Mick Hartley

Ah, this is sad:

The death of a North Korean defector, whose skeletal remains were found in her apartment, has shed light on the loneliness that afflicts many of those who flee the regime of Kim Jong-un.

The 49-year-old woman was discovered last week, police in Seoul confirmed, by a housing officer who called at her apartment after she failed to pay several months’ rent. A post-mortem examination is under way, but the state of the body and the fact that it was dressed in winter clothes suggest that she may have died almost a year ago.

The woman, who has not been named, defected to South Korea in 2002, and was regarded as having successfully integrated into South Korean society. For six years, she counselled other defectors at the Korea Hana Foundation, a government organisation that helps to resettle newly-arriving defectors.

But the health authorities lost track of her when she left her job in 2017 and the woman became so isolated that her death went unnoticed. The case is causing concern because it is not unique.

Since the end of the Korean War in 1953 divided the peninsula, some 33,900 North Koreans have escaped their impoverished and oppressive homeland for the affluent, democratic South. Arriving defectors all spend three months in a resettlement and education centre and receive a cash handout and stipend from the government. When surveyed, three quarters report satisfaction with life in the South.

But many of those who make the fraught journey to South Korea face a shock of adjustment. 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 due to suicide, which is 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. Some 47 per cent of those surveyed report suffering mental anguish.

The South Korean ideal is to be tall, well-educated and well-dressed. North Koreans are often stunted by malnutrition and have been raised on a diet of propaganda, in a country without brands or fashion. The variety of Korean spoken in the South is littered with acronyms, mobile phone text speak and English loanwords unfamiliar to northerners.

Some also report discrimination, somewhere between resentment and contempt, harboured by some in the South towards defectors. Many are tormented by guilt about the families they have left behind, who can face recriminations for the defection of a family member. According to the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights, 18 per cent want to return to the North.

South Korea, with the lowest fertility rate in the world, has a real problem with the increasing number of elderly, many of whom live – and die – alone. But yes, the case of this poor woman does draw attention to the increasing divide between the two Koreas. Can re-unification ever be possible now? It's like East and West Germany on steroids: East Germany was bad, but North Korea is in a different league. If – when – the Kim dynasty finally falls, it's impossible to predict what will happen. Limping on as a failed state, propped up by UN forces and hand-outs? Taken over by China? Re-unification with the South? – but at what horrendous expense?