Mick Hartley

It's something of a "man bites dog" story: the North Korean defector who crossed the DMZ the wrong way to get back home. Surely the man's insane? -  returning to the nightmare Kim regime from the freedom of South Korea. But though we hear something of those defectors who've made a success of their subsequent lives, there are far more who struggle.

Richard Lloyd Parry in the Times:

The first time he crossed the minefields and barbed wire it was hard to believe that Kim Woo-joo had made it across alive. The fences he climbed were 10ft high; he evaded security cameras and armed patrols on both sides in a desperate effort to escape from North Korea to the South.

Then, last weekend, he achieved the same feat a second time. Five times he appeared on CCTV and five times, the South Korean forces missed him. But more remarkable than his courage, and the incompetence of the border guards, was his motivation.

Having successfully escaped to rich, free and democratic South Korea 14 months earlier, Kim, 29, chose to risk everything to return to the harshest totalitarian dictatorship in the world.

The case has caused anxious reflection in South Korea because it is not an isolated one. Since the end of the Korean War divided the peninsula in 1953, some 33,800 North Koreans have escaped to the South and on the face of it they are the fortunate ones. The 26 million left behind endure life in a poor, isolated and brutally repressive rogue state. But those who make the fraught journey to South Korea, more commonly via China and southeast Asia, face a shock of adjustment that is often desperately hard.

They suffer high rates of unemployment, alcoholism and depression. According to a survey published in 2015 by the South Korean government, 15 per cent of deaths among defectors were suicides, three times the national rate.

A quarter of defectors are in the lowest income bracket, according to South Korea’s unification ministry, six times that of the population at large. About 47 per cent of those surveyed report suffering mental anguish and, according to the Database Centre for North Korean Human Rights, 18 per cent want to return to the North.

Kim Woo-joo was a representative of this impoverished and isolated underclass. The unification ministry has counted just 30 defectors like him who are positively known to have returned to the North but this is certainly an underestimate. The government said this week that it will create a new organisation dedicated to supporting defectors who face hardship and anguish.

“I wasn’t surprised at all when I heard about him going back,” says Lee Hae-jin, 41, who fled the North in 2008. “I just thought, ‘Here we go again’.”

Lee is a North Korean success — happily married to a South Korean, with a PhD from a famous Seoul university and a job as an economic researcher. But she still struggles with the merciless competitiveness of South Korean society, for which an upbringing in the North leaves defectors wholly ill equipped.

The “ideal” South Korean is tall, well educated and well dressed. North Koreans are often stunted by malnutrition, have been raised on a diet of propaganda in a country without brands or fashion. Like all defectors she spent three months in a resettlement and education centre but the teaching there, she says, focused on South Korean version of history, rather than practical matters.

Among her biggest problems was the divergence in the variety of Korean spoken in the South, which is littered with acronyms, phone text speak, and words borrowed from English.

“Sometimes, I had no idea what people were talking about,” she says. “It took me two or three years. I didn’t know how to take a bus. I had no idea how to Google.” She supported herself through university with a series of low-paid jobs, including waitressing. But she was always aware of a covert discrimination, somewhere between resentment and contempt, harboured by some in the South towards defectors.

She became conscious of mean remarks made behind her back by her fellow students; there was the constant complaining among South Koreans about the stipend awarded to newly arrived defectors. “Even if a North Korean does well, people will say to one another, ‘Why is that North Korean guy driving a Mercedes?’,” she says. “When I got married to a South Korean, people said, ‘Ooh, you found a good husband even though you’re North Korean’.”

For most defectors though, the pain is that of anonymity. Kim Woo-joo worked as cleaner, often at night in empty office buildings, where he met no one and made no friends. In the days before he fled back across the fence, he dutifully put out his few possessions in the rubbish for collection so as to leave no mess behind him.

“He was taking out a mattress and bedding to the dump on that morning, and it was strange because they were all too new,” one of his neighbours said. “I thought about asking him to give it to us but ended up not doing that, because we’ve never said hi to each other.”

If individual North Korean defectors have these problems, imagine what unification might be like – if that ever happens. East and West Germany would seem like a walk in the park compared to North and South Korea.