korea, because they exist in a grey area as government policies fail to support their social inclusion and empowerment, according to Kim Duck-soo, deputy director of Citizens' Alliance for North Korean Human Rights, a rights advocacy group in Seoul.
One of their biggest issues is getting a university degree, a critical factor for networking and success in South Korea. Unlike legally recognized North Korean escapees, who can enter reputable schools without having to ace the college entrance exam, such children have to compete with other students who grew up here without receiving special treatment.
Another major issue is the mandatory military service. The Military Service Act states that "a person who has immigrated from north of the Military Demarcation Line" is not obliged to serve in the military. But the law does not apply to their children born in third countries.
A North Korean defector attends a nail art class at Hanawon, a government-run settlement support center for North Koreans, in Anseong, Gyeonggi Province, July 10. AP-Yonhap
"In a hyper-competitive society, many of them struggle badly," Kim said. "A combination of language, identity, education and financial issues leave them vulnerable to family problems and to poverty. With that being said, it's not just a problem for the children ― but for whole families, about 70 percent of all North Korean defectors' households with children in South Korea."
Over the years, several bills have been proposed to reform the system to better protect the marginalized group, only to be discarded or neglected at the National Assembly. One of the main reasons came out of concern that it might lead to a diplomatic issue with China, where there are as many as 200,000 such children ― with or without citizenship. Lawmakers worry it may well become a tricky issue if too many decide to come here seeking South Korean citizenship.
But Kim believes such concerns are overblown and wrong.
"Before being a diplomatic issue, it is a human rights issue. The bottom line is that it should not be left unattended just like this," he said. "There should be a way to resolve this, for the inclusion and empowerment of those who came here with their children to live with dignity and security."
The Korea Times · July 16, 2023
10. Escaping North Korea: Harrowing tales of survival, strength
Yes, I will keep sending out these reports because we must never forget what is happening to the people in the north.
However, I will also include this comment from a very wise escapee from north Korea: Please do not let these reports define escapees. There is much more to them and their stories than these tragic descriptions of their harrowing experiences.
And despite the hardships they face even after they have escaped they are strong people who have much to contribute anywhere they live and we should give them the opportunity to do so.
Escaping North Korea: Harrowing tales of survival, strength
Christine: “North Korea is like Egypt before the Exodus – fleas, hail, pestilence, death. But I believe that God wants His people released. Like Pharoah, Kim Jong Un will let His people go.”
By MAAYAN JAFFE-HOFFMAN Published: JULY 15, 2023 12:59
Jerusalem Post
South Korea – Images of bodies crawling with maggots still haunt Christine at night.
“So often, smoke would cease rising from a neighbor’s chimney. We would open the door and find an entire family dead,” Christine recalls as she describes her teenage years in North Korea in the 1990s.
“People would be lying on the side of the street – dead or almost dead.
“There were so many of them that the ‘people collectors’ would just collect the bodies and dump them into mass graves without any funeral or anything,” she continues. “Sometimes there were too many to collect them. So, they would lie on the street rotting and infested with maggots.”
One of the nearly 35,000 North Korean defectors living in South Korea, Christine, who fears using her real name, is trying to create a new life on the other side of the Han River.
North Korean defectors draw their experience in concentration camps before leaving the country. The common theme is that these individuals were tortured and treated like animals. (Drawing courtesy of Prof. Yong Hui Lee with permission) (credit: Courtesy Prof. Yong Hui Lee)
Petite with big dark eyes and shoulder-length hair, Christine spoke to The Jerusalem Report on a drive to the demilitarized zone that divides North and South Korea, in early July.
The border trip was organized by the Songdo Jusarang Evangelical Church to highlight the plight of the defectors in advance of a conference it is organizing in August to pray for the reunification of the Korean peninsula that will involve a delegation from Israel.
Upon arrival at the hilltop lookout, Christine can see the Han River and miles of barbed wire. She can imagine her family only four kilometers but a life away. Her mother and two siblings are trapped in North Korea and she has not seen them in over 15 years. She cannot communicate with them freely for fear of death.
Christine was born in a northern city in North Korea. Her father worked in a chemical weapons factory. He was transferred to Russia when she was 10, leaving her mother with five children. The family then moved in with Christine’s grandfather, who ran a communications business in the country. But when he was accused of practicing Christianity, the family was forced to relocate to the mountains, where they survived on nothing but tree bark and grass soup.
Determined to help her family, in 1998 Christine made a run to China, where although purchased by a sex trafficker, she could survive and send back funds to her family. However, in 2004, she was tricked by a broker who sold her to the police and had her sent back to North Korea and detained in a prison camp.
“They treated us like animals,” Christine remembers. “The food they gave us was rotten. You could smell the stink.”
She became ill with diarrhea until she passed out from dehydration and was left in her prison cell for dead. When she surprisingly regained consciousness, the guards were angry. They yelled and cursed at her and warned her she should have died.
“I hardened my heart to North Korea that day,” Christine says. “When you live in North Korea, you are taught that Jong Un Kim is our God, and he will take care of us. So even though I [made a run] for China to avoid starvation, I always thought longingly of my country. But that day, when the security guard wished me dead, I shut down my heart to North Korea. I decided I would no longer stay silent until the rest of the world knows about the country’s cruelty.”
Christine did not believe she would leave the prison alive. Lying in a cell the size of an average minivan with 33 people zigzagged across the floor, she waited for her passing.
“There was an old lady in the cell with me, a grandmother. Somehow, she looked so peaceful,” Christine explains. “I asked her for her secret. She told me about God.”
That night, Christine started to pray.
The next morning, she was picked for forced labor. For three days, she slaved at a construction site. One afternoon, the guard asked her about her family, and she told him of her siblings. In the evening, the guard called Christine from her cell. Her brother had paid him bribe money, and she was freed.
“I knew, however, that although I was released from prison, I could not live in North Korea. I bought two bottles of poison and escaped,” she says. “I had decided that if I failed, I would rather die than return to prison.
“I stood on the edge of the Duman River between China and North Korea, and I remembered that old lady’s praying, and I told God that if he got me across the river safely, I would devote the rest of my life to His will,” Christine continues. “And by miracle, I made it across.”
In October 2012, Christine escaped from China to South Korea, where she could begin again – this time as a devout Christian. She recently learned that her brother was picked up for assisting her and taken to a concentration camp, where he was tortured to death. Her father suffered a heart attack from the shock of his son’s death. Another brother is still detained. Christine’s mother and two other siblings are at large – but she cannot communicate with them, fearing for their lives.
“North Korea is like Egypt before the Exodus – fleas, hail, pestilence, death,” Christine says. “But I believe that God wants His people released. Like Pharoah, Kim Jong Un will let His people go.”
Zion Conference
An estimated 90% of the tens of thousands of individuals who escape from North Korea to China and then on to South Korea convert to Christianity, according to Yeonhee Shin, herself a defector and convert.
“It is the Christians who care for us, give us funding, and help us settle,” Shin says.
“But just because they become Christians does not mean they stay Christians. Sometimes, they struggle in South Korea and turn away from faith again.”
However, she says that a majority go on to study religion in seminaries in South Korea; some even become pastors and work at leading churches. South Korea is around 30% Christian – more than 15 million people.
Approximately half its citizens have no religious affiliation, and 20% are Buddhist. South Korea was founded in 1948. Before then (1910-1945) all of Korea was under Japanese occupation. At the end of World War II, Korea was divided, with the North occupied by the Soviet Union and the South by the United States. On August 15, 1948, South Korea declared independence. A month later, on September 9, North Korea declared independence under the rule of prime minister Sung Il Kim. Two years later, Kim declared war against South Korea, intending to take over the peninsula.
The Korean War lasted three years, ending on July 27, 1953, with “inconclusive results.” An amnesty line agreement was signed, and a demilitarized zone was established that has held up ever since.
Kim Il Sung ruled North Korea until he died in 1994. His son, Kim Jong Il, replaced him and later he, in turn, was replaced by today’s hereditary dictator Kim Jong Un.
From August 10 to 19, the Songdo Jusarang Evangelical Church will host the Zion Conference in front of City Hall. Thousands of Christians are expected to attend. The church is a pro-Israel house of worship. (credit: MAAYAN JAFFE-HOFFMAN)
This year marks the 70th anniversary of the end of the war. In Judaism, 70 is considered a “jubilee year” – a year of freedom from enslavement, as it says in the Book of Leviticus. Therefore, several pro-Israel Protestant Korean churches have joined together to host a “Zion Conference,” August 10-19, to provide a gathering place for Christians in honor of the jubilee year, to pray for the reunification of the Korean peninsula. Thousands of people are expected to attend, including more than 100 Israelis who will be flown in from the Jewish State with funding from the Songdo Jusarang Evangelical Church and its pastor Sang Gil Jang.
“Korean Christians strongly believe that reunification can only be possible by the power of the Holy Spirit,” Jang says. “The biggest blessing for reunification will come when the Chosen People come to pray and intercede on our behalf. We need nations’ prayers to bring down this dictatorship at this historical time.
“North and South Koreans are the same blood, the same people, the same language – true families,” Jang continues. “When the North Korean dictatorship falls, everyone thinks we will be one country. While the United Nations divided Korea 70 years ago, nations united will bring North Korea and South Korea back together.”
The ‘hell’ of the 21st century
Israel and South Korea have deep, historic ties. Israel sent medical supplies and humanitarian aid to the South Koreans during the 1950-1953 war. But the connection between the two countries is much more than that, according to Israel’s Ambassador to South Korea, Akiva Tor.
Both countries were founded in 1948, he says. Both countries were established with a dearth of natural resources. Both countries became prosperous. Today, South Korea and Israel are both countries living under the threat of nuclear attack – by North Korea and Iran, respectively.
However, despite having diplomatic relations for six decades, no South Korean president has visited Israel. President Reuven Rivlin visited South Korea in 2019, and president Shimon Peres in 2010 before him. Foreign Minister Eli Cohen visited Seoul in June, marking the first visit of a sitting foreign minister in nine years.
“Relations are not as close as we would like them to be,” Tor admits.
Bilateral trade between the countries rose by 35% in 2021 to around $3.5 billion following the signing of a Free Trade Agreement – Korea’s first FTA in the Middle East and Israel’s first in Asia. But Tor says the potential is as high as $10 billion.
The key to increasing ties, Tor believes, is the Christian community. Many of its members now hold positions in the National Assembly and serve as ministers. The churches are vast, including some with more than 100,000 members, and several of their leading pastors hold close ties with Tor specifically and Israel in general.
In June, representatives from Seoul and Jerusalem signed what they called the Seoul Manifesto at an inaugural Korea and Israel One Network conference.
KION is a faith-based organization founded by Korean Zionist Christians to recruit more than a million Koreans to defend Israel and fight against antisemitism in Korean churches and media. The declaration, signed by KION co-chair’s former Israeli deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, and former Korean prime minister, Kyo-Ahn Hwang, calls upon the countries to increase bilateral relations in politics, business, culture, media, religion, education, and humanitarian aid.
Since 2019, Jang and another seven partner churches have worked closely with the Jewish Agency and supported aliyah to Israel from France, Kazakhstan, India, Ethiopia, and most recently, Ukraine. In total, South Korean churches have funded more than 940 new immigrants to Israel, as well as relocation expenses. Sang Gil says he brings delegations of more than 50 people to the country each year.
At the same time, these Christians are supporting an underground church movement in North Korea, which has doubled in size in the last two decades to as many as 400,000 members.
“Even under the most severe persecution, the Gospel is spreading,” says Prof. Yong Hui Lee, a Korean economist who, for the past 17 years, has been fighting to raise awareness of the human rights crisis in North Korea. His Esther Prayer Movement gathers nightly to pray for the safety of North Koreans.
According to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, North Korea ranks as the third least democratic country in the world. It ranks lowest – and most repressed – on the Economic Freedom of the World Index. On Transparency International’s 2022 Corruption Perceptions Index, North Korea ranked 171 out of 180, with its public sector perceived to be among the most corrupt.
The most recent Global Slavery Index found North Korea has the highest prevalence of modern slavery.
“This is the hell of the 21st century,” Lee says. He rescued flash drives of photos and videos from defectors to try to share their stories with the world.
Lee has been to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and says North Korean concentrations camps are “comparable [to the Holocaust]. The footage from the concentration camps made by the North Korean defectors shows children being tortured by fire.... The concentration camps are so severe. They are the reason that [the] communist dictatorship survives. People are too afraid of such severe punishment.”
Defector Shin shares that North Koreans are treated like livestock. Not only do they not have freedom of speech, but they cannot think for themselves.
“I could not sleep when I wanted to sleep or study when I wanted to study,” Shin says.
“People do not understand the depth of the torture. But God knows, and He brought defectors like me out of the country to tell the story. My mouth and your article will reveal the secrets of what is happening in North Korea.”
Lee called on Jews in Israel to “shout for justice.” He says there is a Chinese embassy in Tel Aviv, and Israelis should be marching outside its front door, calling on the government not to send North Korean defectors back to be persecuted.
There are currently 2,300 North Korean defectors held in Chinese prisons who could be sent back to North Korea at any moment, Lee adds. China couldn’t send these defectors back during the COVID lockdown, however, now that the borders are open, they are expected to be deported at any time – to face death.
“We say the Holocaust should never happen again. Please cry out for the people of North Korea,” Lee says.
‘I have a dream’
Sung Ho Ji was born in April 1982 and raised during the North Korean famine of the mid-1990s. He and his family survived on corn husks and cabbage roots, he tells the Report. At harvest time, he and his siblings would dig up seeds the rats had stashed in their burrows.
“Sometimes, the rats would attack us. We would club them to death, giving us a real feast,” he says.
His grandmother died of starvation.
To survive, Ji would steal coal from the trains and try to exchange it for food in the markets. In March 1996, teenage Ji passed out from starvation and dehydration while jumping from car to car, falling between the gap and onto the tracks. When he woke up, he realized he had been run over by the train and was gushing blood.
“A piece of fragile flesh was holding my leg to the rest of my body,” he recalls. “Three fingers on my left hand had been sheared off.”
The doctors operated on him for four-and-a-half hours without anesthesia as they amputated his leg and hand. His screams echoed through the halls of the hospital. It took 10 months to nurse him back to health when the surgery was over. His father was his caregiver, securing penicillin from the black market to treat his son’s innumerable infections.
Eight years later, his mother and sister escaped to China. He and his brother followed two years later. When his father made a similar attempt, he was caught and beaten to death.
Ji swam across the Duman River into China, nearly drowning. He begged his brother to leave him for fear that his disability would cause them both to be apprehended. Together, however, they survived and walked 10,000 kilometers through China, Cambodia, and Myanmar to reach freedom in South Korea.
Today, Ji is a member of the National Assembly, and his story has become a symbol of how the desire for freedom could be so great as to survive the impossible.
“When I look back on my life, it was a miracle – the whole journey was a miracle,” he says.
He admits that he still has nightmares of his leg being amputated and of when he was captured and tortured in a concentration camp, despite his disability, when he tried to sneak over the Chinese border to get food.
Ji cannot visit China because he says, “I am target No. 1 of North Korea. We joke that I cannot go to China because if I drink the water in a Chinese hotel, I will wake up in North Korea.”
In South Korea, Ji was fitted for a prosthetic hand and leg, and he can now walk again without his crutches. In the assembly, he represents the voice of North Korea’s defectors and serves as an example for them of how one can escape, survive and even thrive.
“When I was in North Korea, I used to think I had the worst luck in the world,” he says. “But since I came to South Korea, I can breathe the freedom and see all the good things God is planning for me. I believe God gave me a bigger purpose in life.”
On Ji’s wall, he has a painting of a kotjebi, a homeless child scrounging for food. The image serves as a reminder of where he came from and his purpose in parliament.
“When defectors come [to South Korea] and have a good life, the North Korean government is further weakened,” Ji says. “That is important, as the ultimate goal is reunification.”
His role model is Martin Luther King, Jr., who said, “I have a dream,” and then accomplished it.
“I have a dream, too,” Ji smiles.
“I wish my brothers and sisters from North Korea could have a human life, and I will not stop until that becomes a reality.” ■
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Jerusalem Post
11. Inside the school teaching North Korean defectors how to live in the outside world
Inside the school teaching North Korean defectors how to live in the outside world | CNN
CNN · by Jessie Yeung,Yoonjung Seo · July 16, 2023
Seoul, South Korea CNN —
Before she left North Korea, the woman known as “C” had caught glimpses of life across the border through smuggled television shows.
People caught with foreign materials like books and movies, which are banned in the hermit nation, can face severe punishment. But C secretly watched the South Korean shows anyway, fascinated by what she called a “different reality” than the one she lived in.
“I learned that South Korea is a rich country where human rights are guaranteed,” said the woman, who is in her 20s.
With North Korea’s borders tightening and life getting harder, she fled in 2019, spending the next few years in neighboring China before heading to South Korea – where she is now receiving training at a government-run facility called Hanawon.
All defectors arriving into South Korea are required to spend three months at Hanawon, essentially a school that teaches them to assimilate, before they are allowed to enter society. Officials say the facility trains defectors in everything from history and culture to vocational skills and everyday tasks such as buying groceries – things that might look very different inside their highly isolated and impoverished home country.
C spoke to journalists Monday during a rare media tour of Hanawon, organized by the Unification Ministry. None of the defectors present provided their real names. And while C has some concerns about life in South Korea – it’s so different from the North; what if people find her strange? – she sounded optimistic and determined.
“I’ve been learning hard … I try to manage my life believing that things will work out if I try hard enough,” she said. “I’m getting to know how to live in South Korea at Hanawon.”
A Hanawon instructor in an IT education center for North Korean defectors on July 10, 2023.
Jeon Heon-Kyun/Pool/AFP/Getty Images
But not everybody leaves the facility feeling empowered or sufficiently prepared, and some activists believe the system needs an overhaul.
Upon arrival in South Korea, defectors must spend up to three months undergoing security checks by the National Intelligence Service (NIS), a process meant to sniff out North Korean spies. After clearance, they head to Hanawon for another mandatory three months – meaning they spend roughly half a year in government facilities before being released.
This approach is “outdated,” ineffective and overly restrictive, said Sokeel Park, South Korea country director for international nonprofit Liberty in North Korea (LINK), which helps North Koreans resettle in the South.
“It’s ironic that North Korean refugees risk their lives to escape extreme government control but have to spend their first few months in South Korea living under overbearing government control that doesn’t serve their interests or respect their agency,” he told CNN.
A security guard stands outside Hanawon in Anseong, South Korea, on May 28, 2009.
Seokyong Lee/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Inside Hanawon
The main Hanawon facility lies about 80 kilometers (50 miles) south of the capital Seoul.
At the facility’s vocational education and training center, defectors can choose between 22 types of job training that’s mostly blue-collar work.
Hanawon also attempts to familiarize defectors with parts of South Korean life. For example, they are encouraged listen to popular ’90s music and current hits to better connect with peers and understand cultural references.
In another instance, an IT instructor teaches students to use the copy-paste function and practice typing the lyrics to South Korea’s national anthem.
When CNN visited, most classrooms were empty, with only a few students in the computer and nail care rooms. Though defectors had once numbered nearly 3,000 a year, they fell to just a few dozen in 2021 and 2022, due to pandemic restrictions and tighter border security in North Korea and China.
The Hanawon training covers other basic life skills like how to open a bank account. After finishing the program, defectors receive government benefits, such as an initial subsidy and housing support, as they begin their new lives.
A Hanawon instructor (left) teaches defectors in a bakery class on July 10, 2023.
SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg/Getty Images
‘They only taught me nonsensical things’
But some defectors walk away from Hanawon feeling frustrated and ill-equipped for the real world.
“Hanawon was supposed to teach me things I could actually use, but they only taught me nonsensical things,” said Kim, a defector who escaped in 2017 and finished his Hanawon training in 2018.
Some lessons, like how to use modern technology, were helpful. But other theoretical classes were baffling – like when they read a book explaining how to plate a ring with gold, he said. CNN is only identifying Kim by his surname to protect his privacy.
During the Monday visit, Hanawon officials said they now teach mainly vocational lessons.
“There’s a saying, ‘Teach someone how to fish rather than give them fish.’ Rather than giving financial aid, it is necessary to provide job training which is actually needed to survive in South Korea, and the training that helps them adjust to the South Korean system,” said Unification Minister Kwon Young-se during the tour.
Two other women defectors currently at Hanawon, identified only as “A” and “B,” also shared their experiences, saying the training was beneficial. “Hanawon has been a great help … The resettlement funds are enough, too,” B said Monday, adding she had spent a lot of time on the computer.
But other defectors share Kim’s skepticism, according to Park, the LINK country director. Various experts and advocates have made similar criticisms in past years, pointing out that defectors need more mental health care and long-term assistance.
North Korean defectors attend a computer class at the Hanawon facility on July 10, 2023.
Jeon Heon-Kyun/Pool/AFP/Getty Images
One problem is that not all life in North Korea is the same. A resident in the capital Pyongyang, home to favored citizens like government officials and their families, may be more familiar with modern luxuries like a school education, coffee, even cell phones (limited to North Korea’s censored intranet) than residents in poorer parts of the country.
And some defectors like C live for years in China before arriving in South Korea – giving them more time to adjust and get work experience.
The Hanawon approach needs to offer tailored assistance based on individual needs instead of imposing the same requirements and training on all defectors, Park said.
Many defectors also end up doing jobs in different fields than what they’d learned at Hanawon, rendering those classes ineffective, Park added. For example, younger North Koreans may have broader ambitions such as pursuing internships, attending college and entering white-collar careers.
Then there’s the psychological toll of spending six months at the vetting facility run by NIS and Hanawon.
They arrive in South Korea with “so much hope and expectations,” said Park – but this excitement is often drained by the time they finally emerge from Hanawon.
CNN has reached out to Hanawon officials for comment.
Community-based approach
Many defectors and activists say the Hanawon process should be streamlined. “I think it’s better to settle down quickly, earn money sooner, and live while adapting by making breakthroughs,” said Kim, the defector who fled in 2017.
When asked about Hanawon’s remote location on Monday, Kwon, the minister, said it was because “defectors can be nervous” around new people. Authorities figured it would be better to start in an isolated facility and “gradually expand” their exposure, he said.
Photo Illustration/ Getty, Adobe Stock
Why some North Korean defectors return to one of the world's most repressive regimes
Kim acknowledged the challenges of adjusting to South Korea. He often felt embarrassed when people asked, incredulous, how he could not know the words for common items bought in stores.
Work was tough, too, and made worse by South Korean coworkers who seemed to look down on him, he said. And there were cultural differences he found puzzling, like greeting coworkers each morning – which he’d never done in the North.
The difficulty of post-defection life is well documented, with some cases ending in tragedy. In 2019, a North Korean mother and son were found dead in their South Korean apartment from suspected starvation, prompting mass vigils and protests, and promises from the government to boost welfare measures.
In 2022, the remains of a North Korean woman wrapped in winter coats found in her Seoul home. Authorities estimated she’d been dead for a year.
Many defectors struggle financially, even years after arriving in South Korea. Some 6.1% of defectors were unemployed in 2022, more than double the national rate, according to government figures.
But many of these challenges can be better addressed through community-based support like local centers that offer continuous assistance and camaraderie, Park said.
These centers do exist to some extent, but could be further expanded, with some of the Hanawon offerings turned into optional local classes, he said. That could also alleviate another major problem for defectors: isolation after being completely cut off from loved ones back in North Korea.
After their arduous journey, he said, North Korean defectors should have the chance to begin this new chapter on their own terms – with the freedom they risked their lives to seek.
CNN · by Jessie Yeung,Yoonjung Seo · July 16, 2023
12. The question I'd most like to ask Kim Yo-Jong, North Korea's doyenne of despotism
Spoiler alert:
At that heady meeting, punctuated by visions of denuclearisation and a better future for all, please ask her the question I can’t: “How much of your family’s wealth are you willing to spend to buy food for your hungry people?”
The question I'd most like to ask Kim Yo-Jong, North Korea's doyenne of despotism - The Big Issue
bigissue.com · by Guest Columnist · July 15, 2023
“If you met her, what would you ask her?” the BBC’s Julian Marshall asked me in a recent interview on Kim Yo-Jong, the younger sister of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and the subject of my book, The
Sister. I didn’t have a readymade answer. It had never occurred to me that I may ever meet her.
Unauthorised and undiplomatic, my biography of Ms Kim pulls few punches. Referring to her as the world’s first “nuclear despotess”, hence, the most dangerous woman out there, I portray her as the de facto second-in-command to her brother, who heads a nuclear-armed and uniquely cruel regime. According to the United Nations, the North Korean state, in the perpetration of manifold crimes against humanity, “does not have any parallel in the contemporary world”.
North Korea is ruled by arguably the most totalitarian regime in history. Neither medieval kings, who lacked North Korea’s technical means of mass mobilisation and surveillance, nor George Orwell, who died in 1950, could have prefigured it.
Until the great famine of the 1990s, such was the regime’s near-total control over its population that very few North Koreans dared defect – a crime punishable by death that extends to the family of the condemned. But mass starvation drove people into China and beyond. For tens of thousands, an instinct for survival trumped fear of imprisonment.
Supreme leader Kim Jong Il, Ms Kim’s father, saw a business opportunity. In presiding over a famine in an industrialised, literate and stable economy – a unique feat in history —Mr Kim used the mass starvation of his people as an international fundraiser, reaping billions of dollars’ worth of aid. The UN accused him of the “inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation”.
And how have Kim Jong Un and Kim Yo-Jong led their nation? The enslavement, deliberate mass starvation and public executions of their subjects while threatening nuclear strikes on their neighbour – the free, democratic and prosperous South Korea – rage on. Out of this macabre milieux has emerged a young, attractive doyenne of modern despotism.
From the moment she touched down in South Korea for the opener of the Pyeongchang Winter Games in February 2018, much of South Korea seemed enthralled by her. A princess of peace, cooed commentators. The cognoscenti remarked on her chaste taste in fashion and makeup. At the opening ceremony, seated behind US VP Mike Pence with her Mona Lisa smirk-smile, she stole the show.
The next morning she personally delivered a letter from her brother to South Korean president Moon Jae-In. Many hoped for peace, denuclearisation and reunification.
But the bonhomie didn’t last. In April 2019, her brother called President Moon “officious” and said that South Korea should abandon its “sycophancy” towards the US. In August, her nation’s major propaganda outlet fired off one of the more pungent insults against Moon, calling the leader a “laughing-stock” and suggesting that the idea of holding peace talks while military exercises continued was enough to “make the boiled head of a cow laugh”. In March 2020 Ms Kim issued her first official written statement, aimed at Moon. She called her former agreeable host a “frightened dog barking”. More and more colourful insults poured forth from the potty-mouthed First Sister of North Korea: “parrot raised by America”, “mentally ill”, and “first-class idiot”.
She’s not held back when it comes to Moon’s successor, President Yoon Suk Yeol, or President Joe Biden. She castigated the former as an “idiot” and ridiculed the latter as a “person in his dotage”, flirting with “more serious danger”. Recently reports have surfaced saying that Ms Kim has been issuing execution orders for people simply “getting on her nerves”. Officials and ordinary people alike refer to her as “devil woman” and a “bloodthirsty demon”.
How far will she sink? Kim Yo-Jong’s descent into vituperation and despotism is calculated. Her role of playing the “even worse cop” to her “bad cop” brother will be rendered even more dramatic once she calls for peace talks. After a period of nastiness and threats comes a post-provocation peace phase featuring smiles, handshakes and pledges – both of peace by Pyongyang and funds by others. That’s the Pyongyang playbook.
At that heady meeting, punctuated by visions of denuclearisation and a better future for all, please ask her the question I can’t: “How much of your family’s wealth are you willing to spend to buy food for your hungry people?”
Sung-Yoon Lee is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. His book, The Sister: The Extraordinary Story of Kim Yo-Jong, the Most Powerful Woman in North Korea is out now (Pan MacMillan, £20). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.
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13. On Balance: Offensive And Defensive Missile Capabilities On The Korean Peninsula – Analysis
Excerpt:
Even though South Korea has accelerated its missile defence upgrades, they don’t seem to be keeping pace with North Korea’s growing offensive capabilities. For instance, the upgraded KAMD could take up to four years to materialise. Other systems might take up to a decade to even be developed. That being said, despite its own defence shortcomings, South Korea does fall under the US’ nuclear umbrella. For the time being, the US’ recent reaffirmation to use all capabilities, including nuclear weapons, in case of a North Korean attack, should be an effective deterrent.
On Balance: Offensive And Defensive Missile Capabilities On The Korean Peninsula – Analysis
eurasiareview.com · by IPCS · July 15, 2023
By Viraj Lohia
On 31 May 2023, North Korea launched Pyongyang’s first spy satellite. The launch failed when the rocket crashed into the Yellow Sea, after veering towards South Korea. Seoul called the exercise a “grave provocation.” Washington and Tokyo also condemned it. Pyongyang vowed to conduct another launch as soon as possible.
North Korea’s recent launch is a legitimate cause for worry for South Korea, Japan, and the US. Coupled with their advanced missile technology, the satellite will hone Pyongyang’s offensive capabilities in the form of potent precision strikes. An overview of North Korea’s offensive missile and South Korea’s defensive missile capabilities is thus germane—especially as North Korean developments appear to be outpacing South Korea’s.
The North Korean Missile Threat
North Korea’s missile programme has advanced rapidly under its leader, Kim Jong Un. Today, its missiles are able to hit all of South Korea, and are difficult to intercept while being easy for Pyongyang to operationalise. The North Korean arsenal includes the KN-23/KN-24 short-range ballistic missile, which are variants of the Soviet-era Iskander missile with a range of nearly all of the peninsula.
The KN-23/KN-24 missiles fly in a quasi-ballistic trajectory and can perform pull-up manoeuvres in their terminal phase. This makes it difficult for missile defence systems to accurately calculate a point of interception. These missiles are also solid-fuel, which makes them easier to transport and faster to launch. They are tough to intercept not only because of their trajectory but also because of their shorter burn period. Detection during launch via infrared sensors is thus less likely.
North Korea is also developing hypersonic capabilities. The indigenously developed Hwasong-8 is a hypersonic glide vehicle with more manoeuvrability than the KN-23/KN-24. Greater manoeuvrability creates additional difficulties for missile defence systems to precisely intercept an incoming missile. North Korea is simultaneously testing submarine-launched and land-basedcruise missiles. These are difficult to detect due to their low-altitude flight path.
North Korea has also reportedly been working on miniaturising its nuclear warheads. On 28 March 2023, the state-sponsored Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) released propaganda photos of Kim Jong Un standing beside a device called the Hwasan-31. The report claimed that the device was a miniaturised nuclear warhead that could fit on North Korea’s short and long-range missiles.
An operational, miniaturised warhead would be a significant nuclear milestone. Further, a successful spy satellite launch would enable Pyongyang to use its arsenal for precision and pre-emptive strikes against its enemies.
South Korean Missile Defence
South Korea is spending a fortune to build a multi-layered missile defence system called the Korea Air and Missile Defence (KAMD). The first layer of this large system is formed by the American-made PAC-2/PAC-3 air defence systems. Cheongung II, an indigenous system, forms the second layer. The US’ Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) forms the top layer. These systems intercept incoming missiles at altitudes of 20 km, 40 km, and 150 km, respectively. South Korea also intends to run ballistic missile early warning systems on Aegis destroyers to strengthen “all-directional” detection capabilities.
Over the past two years, South Korea has been upgrading parts of the KAMD. In early 2022, Seoul announced plans to upgrade its existing PAC-2 systems to PAC-3. In the middle of the year, along with raising overall defence expenditure, it also budgeted for more PAC-3 missiles. In December 2022, the country received PAC-3 systems and missiles as part of a capability enhancement programme with the US.
Upgrading the short-range layer of the KAMD appears to be most important. This is because PAC-2-capable missiles employ blast fragmentation technology, which is not as reliable as the hit-to-kill technology employed by other systems. Blast fragmentation doesn’t completely destroy the warhead—even in a damaged state, the warhead could still hit near the point of interception. Hit-to-kill missiles, on the other hand, ensure complete destruction mid-air.
South Korea has also been developing its own long-range surface-to-air missiles (L-SAM). These missiles are capable of high manoeuvrability during the terminal phase of an engagement which directly counter Pyongyang’s new, manoeuvrable missiles. The L-SAMs are scheduled to be deployed by 2027. Lastly, South Korea’s Defense Acquisition Program Administration plans toinduct another range of advanced L-SAMs (and medium-range SAMs) between 2024 to 2035 to defend against advanced North Korean hypersonic and inter-continental ballistic missiles.
The new L-SAM project comprises the development of a gliding-stage interceptor missile tocounter North Korean hypersonic missiles. The M-SAM project is aimed at improving interception performance. Since THAAD is inoperative against the KN-23 and PAC-3, and Chenogung II systems can’t accurately calculate interception courses, these developments would fill current gaps in the KAMD.
Conclusion
Even though South Korea has accelerated its missile defence upgrades, they don’t seem to be keeping pace with North Korea’s growing offensive capabilities. For instance, the upgraded KAMD could take up to four years to materialise. Other systems might take up to a decade to even be developed. That being said, despite its own defence shortcomings, South Korea does fall under the US’ nuclear umbrella. For the time being, the US’ recent reaffirmation to use all capabilities, including nuclear weapons, in case of a North Korean attack, should be an effective deterrent.
Viraj Lohia is an intern at the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies.
eurasiareview.com · by IPCS · July 15, 2023
14. A North Korean defector captivated U.S. media. Some question her story.
Unfortunately Ms. Park is doing a disservice to the entire escapee community. She should not politicize and exploit her story, if in fact it is true as there are allegations concerning the veracity of her stories.
As my wise escapee friends have said they are more than their stories. Unfortunately Ms. Park is someone who is milking her story.
A North Korean defector captivated U.S. media. Some question her story.
Conservative audiences are enthralled by Yeonmi Park’s tales of communist dictatorship — and her claim that liberals are steering America onto the same path. But critics say her accounts of life in the brutal regime don’t add up.
By Will Sommer
July 16, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
The Washington Post · by Will Sommer · July 16, 2023
Megyn Kelly introduced a guest on a February episode of her podcast in February with an unusual caveat: “People have been coming for” Yeonmi Park, she said, by accusing the North Korean defector turned American conservative activist of telling false stories about her home country.
The host acknowledged some shifting aspects of Park’s accounts — but, “whatever!” she concluded. Kelly assured listeners that she had fact-checked Park’s story, and “as incredible as they were, her descriptions of North Korea checked out.” Later, she urged Park to run for office.
Sixteen years after fleeing the brutal regime, Park has become a multiplatform star in America, appearing on “The Joe Rogan Experience” and other popular podcasts, amassing a YouTube following of more than 1 million subscribers, and selling more than 100,000 copies of “In Order to Live,” her 2015 memoir about the cruelties and deprivations of life under the communist dictatorship.
Now, though, Park is making the media rounds to raise alarms about another nation — the United States.
Citing her experiences as a student at Columbia University, Park styles herself as “the enemy of the woke,” warning that America is on the verge of liberal dictatorship and that “cancel culture” at U.S. colleges is the first step toward North Korean-style firing squads. It’s the theme of her new book, “While Time Remains,” published in February by a conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster. As of early July, the book, which features a foreword from Canadian professor and conservative lifestyle guru Jordan Peterson, had sold at least 35,000 copies, according to sales-tracking service NPD BookScan.
“North Korea is not even this nuts,” Park said in a 2021 podcast appearance as the host, Tim Pool, fretted vaguely about “big tech censorship” and people whom he asserted are afraid to share their true opinions on social media for fear of losing their jobs.
“This is how we go there,” she concurred. “This is how it begins.”
Park, 29, has been embraced by members of the “heterodox” movement, media personalities who often don’t consider themselves traditional conservatives but express skepticism — or outright mockery — of liberal “social justice” efforts. Former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss ran an excerpt of Park’s book on her news site, the Free Press. Hedge fund director and Peter Thiel associate Eric Weinstein called for Park to become Twitter’s new CEO.
But while Park’s moral authority as political pundit rests on her experience as a refugee from an authoritarian pariah state, she has been dogged for years by accusations that some of her more lurid tales of state vengeance and extreme societal decay don’t add up.
Scholars on North Korea who are skeptical of Park say she’s symptomatic of a booming market for horror stories from the cloistered nation that they believe encourages some “celebrity” defectors to spin increasingly outlandish claims.
Jay Song, a University of Melbourne professor of Korean studies, says Park has been “very enterprising” in presenting her story. But she worries it will undermine the reputations of North Korean defectors more broadly.
“They just try to survive in South Korea or elsewhere, and they’re working very hard,” Song said. “A character like Yeonmi Park — it’s really misrepresenting the entire community.”
Representatives for Park didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Park, now a U.S. citizen, isn’t the only political pundit to get her start on reality TV. But her particular launchpad would seem far more exotic to American audiences than “Survivor” or MTV’s “The Real World.”
A South Korean TV hit since its debut in 2011, “Now On My Way to Meet You” began as an emotional docuseries about reunifying families separated by the Korean War. But it quickly evolved into a bright, brisk variety show focusing on young women from the North — referred to as “defector beauties” — who banter flirtatiously with male South Korean comedians, perform skits and discuss the lives they left behind. A teenager when she was cast as a regular panelist, Park quickly broke out as a star.
It was on the show that the basic outlines of her biography first emerged. According to Park, she was born in 1993 in the city of Hyesan, near the Chinese border. Her early childhood there and in the capital city of Pyongyang coincided with a famine that killed an estimated hundreds of thousands of North Koreans each year. Her father, a member of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea, smuggled metals on the black market to support his family and was eventually sentenced to a prison term.
In 2007, when Park was 13, she fled across the Chinese border, spending a couple years there before making her way with her mother into South Korea, via Mongolia, with the help of Christian missionaries.
Yet, while most of Park’s “Now On my Way to Meet You” co-stars recounted stories of deprivation, she was dubbed “Paris Hilton” because of the tales she told of her family’s relative wealth in North Korea — a lifestyle accessorized with imported Japanese fashion and Chanel bags.
While making her name on the show, Park also began making political connections. Freedom Factory, a libertarian think tank in Seoul, hired her as a media fellow; she soon got another such role with Young Voices, a D.C.-based talent agency and PR firm connected to the Atlas Network, a free-market-boosting nonprofit funded by Koch foundations and other U.S. conservative donors. In 2014, she published an op-ed in The Washington Post — co-bylined with an Atlas Network fellow, with whom she also hosted a podcast — predicting that her “Black Market Generation” of North Koreans who had grown up enjoying Western luxury goods and bootleg copies of “Pretty Woman” would soon force a capitalist revolt from within.
Her worldwide breakthrough came in October 2014 with a speech at the human rights-focused One Young World Summit in Ireland. Dressed in a traditional hanbok dress, Park urged the audience to support North Koreans suffering under the dictatorial rule of the Kim dynasty.
The video went viral, garnering more than 80 million views, turning Park into one of the most famous North Korea defectors in the world — and landing her a book contract.
With the publication of “In Order to Live” — a collaboration with Maryanne Vollers, a veteran ghostwriter for Billie Jean King, Hillary Clinton and Ashley Judd — Park began presenting a far more harrowing description of her North Korean life than she had shared with her South Korean TV fans.
In U.S. media appearances and her book, Park portrayed a childhood in which dead bodies were a frequent specter. In one particularly grotesque image, she described seeing starving children forced to eat rats, only to die because the rats were poisoned. Then, other rats devoured their corpses.
Experts on North Korea took note of the strikingly different bio that emerged when Park moved from reality TV to the international human rights conference circuit. Her “Paris Hilton” character was nowhere in this story. Park claimed that she never encountered eggs or indoor toilets until she left North Korea, that she resorted to eating grass and dragonflies to survive.
“She once presented herself as a top 1 percent North Korea elite, so she didn’t see any hunger or malnutrition when she was living there,” said Song. “She totally flipped the narrative when she was on to these conferences.”
Christine Hong, a literature professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz and board member at the Korea Policy Institute who has studied defector narratives, noted that Park’s new account didn’t even gibe with her mother’s stories of ready access to food and luxuries. (In one “Now On My Way to Meet You” appearance, the mother explained that Park couldn’t comprehend that her less privileged co-stars came from the same country she did.)
“But no one seems to care,” Hong told The Post. “And the reason that no one seems to care is that when it comes to North Korea, it’s basically an informational free-for-all.”
Park tried to address those discrepancies in her memoir, explaining she didn’t disclose her childhood hardships in her South Korean television appearances because “I no longer even thought about it.”
Cracks in Park’s story had already emerged even before her publishing debut. Mary Ann Jolley, a journalist who interviewed Park for an Australian documentary in 2014, pointed out multiple other inconsistencies in a story for the Diplomat, a news site focused on East Asia.
For example, Park claimed to have seen a friend’s mother executed in a stadium for the crime of watching a Hollywood movie (in other accounts, it was a South Korean DVD). But other defectors from Hyesan told Jolley that executions were never carried out in the stadium, and that no executions happened in the city during the time period she described.
The largest discrepancy highlighted by Jolley concerned the family’s departure from North Korea. In her initial accounts, Park claimed that she left the country with both of her parents, helped by Chinese contacts her father met while smuggling.
“There were cars to get us because of the connections with Chinese people, and then we went to China directly,” Park said in a 2014 appearance two months before her viral speech.
Park presented a different story in her Ireland speech, saying that only she and her mother fled South Korea, and that they did so on foot, joined later by her father, who eventually died in China. In this version of the story, repeated in her memoir and in many subsequent interviews, Park’s mother was raped by a human trafficker, sacrificing herself to save Park from the man, and both women were sexually abused and trafficked in China for years before ultimately escaping.
In an email to the Diplomat, Park blamed the inconsistencies in her stories on translation issues and her inexperience with English. In a February appearance on comedian Andrew Schulz’s online show, Park said she had initially not revealed her story about human trafficking and rape on South Korea television because she feared the stigma would keep her from finding a husband. Vollers also attributed “minor discrepancies” in Park’s stories to translation issues and wrote in the Guardian in 2015 that she took steps to verify Park’s claims.
“Yeon-mi was giving interviews in English before she was fully fluent,” Vollers wrote.
Park quickly became an in-demand speaker on human rights. But, as she would later describe it, she soon ran into a new kind of authoritarianism, right in the United States.
Park moved to New York City in 2014 and enrolled at Columbia. Park found her classmates perpetually seething over perceived “microaggressions,” she later wrote. They weren’t the only oversensitive people she encountered: In “While Time Remains,” Park described running afoul of an unspoken campus code when she praised Jane Austen during orientation.
“Wrong!” a professor thundered at her, in Park’s telling. “Those books promote female oppression, racism, colonialism, and white supremacy!”
A spokesperson for Columbia declined to comment on the anecdote.
Park’s latest book chronicles what she describes as her disenchantment with American liberalism. She sees criticism of U.S. policy and society from the left as a dominant ideology that she equates to the anti-American propaganda she was fed as a young person in North Korea — and she argues it is just as dangerous. Many of her examples are personal: She describes her irritation when a book agent, after the success of her first memoir, asked her to take on what she saw as liberal topics, such as feminism or the treatment of Black prisoners. (Literary agent Amanda “Binky” Urban, who represented Park in the sale of her first book, told The Washington Post that she isn’t the agent Park is referring to.) Park continued to appear at events as a human-rights advocate, but she had started to sour on the predominantly liberal circles they brought her into.
“In North Korea, everything’s about America, everything horrible,” Park said in an online appearance with conservative talk radio host Dennis Prager. “And in Columbia, exact same thing. Everything is about the problem with America and white men.”
As Park tells it, another foundational event in her turn against American political correctness came in August 2020, amid unrest after the police murder of George Floyd. Park, who by then had married an American man and had a baby, was living in Chicago. (Her son is doomed by “woke” politics, she wrote in “What Time Remains”: “He is half-Caucasian, half-Asian — the very peak of the ‘privilege’ pyramid.” Park and her husband divorced in 2020.) On a walk with her child and nanny, Park was mugged by what she described in a 2021 appearance on Rogan’s podcast as three Black women. When Park tried to call the police, she claimed, as many as 20 white people surrounded her and accused her of being racist.
“The bystanders who watched it happen refused to intervene because of the color of my skin, and that of the assailants,” Park wrote in her new book.
A key element of Park’s account is that while police arrested the suspects, they were never prosecuted. “Of course, they are not going to prosecute these girls,” Park said on Rogan’s podcast. “There’s so much crime in Chicago, they are not going to prosecute somebody who robs. And that’s when I was thinking, this country lost it.”
But, according to a Chicago police statement obtained by the Daily Mail in 2021, Park was robbed not by three women but a woman and a man — and the female suspect was indeed charged with a crime, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years in prison. (Park, in her most recent book, acknowledged that the mugger was prosecuted.)
Park thanks a number of American conservative and “heterodox” figures in the acknowledgments of her new book, including Weiss, Breitbart News editor Emma-Jo Morris, and YouTube host Dave Rubin. Her book agent and spokesman, Jonathan Bronitsky, worked as the chief speechwriter for Trump administration attorney general William P. Barr. She told the New York Times she makes $6,600 a month working for the young-conservatives group Turning Point USA.
Many of Park’s most eye-catching claims about the deprivations and cruelties of North Korean life have come in podcast appearances that coincided with her rebranding as the “enemy of the woke.”
A train journey that would take a mere hour in the United States? “In North Korea, it would take a month at least to go [the same distance]” Park told a shocked Rogan in her 2021 appearance on his show. “Because there’s no electricity, and sometimes people have to push the train.”
Her tales of the gothic punishments that await dissidents are widely shared on YouTube, where videos with titles like “THIS is a Crime in North Korea!?” can earn more than 10 millions views.
These stories are drawing fresh scrutiny.
Andrei Lankov, a professor at South Korea’s Kookmin University who made the first of his many research trips to North Korea in the 1980s, said many of Park’s stories have little resemblance to what he and other experts have experienced in the country or understand to be the truth about life there.
Park frequently claims in podcast appearances that North Koreans don’t have access to maps of the world, and that they fail to learn basic math like “1 + 1 = 2.” Lankov points to images of elementary-school textbooks that prove otherwise.
To underscore the dangers of collectivism, Park often claims that North Koreans don’t have a word equivalent to “I” and that they must resort to the first-person plural. “We [are not] allowed to say ‘I,’” she said in a 2021 podcast appearance. “We say, ‘we like water.’”
But Lankov disputed the notion that this particular syntax is anything more than a rhetorical quirk. “It’s just a normal part of speaking Korean in South Korea [as well], among the older generation at least,” Lankov said.
Similarly, Park shocked podcast host Pool when she maintained that North Koreans “don’t know the concept of love” aside from the adoration they’re allowed to feel for members of the Kim dynasty. (“The most villainous thing I’ve ever heard,” her host replied.)
Lankov and other Korea experts scoff. “Of course they have words for love,” said Song, the University of Melbourne professor.
Park has also repeatedly alleged that North Koreans can be executed and their families punished for the crime of failing to clean their framed household portraits of leaders such as Kim Il Sung or Kim Jong Il.
“So if the picture is dusty, you get executed?” an astonished Rogan asked her in 2021.
“Yeah,” Park said.
Lankov argues that this is a convoluted distortion of one of the real-life grotesqueries of North Korean life. Citizens there are required to undergo routine “self-criticism” sessions, in which they publicly confess to personal failings. Some, out of pressure to come up with something to say, end up falling back on an absurdly minor offense that will let them off with a minor punishment — like inadequate maintenance of their shrine to the Kims. Park’s assertion that someone would be executed for having a dusty portrait of Kim Jong Il, Lankov said, would be the equivalent of telling North Koreans that Americans can be executed for a speeding ticket.
Few of Park’s podcast hosts have questioned her stories. But debunking her claims has become something of a hobby for left-wing internet figures, such as Twitch star Hasan Piker. An image of Park from her Rogan interview became a popular meme in May, used by posters to signal to readers that they’re exaggerating or telling a tall tale.
“The joke is that she’ll say anything that’s just wildly outlandish, and Joe will just accept it as true,” said Don Caldwell, editor of the site Know Your Meme.
Other high-profile accounts of life inside North Korea have turned out to be fabrications. In 2015, former Washington Post reporter Blaine Harden conceded factual errors in “Escape from Camp 14,” his 2012 bestseller about defector Shin Dong-hyuk. Under pressure from other defectors who disputed his stories, Shin admitted he had lied about several key aspects of his story, saying he had originally found it “too painful” to give a full account of his life.
Scholars say North Korean defectors may feel pressure to serve up a dramatically compelling account of their previous lives. While South Korea provides some aid and training to the roughly 30,000 defectors in the country, they often find themselves ill-equipped to earn a living in a competitive capitalist economy. Defectors face higher than average unemployment rates; their suicide rates are said to be higher than the general population.
Some defectors in South Korea are paid for interviews, and there is a sense that the more attention-grabbing stories will earn more money. Meanwhile, North Korea’s isolation makes it difficult to fact check even the most bizarre tales.
Park’s first memoir appeared in 2015, amid an “increasing number of narratives of escape from North Korea,” its Kirkus review noted. Hong, the UC-Santa Cruz professor, sees a booming “industry” for such tales, “and that involves English-language bestsellers on Amazon, it involves TED Talks, it involves documentary films, it involves a speaking circuit.”
It would seem unnecessary to exaggerate the horrors of North Korea when the documented truth is terrible enough. A 2014 United Nations report found widespread government abuses, including rape, murder and forced abortions. In 2022, a State Department report on North Korea listed forced sterilization, executions and “arbitrary” detentions on a long array of “significant human rights issues” in the country.
Park’s critics fear that the questionable veracity of her claims about North Korea will overshadow genuine concerns about the dire state of human rights there. Song, the University of Melbourne professor, believes Park reflects back to her audiences what they want from her — whether it’s to confirm their deepest fears of authoritarianism or their darkest suspicions of liberalism.
“She’s a total mirror of the society she’s in,” Song said. “She can read this emotional radar in what people want to read from her.”
The Washington Post · by Will Sommer · July 16, 2023
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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