[imagesource: AFP]

If you survive an escape from North Korea you generally don’t look back.

It’s a perilous journey, even for trained soldiers, and you can bet there isn’t a warm welcoming party awaiting you in Pyongyang should you return.

Making that journey isn’t unheard of, though, with 29-year-old Kim Woo-joo making international news after he returned to North Korea via daring means.

According to The Guardian, the former gymnast “scaled a tall barbed-wire fence and walked the 2.5 miles across the heavily armed demilitarised zone (DMZ), dodging landmines but not security cameras”.

Woo-joo had made his escape to South Korea in November 2020. It was first alleged that he could be a North Korean spy, but officials have now admitted that he was so unhappy with life in South Korea that he chose to return.

He had been working as a cleaner and was experiencing financial difficulties, with an official saying he was “barely scraping a living”:

His daring flight prompted uncomfortable questions about the treatment of political and economic refugees from the North, for whom life in the democratic, capitalist South sometimes falls far short of expectations.

At about 20%, the unemployment rate among defectors is six times higher than the average for South Koreans, according to the Database Centre for North Korean Human Rights. Although their average monthly income reached a record high in 2019, it still lags far behind that of South Koreans, the unification ministry said.

It’s not known what has happened to Woo-joo since his return.

In the past decade, as many as 30 defectors have returned to North Korea from South Korea. That sounds like a lot until you realise that in excess of 33 000 North Koreans have defected to the South since the late 1990s.

The process of being assimilated into the South’s system is not as simple as making it across the border alive:

New arrivals spend three months being debriefed to ensure they are not spies, followed by a similar period at Hanawon (house of unity), a settlement support centre where they are given counselling and coached in the practicalities of South Korean life.

They are eligible for government subsidies of 20m won (£12,260) to find a home or a place at university, followed by monthly payments of 320,000 won for five years.

What many defectors struggle with is a complete lack of sense of community, as well as adjusting to a free society.

In North Korea, the government plans and controls every aspect of one’s life. Pressure can also be exerted by relatives who remain north of the border, who may themselves be operating on the instruction of police.

Given what we know about how hard life can be in North Korea (I’d recommend reading Escape from Camp 14), I doubt I would be in a huge hurry to return.

[source:guardian]