A family of North Koreans have made the dangerous escape to South Korea by boat, part of an increase in defectors from Kim Jong-un’s regime following a slump in numbers during the pandemic.
The three women and one man, all in civilian dress, were intercepted by the South Korean coastguard in a 25ft wooden boat this morning, close to the city of Sokcho on the east coast. They said that they wished to defect, according to South Korean media, and are being questioned to rule out the possibility that they are spies.
Assuming that they are found to be legitimate, the defectors, who have not been named, will join a gradually increasing number of refugees from the North. More than 30,000 people have made the journey south since the late 1990s.
Most of them did so across the long and formerly porous border with China to the north and then by an indirect route through southeast Asia. But during the pandemic, Pyongyang increased border security, making such crossings much more difficult.
In 2019, 1,047 defectors reached the South. Last year that number had fallen to 67. But according to South Korea’s unification ministry, 139 defectors have arrived in the first nine months of this year.
Advertisement
The bodies of at least six drowned North Koreans, including those of children, have been washed up in South Korea since May, as a result of an apparent increase in risky attempts to defect across the sea and river borders.
South Korea’s unification minister, Kwon Young-se, said earlier this year that the government was preparing for an increase in defector boats.
• How the Oskar Schindler of North Korea helped 1,000 people escape
“There is no doubt that North Korea’s economic situation, especially the food situation, has worsened compared to previous years,” he told a parliamentary committee. “This will continue to happen in the future … From the government’s perspective, we need to prepare for all possibilities, including such situations, and we are actually preparing.”
According to the National Intelligence Service, South Korea’s spy agency, 240 people in North Korea died from starvation in the first seven months of this year, twice the average in the last five years. Such numbers are difficult to verify, and even at their worst are far less serious than the famine on the 1990s, which killed as many as a few million people.
Advertisement
But there is little doubt that the food situation in the North deteriorated during Covid, when the strict closure of land borders also cut off imports of food.
The rise in new arrivals also seems to be driven by moves in China to return some of the many North Koreans who have illegally settled there. South Korean media reported that 600 North Koreans in China were rounded up and sent home on trucks earlier this month following the post-pandemic reopening of the border. Having illegally deserted the North, they face an uncertain, and possibly grim, fate.
The UN estimates that China has detained some 2,000 others, whom it intends to repatriate leaving them vulnerable to “torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and punishment and other serious human rights violations … and even execution”.
The family of one North Korean woman who has been sent to a Chinese detention centre have filed an urgent appeal to the UN working group on enforced or involuntary disappearances to prevent her repatriation to the North.
