By Anna Fifield
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/04c2a02e-13f1-11dc-88cb-000b5df10621.html
Published: June 8 2007 17:20 | Last updated: June 8 2007 17:20

When he stepped off a flight into the glittering, almost science-fiction-like airport terminal near Seoul three years ago, Park Hyun-ki didn’t find South Korea all that different from the North. First, intelligence officers took him away for questioning, an experience not unusual in the North. And once he passed through detention, the fast pace of life in the capitalist South and the “pretty” accent of Southerners felt familiar thanks to the hours of South Korean soap operas he had watched while hiding in China. “It didn’t feel very foreign,” the 28-year-old says. “I did think all the demonstrations on the streets were a bit strange. You can’t even imagine staging protests in North Korea.”

To North Koreans, the South is at once familiar and alien. People who share their names, their language and their history drive down neon-emblazoned streets in Hyundai SUVs, watch television on their mobile phones and criticise the president at every opportunity. Park’s hometown of 3,000 people, lying just outside Musan, a mining city in the North Hamgyong province of North Korea, near the border with China, is a world away from this. The bleak, rocky province – once the centre of North Korean industry but now rusting – is considered backward even by the standards of the North.

Still, life there was “OK”, says Park. After 10 years of schooling, he had secured steady work in a munitions factory making bullets and grenades. But in the mid-1990s, a devastating famine struck, compounding shortages that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union; soon Park’s friends and workmates were facing starvation. “We were eating only three meals a week, sometimes even eating tree bark because that was all we had,” he recalls, sitting on the floor of a Korean restaurant in southern Seoul, the table crowded with bowls of the vegetables and rice, plates of fish and dishes of kimchi and pancakes he could once only dream about.

Then people started dying. “From 1995, four people were dying each day from the hunger.” Realising his fate if he remained in the North, Park started plotting his family’s escape. He surveyed the Tumen river, which separates North Korea from China, and befriended the guards patrolling the border. Finally, one night, he bribed one of the soldiers and escaped with his family into China. A gruelling journey followed, during which both of his parents died and his sister was captured by human traffickers hoping to sell her to a Chinese man. Park, alone and bewildered, found his way to the South Korean embassy in Beijing and eventually flew to Seoul.

Upon arrival in the South, refugees are sent to a government centre called Hanawon, where they spend 10 weeks learning about Southern culture as well as practical skills such as how to use a computer, a bank card, a mobile phone and the subway. As they leave, they receive government payments. A single refugee gets a lump sum of $3,000 for basic assistance, a further $7,000 paid out over the following two years, and $10,000 for housing – meant to cover five years’ rent. (This $20,000 is a sharp reduction from 2004, when a lone refugee could expect $35,000, and the amount is set to be cut further this year.)

Park blew most of his grant on drinking, karaoke and playing pool. “In North Korea we have no concept of money or budgeting or saving, so once we get here we don’t know what to do,” he says, shrugging his shoulders. With his downbeat expression, shaggy hair and black “Hugo Boos” (fake Hugo Boss) jumper, Park cuts a rather pitiful figure.

Not realising he had to be careful with his national identity card, he discovered that new acquaintances had racked up huge mobile phone bills in his name. He found a job in a bar to pay the debt, but soon had to quit because he got into fights with customers who mocked his country-bumpkin accent. He tried working as a broker for escaping North Koreans but that enterprise landed him in jail, charged with forging the documents North Koreans need to win passage to the South. Upon his release he discovered his girlfriend, also a refugee, was pregnant and had only $8 to her name. “I felt so frustrated with the treatment I received,” says Park, jobless again. “I spent three months in jail while my girlfriend was pregnant and now the government calls me a criminal. I think it’s the South Korean government that’s criminal, not me.”

After the Korean war ended in 1953 and the division of the peninsula, Pyongyang operated under a strict policy of isolationism, keeping people in and information out. In the four decades that passed between the Korean war and the end of the cold war, only 600 North Koreans sought asylum in the South. The vast majority were elite men – diplomats, party cadres or military officers. Upon their arrival in Seoul, they were celebrated as heroes, their defections portrayed as a triumph of capitalism over communism. With their high levels of education, social skills and ready-made jobs at government think-tanks, these early defectors easily slotted into South Korean society.

But that all changed after the North Korean famine of the mid-1990s, which killed an estimated 2 million people, or almost 10 per cent of the population. The escaping North Koreans were no longer elites seeking political respite but unskilled workers from rural areas who were driven into China by hunger. Between 1994 and 1999 the number of North Koreans arriving in the South rose to 50 a year, but then started multiplying rapidly, increasing from 312 in 2000 to 1,894 in 2004. The number of refugees living in the South this year passed the 10,000 mark.

Now, three-quarters of defectors are women, the vast majority in their 20s and 30s. About 80 per cent of the total are from North Hamgyong province, whose rocky landscape is not well suited to agriculture and left the residents most vulnerable to the famine. As far from the showcase capital of Pyongyang as it’s possible to get in North Korea, Hamgyong has long been home to those considered undesirable in the rest of the country, and is believed to house several of the labour camps where those deemed politically unreliable are put to work.

The vast majority of those fleeing North Korea escape across the Yalu or Tumen rivers, which form the 1,400km border with China, swimming and wading in the summer or running over the ice in the winter. The border is increasingly heavily monitored on both sides, and those captured by North Korean or Chinese police risk repatriation and the labour camps – or worse.

Most of those who do make it across spend about three years hiding in China before making their way – with the help of Christian missionaries or expensive brokers (charging anywhere from $3,000 to $30,000) – to countries such as Mongolia, Thailand or Vietnam, where they claim asylum and are sent to South Korea. There, a hero’s welcome is far from what they receive.

According to a 2004 survey, half of South Koreans hope for “gradual unification” with the North, while 39 per cent say their ideal would be “prolonged friendly coexistence”. President Roh Moo-hyun feels the same, saying he wants Korean unification “through a predictable process”. And as Seoul has tried to warm relations with Pyongyang through its “sunshine policy” of engagement – seeking to lessen the burden of eventually absorbing the North – so it has become loath to do anything that might antagonise Kim Jong-il and his regime, a category into which encouraging defection falls.

“The South Korean government does not have any intention of fostering the North’s collapse,” Roh said during a visit to Berlin two years ago. “Germany paid a high price to realise national unification and is still suffering from it. I hope Korea will not undergo the same.”

In fact, the cost of Korean unification is likely to be much higher than it was in Germany. In 1989, East Germany’s gross domestic product per capita was one-third of West Germany’s, and about 80 per cent of the German population lived in the West. But on the Korean peninsula, the North’s GDP per capita is about one-15th of the South’s, and the populations are more evenly divided, with only two-thirds of Koreans living in the South.

South Korea’s main preoccupation has been the financial and economic cost of unification, with young people in particular expressing concern over the impact that sudden unification might have on their high-tech, conspicuous-consumption lifestyles.

But this is obscuring a much bigger challenge – that of social integration. “There will be a lot of social problems, especially with this rather large middle class that is forming in North Korea,” says Andrei Lankov, a professor at Kookmin University in Seoul who once studied in Pyonyang. “What will South Korea do with people who are called engineers but who have never seen a computer?”

When Lee Ji-su arrived in Seoul four years ago, she found herself almost intoxicated with the opportunities South Korea offered. After 27 years of repression, brainwashing and then hunger in North Korea, and a terrifying journey through China, she arrived in a country of riches and possibilities she could not have imagined. “I was so excited about my new life. I wanted to get out there, into the real South Korea, as soon as possible,” says Lee, sitting on the floor in her cramped apartment in a commuter town outside Seoul. On the bustling main street, construction companies are building flash new apartment towers, and limousine buses zoom back and forth to the capital.

Lee, now 32, comes from Chongjin, a rusting port city in North Hamgyong not far from China. An accordion player, she was in the local Korean Workers’ party band. At rallies to whip up loyalty for Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il, she had to play songs such as “My Country, The Best Country” and “Kim Il-sung, Sing of the Love For Him”.

Because of her privileged position as a member of the Korean Workers’ party, Lee was well-off, living in a comfortable apartment, eating well, playing her music and enjoying something of a bourgeois lifestyle. But as the famine took hold and her mother died, Lee had to fend for herself. She started exporting dried fish to China to raise money, using the proceeds to buy cheaper foodstuffs for herself. “I was in the Workers’ party performance team so I had received a lot of political education,” she says. “But when I got to China I saw how much richer than us they were and I watched some South Korean TV. Then I realised just how much the regime had lied to us.”

The myth of Kim Jong-il’s “socialist paradise” exposed, Lee started using her fish-selling trips to investigate the opportunities for crossing the border and not returning. After several such trips, she started the arduous journey to South Korea.

Although it would be impossible to pick out Lee, with her carefully made-up face, gold dangling earrings and (fake) Prada bag in a South Korean crowd, neither her life in North Korea nor her time at Hanawon prepared her for the rigours of the South. She got a job as a waitress but the owner paid her only $300 a month, not the $1,300 he had promised; the work proved gruelling, and the customers looked down their noses at her. “South Koreans think the North Korean accent sounds very crude, so people treated me as ignorant,” she says, admitting this hit a nerve since she didn’t even know how to use a credit card when she first arrived.

In a survey of 300 North Korean refugees living in Seoul, half said they felt they were viewed as second-class citizens and the same proportion labelled discrimination the most difficult thing they had to cope with.

“Some South Koreans say things to me like: ‘It’s OK for you, you don’t have to work here because the government pays you with our taxes.’ I find that very distressing,” she says. “Even at the local council office, they say things like: ‘Why aren’t you at work?'” She had been living on instant noodles for the three days before our interview, and both she and Park asked to use aliases for fear of angering South Koreans.

Although Lee now has a job as an office assistant, for many, work is a struggle. Unemployment among refugees is at about 40 per cent – compared with 3 per cent for the general population – and those with jobs usually hold temporary or otherwise inferior positions. “We get ‘3D’ jobs,” says Lee. “Jobs that are dirty, difficult or dangerous.”

Then there is the challenge of forging new relationships. Marriage between South Koreans and previously married North Koreans is a legal minefield – what happens if the former spouse shows up in the South? – and social differences exist even at home. About 70 per cent of inter-Korean marriages end in divorce. Kim Seung-chol, a gaunt salaryman who married a South Korean woman a decade ago, tells me: “In North Korea, women feel happy when their husband brings home the bacon.” But “in South Korea, women need more than just money,” he says. “They want to communicate with their husbands and have fulfilment and things like that. I advise new arrivals that in South Korea they have to tell their wives that they love them every day – but they just laugh, they can’t believe it.”

Some experts argue this sort of advice should be harnessed by Seoul, with the government using refugees’ first-hand knowledge of both the North and the South rather than ostracising the new arrivals. Lankov says: “The number of refugees has reached 10,000 and Korean newspapers call this a ‘flood’ or ‘exodus’. But look at what was happening in Germany in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s. The average number of people flowing from East to West each year was 21,000.

“These refugees are the avant garde of unification, and sooner or later unification will happen – whether people like it or not. The experience of dealing with these people will be very useful when the South has to cope not just with 10,000 but 24 million refugees.”

At tae kwon do practice in a classroom filled with the smell of teenage boys, Oh Tae-hoon’s face breaks out into a large smile as he kicks his buddy in the chest, his skinny frame rattling around in a protective vest. Born in North Hamgyong, Oh is 17 years old but the same size as a Southern 13-year-old.

Oh was six when his mother deserted the family during the famine. After his father died in 2000, he was alone. “I would hang around on the streets with a friend who also had no parents, looking for food or just killing time.”

Because he lived near the border, he learnt a lot about China, and saw chances for a better life elsewhere. One night in December 2003, he swam across the Tumen river, then walked and cadged rides to Mongolia, where missionaries helped him claim asylum in South Korea. But with no family in the South, Oh was sent to a special school south of Seoul, where he has lived in the dormitory since.

Because he is not an adult, Oh did not receive any lump-sum payments after Hanawon. Instead, he gets $50 pocket money a month from the government – sometimes enough to get by, sometimes not. But after years of living on the streets and skipping school, settling into life as a South Korean teenager is not easy. “I didn’t have much chance to study before I came here so I don’t know the basics,” he says.

Although Oh is a special case, learning is a struggle for most children from North Korea. Joanna Hosaniak, a Pole, works at the Christian NGO Citizens’ Alliance in Seoul, which runs the Hankyoreh Seasonal School where Oh is a pupil. She says many of the children live “almost like wild animals” while in China, so have trouble integrating into South Korea. “They look to their parents for emotional warmth,” she says, “but very often the adults themselves have so many problems that they can’t give that kind of care to their children.”

Indeed, after a repressive life in the North, followed by dangerous and stressful journeys through China, children and adults alike arrive in South Korea suffering from malnutrition and post-traumatic stress disorder. Simple things such as living in an apartment can become a “psychological killer”, says Chung Byung-ho, a cultural anthropologist who helps North Koreans integrate into the South.

“Most of these people have never lived by themselves, then suddenly they are given an apartment, and when they close the door, they feel that nobody cares,” he says. “Socialist societies never leave people alone – they are always interfering, organising, mobilising.”

All this is compounded by the unimaginable level of brainwashing North Koreans experience in the world’s most aggressive personality cult. For many refugees, Christianity fills the gap and helps refugees cope with the South’s sink-or-swim policies. More than half of refugees were baptised during their years in hiding in China, where mainly Protestant missionaries provide the support networks so many refugees lack. To help lay the groundwork for social unification, South Korean attitudes may have to change. “South Korean people no longer think of this as subsidising heroes but as subsidising migrants,” says Chung.

Lankov, meanwhile, has suggested in a report on refugees for the US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, that Seoul do more to encourage elite defection, perhaps increasing the payments made to people who bring valuable information and skills with them. Refugees should also be provided with more educational opportunities once they arrive in the South. Although they might not be particularly suited to academic study, they could benefit from more vocational training, he says.

Indeed, the hope of many young refugees knows no bounds. Fifteen-year-old Hong Sung-min had been living in South Korea for only two weeks before starting at the Hankyoreh school, alongside Oh, in January. With a broad smile across his spotty face, he is full of excitement about what life in the South could offer. “I am interested in foreign languages, especially English and Chinese. And I want to own my business later in life,” he says between lessons. “Yes, I want to be rich.”