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REFUGEES: North Koreans Escape – to Pain

Antoaneta Bezlova

SEOUL, Jun 8 2005 (IPS) - The lucky escapees from famine and the Stalinist dictatorship of North Korean leader Kim Jung-Il face a living nightmare even when they reach prosperous and democratic South Korea, where food and free will are unrestricted.

Haunted by survivor’s guilt, traumatised and emaciated, North Korean refugees arrive in the capital Seoul after a long ordeal of hiding, waiting and debriefing. They hope for a job and new life but they find it hard to shut off the memories of starvation and despair. Nearly all of them succumb to depression, and many attempt to commit suicide.

“Systematically, all of them suffer from psychosomatic pain – in the head, in the back and chest,” says Gilduin Blanchard, representative of the international non-governmental organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) in Seoul.

“Men drink, women often refuse to go out for months – so big is their fear. The rate of suicidal attempts is very high.”

Still, those who manage to escape are the strongest, social workers say. In the dead of winter, they sprint across the frozen Tumen river bordering China and spend days in hiding while the Christian underground railroad and human rights activists arrange their escape route.

Over the years of a protracted North Korean famine, which started in the early 1990s, those activists have set up a chain of safe houses and orphanages to smuggle North Koreans into China.

The refugees imagine that once in China, their sufferings are over. “They believe they can find food and work there,” says Blanchard. But the reality is in fact, very different. “They have no legal status inside the Chinese border, which means they have to hide in constant fear from being repatriated.”

Previously, Chinese authorities turned a blind eye to what they still call economic migrants, who regularly cross the border to barter for food, stay with relatives, or just blend in with the vast ethnic Korean population along the Chinese side of the frontier.

But in 2000, Beijing reversed its lenient attitude and started organising nationwide manhunts, offering rewards to those who turn in North Korean refugees and fining and even jailing those who help them.

“Since the beginning of 2005, the Chinese have been catching and expatriating about 400 to 500 people a week,” says U.S. Christian missionary Tim Peters, who heads ‘Helping Hands Korea’, a group that assists refugees from the North. That means at least 20,000 to 25,000 North Koreans are attempting to escape the country yearly.

Only a handful of those end up in South Korea. There are just over 6,500 officially registered North Korean refugees in the South and the numbers of newcomers have been steadily dropping. In the first five months of this year, only 431 new refugees made their escape to Seoul – roughly half the number that arrived over the same period last year.

Refugee supporters blame the downward trend on a combination of factors. They say the Chinese government’s pressure to stop the exodus on its side of the border has been matched with an increase in summary trials and executions on the North Korean side.

“In recent months the North has stepped up the number of public executions, hoping they can serve as a deterrent for people who want to escape,” says Kim Sang Hun, a 70-year-old retired United Nations official and human rights activist.

Rare video footage of summary executions in the North showing blindfolded prisoners shot in the head was smuggled through China to South Korea earlier this year. But South Korean authorities have barred the airing of the secret tape, fearing it might upset Pyongyang and harm fragile North-South relations.

Loath to jeopardise its dream of lasting détente with the North, in recent years the South Korean government has refrained in international bodies from criticising the North’s abuses. In 2004, Seoul abstained from voting on North Korea’s human rights record at a United Nations meeting in Geneva.

But South Korea’s ambivalence about a get-tough policy with the North has been criticised by refugees and activists for silently endorsing the manifold sufferings of millions of Koreans across the demilitarised zone. Among South Koreans there is little understanding of the North’s famine and little sympathy for the fugitives of Kim Jung-Il’s draconian regime.

“The escape is such an ordeal that refugees that arrive in the South believe themselves to be survivors,” says Choi Seung Cheol, an escapee from the North. “But people in the South don’t recognise their endurance. They see North Koreans as second-class citizens and this makes life for us here very difficult.”

Choi, who trained as a doctor in the North, says four out of five refugees suffer from high blood pressure from the claustrophobia and anxiety experienced during their escape.

“We all had to live in closed spaces for a long time – first shelters, then foreign embassies and debriefing centres,” he says. “Subconsciously, people know that they are free but in reality they are not, not for a long time after crossing the North Korean border.”

Social isolation upon arrival in the South is common. Nearly 90 percent of the North Koreans living in the South are unemployed. They lack the skills and training to succeed in the competitive South Korean society.

Others like Choi, who received his medical diploma in the North, have to start studying all over again. Among the 80 North Korean medical doctors who live in the South, only five have been permitted to practice so far.

According to MSF’s Blanchard, North Korean refugees’ inability to cope with the emotional pain and survivor’s guilt also makes social integration very difficult..

Cautiously, MSF in Seoul has started counselling the patients most in need of psychological support. With the help of two psychologists from South Korea and France, the organisation has offered refugees the opportunity to talk about their experiences and unload the pain.

“Some refugees have refused to talk to our psychologists because they think this stigmatises them even more,” says Blanchard. “But in one particular case of a woman who left her children in the North and then had to abandon her young baby in China, we thought the counselling was about the only thing that kept her alive.”

Women among refugees are the most vulnerable. A lucrative trade in women has sprung up along parts of the North Korean border with go-betweens charging fees of up to 10,000 yuan (1,200 U.S. dollars) for exporting girls willing to marry Chinese farmers. There is a strong demand for wives on the Chinese side because local girls generally prefer to leave the hard life of the countryside to find work in either Chinese cities or South Korea.

“Virtually, all North Korean women who cross the Chinese border have been trafficked, in one way or another,” says Peters.

This fall, MSF is planning to share taped testimonies of refugees’ experiences with the public in Seoul. The names would be withheld but South Koreans would be able to listen to the personal accounts of their ethnic siblings. “We believe it is important that South Korean people know the truth about life in the North,” says Blanchard.

Choi, the North Korean medical doctor, has his own summary of life along the two sides of the demilitarised zone, the northern half where he believes ordinary people still care for one another and its neighbour where indifference reigns. “South Korea is a suffering utopia; North Korea is a happy hell.”