Coronavirus shines light on changing face of North Korean defectors

Fleeing the hermit state used to be about escaping poverty and hunger

As Kim Jong-un clamps down on border loopholes fewer are getting through. Many of those who do are motivated by family, freedom and education

Reading Time:4 minutes

Photos of the refugees helped by the North Korea Refugees Human Rights Association of Korea are displayed in Seoul, South Korea. Photo: Reuters

Published: 4:38pm, 12 Feb 2021Updated: 6:08pm, 12 Feb 2021

In 2010, the year Ken Eom arrived in South Korea, he was joined by just over 2,400 of his fellow North Korean escapees.

Like many of those who made the difficult and dangerous journey from the authoritarian North to the democratic South, Eom was driven by the desire to see his loved ones again.

“My family escaped from North Korea before I escaped, so I could not get a job in North Korea and was being watched by the North Korean regime,” said Eom, who spent a decade serving in the North Korean military before his escape.

“I needed to follow my family who were in South Korea already.”

Last year, arrivals from the North to the South plunged to just 229, down from 1,047 the previous year, as third-generation dictator Kim Jong-un sealed his country’s borders in response to Covid-19. The number was the lowest since North Koreans began to flee en masse in the late 1990s, when the North was ravaged by a devastating famine estimated to have cost between 240,000 and 3.5 million lives.

Before the “Arduous March”, as the famine is known in the North, defections numbered in the dozens each year, typically involving soldiers crossing the inter-Korean border or workers who were sent to Eastern Europe and then became disillusioned with the state following the dissolution of the USSR.

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