Opening up
Defectors who’ve fled abusive marriages want their children back
North Korean defectors who became Chinese brides end silence.
SEOUL: After fleeing North Korea to avoid extreme poverty and oppression, the young woman allowed a stranger to arrange a marriage for her with a rural Chinese farmer because she had nowhere to go. An even more painful decision came later.
She said severe abuse by her husband, including once being tied to a post, and the constant fear police would send her back to the North to face torture and prison convinced her that she needed to flee to South Korea. She decided she had to make the risky journey alone, leaving behind the young daughter she had with her Chinese husband.
“My heart has been torn apart,” the 35-year-old said of the daughter she left in the north-eastern Chinese town of Longjing nearly 10 years ago, when the girl was four.
She asked to be identified only by her surname, Kim, out of fear that publicity about her past would destroy her life in the South, where she has remarried and has two other children.
Kim has lost touch with her daughter and is afraid to return to China, but neither she nor other defectors in similar situations have given up. Deep shame and guilt about not seeing their children and worry about social stigma in the South kept them silent for years, but some have begun pushing publicly for international help to get back their children. Four defectors plan to travel to the United States next month to seek help from US and United Nations officials. It will not be easy. Experts say Chinese authorities aren’t likely to accept the appeals because the women were illegal residents and their relationships were not legally recognised marriages. Their efforts to reunite with their children could be viewed as individual family problems, rather than human-rights issues requiring international intervention.
“Is there any female defector who had registered their marital status in China?” said Yoon Yeo Sang, a co-founder of the Seoul-based non-profit Database Centre for North Korean Human Rights.
“For China, they were the ones who were supposed to be repatriated, and I wonder if China would accept their common-law marital status and take necessary legal steps.”
China’s foreign ministry did not reply to questions about whether it would help the women. The defectors say they deserve international attention because their plight was primarily caused by the North’s abysmal rights conditions and by China’s policy of repatriating North Korean defectors who are caught hiding in the country.
“There are South Korean laws, Chinese laws and North Korean laws, but none of them can help us,” said Kim Jungah, 40, a North Korean defector living in the South who was separated from her child in China. Now an activist, she will lead three other women on a trip to Washington and New York from Oct 8 to 18.
The 35-year-old Kim from Longjing had initially planned to go the United States as well but said she cancelled due to worries about the publicity.
The market for selling North Korean women into marriage in China heated up after the North suffered a devastating famine in the mid-1990s that’s thought to have killed hundreds of thousands. China has significantly fewer women than men, and the imbalance is particularly acute in rural farming areas because young women often migrate to big cities seeking better economic opportunities.