North Korea refugees find new pressures in South
Seoul: When elite North Korean soldier Joo Seung- hyeon made his way through the Demilitarised Zone, avoiding minefields and watchtowers to defect to the South, he thought he was going to a prosperous new life.
The reality was more complicated than that.
Ostracised by Southerners who he says see their Northern cousins as “poor, uncivilised barbarians”, he was dismissed at countless interviews for menial jobs as soon as he revealed his thick accent.
But he persevered, eliminating his original tones by repeating radio broadcasts, earning a degree in his spare time, and following up with a PhD in unification studies — the first such doctorate ever earned by a North Korean defector.
Now he has written a book detailing the challenges faced by Northern defectors in what has become a radically different society.
The peninsula has been divided since a 1950- 53 war, with little official contact between the two sides. A summit in the DMZ at which North Korea’s Kim Jong- un will meet South Korean President Moon Jae- in this week will only be the third such get- together.
More than 30,000 North Koreans have fled poverty and repression in their homeland since the end the war to make a perilous journey to the South, and are often held up as a symbol of human yearning for freedom.
The goal of unification is enshrined in South Korea’s Constitution and it welcomed them with great publicity, some of those arriving in the 1970s and ’ 80s enjoying nationwide fame as “heroes”.
But the fanfare died down as the trickle of defectors turned into a torrent in the 1990s, when a famine in the North left hundreds of thousands dead.
Public sentiment soured and now many defectors bemoan difficulties finding decent jobs or making friends, with most of their knowledge and skills deemed outdated or irrelevant, and many Southerners viewing them with suspicion and contempt.