Many North Korean officials who used to look the other way, or who even accepted bribes to assist with smuggling, now report brokers to authorities, amid a wider crackdown on cross-border activity. The increased risk has driven prices way up. The remittance crackdown is one of many ways the coronavirus pandemic is severing the already fragile links between North Korean defectors and their families back home.
Since the pandemic began, North Korea has imposed one of the world's toughest lockdowns, not only sealing its external borders but also expanding domestic travel restrictions. That is partly because brokers often help pass messages between separated family members, according to Sokeel Park of Liberty in North Korea, a group that helps North Korean defectors settle in the South.
Even for North Koreans who talk with the outside world via smuggled Chinese cellphones, communication has become much harder. The crackdown on money brokers seems to have become especially intense in the last several months. Whereas brokers who were caught used to receive three to five years of reeducation as punishment, North Korean authorities have now tripled those sentences to 10 to 15 years, the Daily NK reported.
In , only defectors arrived in South Korea. During the second quarter of , only two North Koreans reached the South. That is the smallest quarterly figure since Seoul began counting in Lee Se-jun, a South Korea-based defection broker, told VOA he has not helped facilitate an escape from North Korea in over a year, due to the intense security buildup on the North Korean side of the border. Many of those who have escaped North Korea now acknowledge it may be a long time before they will hear from family.
Search Search. Anyone can leave the room if my story is boring, right? No one is forced to stay here. In that sense, you are all free. There is a great diversity of hairstyles, makeup, and fashion in this room, and you are all very stylish. Even the way you guys are sitting is very relaxed. However, in North Korea, the regime controls everything from fashion to the way that you sit. Blue jeans, hair dye, and short skirts are all prohibited in North Korea. All students must wear uniforms and badges with portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il every day, from the beginning of elementary school to the end of university.
When I was in school, I had to wear a school uniform that had to be immaculately clean. Each class had roughly thirty-five students, and of those, around five students became leaders in the class according to their songbun , a social classification ranking. Some of us lacked food, and many of my classmates could not come to school.
There were a lot of heartbreaking stories. Some of my friends had to climb mountains to dig up grass to eat. Some lost their parents and became beggars, and some literally worked themselves to death along with their parents. And if you walked around the streets, you could easily find dead bodies—those who died of hunger. Security officers would then come to move those dead bodies. Thanks to my father, who was a businessman, and my mother, who was an accountant, I did not experience starvation, even though I was born during the Great Famine.
But the happy years did not last long. When individuals own more than a certain amount of wealth, they have their entire property confiscated or are executed by a firing squad. My father was able to save his life with help from a bowibu North Korean secret police officer, whom my father had bribed in the past. She died of cancer when I was eighteen. I felt no more attachment to my country and did not want to waste my future in a country that had no freedom. I was very well aware of the outside world.
They were completely different from what I had learned in school about starving South Koreans. Through movies, TV shows, novels, and other foreign products, I learned that what I was taught in school was all lies. I have not seen my family for ten years. I followed a broker paid for by my father. I walked across the Tumen River and arrived on Chinese soil, where I met another broker with a car. While we were driving, the broker suggested that we should change our clothes since they were all wet.
She told me that I was lucky. I screamed and tried to escape from the house, but the door was locked and all the wires to the phones were cut. After Kim crossed two fences, he finally arrived at the Bukhan riverside. He crossed the river on foot where the water level was only up to his waist. He remembered the width of the river to be about 70 meters [about feet] where he crossed it. To Kim's dismay, he confronted yet another fence on the South Korean side.
This time it was so thick and the roots were so strongly buried to the ground that there was no way he could dig a hole underneath. Instead of finding a way around it, he decided to climb over the fence. In doing so, the wires scratched his arms and ripped his uniform.
Exhausted, Kim laid himself in front of the South Korean guard post speechless until the soldiers noticed him. Han, now a year-old subway operator, defected June 12, It only took him three hours to cross the DMZ and knock on the South Korean guard post on what he described as a sunny day. And there was no electricity on the wire fence at the time due to a power shortage in North Korea.
Plus, I did not step on mines, which could have killed me on the spot. As Han stood at the 38th parallel, he left one foot on the North's side and the other on the South's for half an hour, trying to decide which would be better for his future -- returning home or starting a new life in South Korea.
He chose South. He found out later that the local media called his case a "knock defection. He was already well off in North Korea, with a predictable life ahead of him.
But he realized after a seven-month-long investigation at the national intelligence that defection was a one-way trip. The North Korean army is fully aware that soldiers who stare at the southern side all day long are exposed to propaganda flyers and broadcasts from the south. That's why only young men from relatively wealthy families or well-recognized backgrounds are assigned to work near the border, Han said.
He noted that he, too, came from an established family, with his father being dispatched to Libya as a dentist at one point and his mother a school teacher in North Korea. Similarly, Kim's hometown was Pyongyang and his father worked as a secretary in a steel factory.
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