According to the Rumsfeld Papers there were 69 North Koreans serving active duty in the US armed services in April 2003.
Much more discussion in the comments.
(h/t to a colleague)
Archive for the ‘Emigration statistics’ Category
69 North Koreans in US military
Tuesday, March 15th, 2011DPRK defectors face problems adjusting to life in the ROK
Wednesday, February 16th, 2011According to Yonhap:
Half of North Korean defectors’ households in South Korea earn less than 1 million won (US$893) per month, a poll said Wednesday, underscoring the economic difficulties they continue to face in the capitalist society here.
The National Police Agency, which conducted a survey of 12,205 households between August and October last year, said 50.5 percent of them fell into that income range. About 23 percent of them earn less than 500,000 won a month, it added.
The figures contrast with South Korea’s per capita income, which stands at around US$20,000. The survey also coincides with another that said earlier this month that the average monthly income of North Korean defectors with jobs here was 1.04 million won and that 38 percent of them were part-timers.
More than 20,000 North Koreans have defected to the South since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War. The defections have taken place mostly since the 1990s, and the border between the two Koreas remains heavily fortified.
Nearly 40 percent of the defectors surveyed by the National Police Agency said they were living under tough economic conditions. Fourteen percent complained of cultural differences and 13 percent of difficulties in getting jobs.
Defectors undergo several months of resettlement training once they arrive here from the impoverished communist state, mostly via China. South Korea also tries to cover their initial expenses of resettlement and provides them with citizenship.
Read the full report here:
Half of North Korean defectors’ households earn below 1 million won a month: poll
Yonhap
2/16/2011
Recent papers on DPRK topics
Friday, December 17th, 2010Forgotten People: The Koreans of the Sakhalin Island in 1945-1991
Download here (PDF)
Andrei Lankov
December 2010
North Korea: Migration Patterns and Prospects
Download here (PDF)
Courtland Robinson, Center for Refugee and Disaster Response, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University
August, 2010
North Korea’s 2009 Nuclear Test: Containment, Monitoring, Implications
Download here (PDF)
Jonathan Medalia, Congressional Research Service
November 24, 2010
North Korea: US Relations, Nuclear Diplomacy, and Internal Situation
Download here (PDF)
Emma Chanlett-Avery, Congressional Research Service
Mi Ae-Taylor, Congressional Research Service
November 10, 2010
‘Mostly Propaganda in Nature:’ Kim Il Sung, the Juche Ideology, and the Second Korean War
Download here (PDF)
Wilson Center NKIDP
Mitchell Lerner
Drug Trafficking from North Korea: Implications for Chinese Policy
Read here at the Brookings Institution web page
Yong-an Zhang, Visiting Fellow, Foreign Policy, Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies
December 3, 2010
Additional DPRK-focused CRS reports can be found here.
The Wilson Center’s previous NKIDP Working Papers found here.
I also have many papers and publications on my DPRK Economic Statistics Page.
DPRK restaurant manager allegedly defects
Tuesday, December 14th, 2010UPDATE (1/3/2011): According to the Choson Ilbo:
North Korea has shut down a restaurant in Kathmandu and recalled all of its staff after the manager absconded with the takings in late November.
South Koreans in Kathmandu said the 13 to 15 North Korean staff of the Kumgangsan restaurant were recalled to the North right after the manager fled.
But the Kathmandu branch of the Pyongyang Okryugwan restaurant chain, which had been misidentified as the one where the manager worked, is still in business in a back alley about 1 km across the street from Kumgangsan.
Most South Korean tourists and about 400 expats in Kathmandu have stopped going to the restaurant since the South Korean Embassy in Nepal wrote to expats and tour operators asking them to refrain from visiting North Korean restaurants after the North’s torpedo attack on the Navy corvette Cheonan in March last year.
“Please refrain from visiting North Korean restaurants that are becoming sources of funds for the Kim Jong-il regime. Anyone who has visited such restaurants will be subject to investigation on charges of violating the Inter-Korean Exchange and Cooperation Law and the National Security Law upon returning home,” the embassy warned in an email.
A South Korean resident said the Kumgangsan and Okryugwan restaurants had depended largely on South Korean customers, so their sales must have dwindled.
The Kumgangsan manager, identified as Yang, reportedly came to South Korea via India. Nepalese police released two South Koreans who were arrested after North Korea accused them of kidnapping him and were deported on charges of violating immigration law.
UPDATE (12/23/2010): According to the AFP, the Nepalese have released the two South Koreans who allegedly assisted the North Korean to defect.
Nepal has released two South Koreans held for their alleged involvement in the case of a missing North Korean, the South’s foreign ministry said Thursday.
The two men, who live in Nepal, were ordered to leave the country within 15 days after being freed, the ministry said.
Yonhap news agency said the pair were accused of helping a North Korean surnamed Yang flee the Himalayan nation across the border into India, after which he defected to the South.
A local media report in the Himalayan country had said they were arrested following pressure from Pyongyang’s embassy in Kathmandu, which wanted them charged with kidnapping Yang.
South Korean newspapers have said Yang was the manager of the local franchise of an overseas restaurant chain operated by the North.
The franchises are an important source of scarce foreign currency for the cash-strapped regime.
Some 20,000 North Koreans have fled their homeland and arrived in South Korea since the end of the 1950-53 war, almost always through a third country.
UPDATE (12/15/2010): According to the Choson Ilbo the defector left with some substantial funds from the DPRK restaurant in which he worked.
ORIGINAL POST (12/14/2010): According to the Choson Ilbo:
A North Korean who went missing in Nepal recently had been the manager of a North Korean restaurant there, it emerged on Monday.
A diplomatic source said the man, identified as Yang, managed the Kathmandu branch of the Pyongyang Okryugwan restaurant chain and had been there for about a year. It seems he defected and is believed to be in New Delhi, India now.
Overseas branches of Okryugwan are a main source of hard currency for North Korea, and the regime carefully selects managers. The North is apparently very sensitive about Yang’s defection, according to South Korean intelligence, because he made off with a stash of dollars that were supposed to be sent to the North.
The North Korean Embassy has asked the Nepali authorities to investigate two South Koreans identified as Choi and Sun who it says had friendly ties with Yang and kidnapped him. Choi and Sun have been arrested, and South Korean Embassy officials are negotiating for their release.
Read the full story here:
N.Korean Restaurant Manager Absconds from Nepal
Choson Ilbo
12/14/2010
DPRK defectors to South reaches 20,000
Monday, November 15th, 2010According to the AP:
The number of North Koreans defecting to South Korea has surged in recent years because of economic suffering in the North, with more than 10,000 defections over the past three years, South Korea’s Unification Ministry said Monday.
About as many North Koreans have defected to the South since the end of 2007 as the number who had fled over the entire previous period since the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, the ministry said in a statement. The overall total stands now at 20,050.
Ministry official Han Dong-ki said the rise in defections reflects North Korea’s worsening economy.
North Korea has relied on outside food aid since natural disasters and mismanagement wrecked its economy in the mid-1990s, when an estimated 2 million people died of famine. The North’s economic troubles are thought to have worsened following a botched attempt at currency reform last year.
Most defectors reach South Korea after crossing over a shared border with China, where activists say tens of thousands of North Koreans are hiding. About 2,500 defectors arrived in the South in 2007, and the number has risen each year since. More than 2,900 defected last year, the ministry statement said.
Many North Korean defectors have trouble adjusting to their new lives in the South, which is one of Asia’s richest countries. They report job discrimination and difficulty finding work, and say they aren’t being paid fairly or getting promotions.
South Korea runs resettlement centers where North Korean asylum-seekers take a three-month course that teaches them computer skills and such everyday lessons as how to use ATMs and shop in supermarkets. South Korean intelligence officials typically question defectors for about three months before they are sent to the centers.
The two Koreas share a common language, but there are often differences in word meanings after more than a half-century of division following the war. The South is also awash in Western influences compared to the isolated North.
The Unification Ministry said it is working to help defectors resettle in the South more smoothly, offering greater tax reduction and medical benefits.
Defectors are a point of friction between North and South Korea. Two North Korean army majors were sentenced to prison in South Korea earlier this year for plotting to assassinate a high-profile defector. The defector later died of heart failure, and police said there was no connection between his death and the plot.
North Korea denies involvement, accusing South Korea of staging the arrests to stoke public anger against the North.
The defector, Hwang Jang-yop, was one of the North’s most powerful officials when he fled in 1997. He was chief architect of North Korea’s guiding “juche” philosophy of self-reliance and had tutored North Korea’s supreme leader, Kim Jong Il, on the ideology.
UPDATE 1: The New York Times also published a story on this trend.
UPDATE 2: The Economist offers coverage.
Read the full story here:
Number of NKorean defectors to SKorea tops 20,000
AP (via Washington Post)
Kim Hyung-Jin
11/15/2010
Three South Koreans arrested for attempting to defect to DPRK
Friday, October 22nd, 2010According to Yonhap:
Prosecutors said Friday they have arrested three people suspected of trying to defect to North Korea, allegedly disgruntled with South Korean society.
A medical doctor, identified only by his surname Shin, and two others are charged with attempting entry into the communist state via China last February, prosecutors said.
Seoul judges issued arrest warrants, citing that the suspects are feared to try to flee and destroy evidence.
The three returned to South Korea after failing to cross into the North, despite receiving help from an acquaintance in Sweden.
They met through an online pro-North Korea community and were quoted as having attempted defection because they were “sick of (South) Korean society,” prosecutors said.
Prosecutors have not found evidence of other parties’ involvement in the defection attempt, but are probing indications that the three had contact with the North during their stay in China.
Read the full story here:
Three suspected of attempting defection to N. Korea
Yonhap
10/22/2010
More than 100 DPRK defectors in Japan
Thursday, October 21st, 2010According to KBS:
Japan’s State Secretary for Foreign Affairs Takeaki Matsumoto says there are more than 100 North Korean escapees in Japan.
Matsumoto made the assessment on Thursday in response to a question posed by Democratic Party of Japan legislator Yosihu Arita during a meeting of a special House of Councillors committee on Japanese abductees.
Arita said a dozen North Korean escapees are under the protection of Japan’s diplomatic mission in China. He said there are reports that some of the escapees have been unable to leave China for nearly two years and urged the Japanese government to promptly address the matter.
In response, Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara said Tokyo will seek the early departure of the escapees in line with the interests of related countries.
Read the full story here:
‘More than 100 NK Escapees Have Entered Japan’
KBS
10/21/2010
DPRK defectors targets of fraud in South
Sunday, October 17th, 2010According to the AFP:
North Korean refugees struggling to adapt to a bewildering new life in South Korea are increasingly getting sucked into insurance frauds as their first taste of capitalism.
Insurance scams have for years been common in the South, and fraudsters in recent years have targeted the refugees as sometimes unwitting accomplices.
“Sometimes defectors get involved because they don’t know how the insurance system works. They just have no idea what they are doing is wrong,” an official at the Hanawon resettlement centre told AFP.
All North Koreans who flee their impoverished communist homeland for the South must spend their first 12 weeks at the centre, which lies about 80 kilometres (50 miles) south of Seoul.
It offers job education, information on South Korea and basic survival skills — such as buying a subway ticket, opening a bank account and using a credit card.
From May it has also offered a new two-hour course on insurance fraud, with investigators from the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) warning about the possible consequences.
“We expect that through education, defectors will think twice before making a decision to become an accessory to fraud,” the official, who supervises the course, told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Newly arrived refugees get government financial help but often must repay big debts to the brokers who arranged their escape via China.
This makes them susceptible to taking part in frauds, which focus on bogus medical insurance claims.
After the refugee has bought a private policy or enrols in a state scheme, or both, insurance company workers typically conspire with hospital administrative staff to issue fake certificates of treatment.
When a refugee has been reimbursed by the insurance company, and sometimes by the government, he or she hands over a portion to the accomplices.
“I received about three million won (2,700 dollars) and used the money to pay debts when I came to South Korea,” one woman in her late thirties told the JoongAng Daily newspaper.
Police in Gyeonggi province surrounding Seoul, a known centre for the scams, said that over the past five years ending March refugees received a total of 3.1 billion won from 31 insurance companies in bogus claims.
“It’s prevalent and we are constantly investigating to catch them,” said a provincial police investigator.
The watchdog FSS says refugees typically send 30 percent of their takings from the frauds to brokers in China and the rest to family still in the North.
In one case in 2008, police said they had charged 41 refugees accused of receiving a total of 420 million won through bogus medical claims.
“Insurance fraud has become almost the common thing to do among defectors after they come to South Korea,” Chun Ki-Won, a priest who helps the refugees, told AFP.
“The primary reason why insurance fraud is rapidly increasing is because it’s becoming harder for defectors to adapt to a new environment.”
Refugees find it harder than their southern-born counterparts to find well-paid jobs and some complain of discrimination.
In a survey conducted by legislator Kim Young-Woo, 66 percent of refugees described their living conditions as difficult.
Some 56 percent said their monthly income is below 500,000 won (450 dollars) — officially deemed to be the lowest sum on which families can manage.
About 17,000 North Korean defectors have gone through the Hanawon centre since it opened 11 years ago, and it is currently holding about 500 people.
Read the full story here:
Insurance fraudsters target North Korean refugees
AFP
10/17/2010
DPRK refugees head for home
Thursday, August 12th, 2010Andrei Lankov writes in the Asia Times:
Sisa Journal, an influential and well-informed South Korean weekly, recently published interesting statistics. It is well known that some 20,000 North Korean refugees currently reside in South Korea. However, the magazine reports that an estimated 200 of them are not here any more. Surprisingly, they have moved back to the North.
Who are those returnees? Broadly speaking, from this correspondent’s personal knowledge of North Korean refugees, they belong to three separate categories.
To start with, some returnees – a few dozen, perhaps, are North Korea spies who completed their missions and went back to Pyongyang to receive their medals and promotions. Indeed, as a recent attempt to assassinate Hwang Chang-yop, the highest-ranking defector from the North, demonstrated once again, it is not too difficult to plant a few intelligence agents into the steadily growing stream of refugees.
To complicate things further, most refugees have their families in the North, so it is easy for the North Korean intelligence agencies to recruit even a bona fide refugee by blackmail.
However, one should not make too much from the presence of espionage agents in South Korea. They usually have no access to sensitive information, since refugees are seldom employed in jobs that give them such access (and if they are, they are watched carefully). So, the only area where they can gather meaningful intelligence is the activities of refugee groups from North Korea. Indeed, many of the refugees who have gone missing in recent years once demonstrated suspicious interest in defectors’ groups and organizations.
Another group of returnees are those refugees who were disappointed with life in South Korea. Most of the North Koreans went South with great and often inflated expectations, but soon they discovered the life they had to lead was far less glamorous than the life they saw in smuggled copies of South Korean TV dramas.
North Korean refugees are not faring well in the South. Their average income is about one million won (US$625) a month, roughly half of the national average. They do not have many useful skills, so they have to do only badly paid unskilled work. Last but not least, they are often discriminated against by “locals” – to the extent that many of them try to pass for ethnic Koreans from China (those are discriminated against, too – but to a somewhat lesser degree).
The situation is aggravated by a sense of loneliness and alienation. So, some North Koreans begin to perceive their past life in the North as an attractive alternative, and move back.
Technically, it is easy: since the refugees have South Korean passports, they can always depart from China after using a North Korean embassy or consulate there.
It helps that the North Korean regime follows a lenient policy towards returning refugees. They are allowed to settle down in their native towns and villages, and if they make a sufficient donation (reportedly, a few tens of thousand dollars) they can even be granted good positions and privileges. They are often used for propaganda, telling horror stories about life in the capitalist hell down south. Professional propaganda mongers help them to prepare such stories in which the personal experiences of the returnees (bitter, to be sure) are liberally mixed with necessary inventions.
And finally, some refugees cannot stand the thought of the families they left behind. Many of them move back to reunite with their families. In recent years, family defections can be arranged via a professional defection broker, but there are people who due to different reasons prefer a do-it-yourself defection. They go back and sometimes perish somewhere in China or North Korea.
So, even the tremendous material advantage of the South does not always make it more attractive. Yes, merely a few hundred refugees have chosen to move back (less so, if we take into account spies and those who went to get their families). Still, this is a discomforting reminder about their position in the prosperous and sophisticated South. It also does not bode well for unification.
South Korean society is not doing well when it comes to absorbing 20,000 North Koreans, most of whom are active and even adventurous people. However, sooner or later it will have to accommodate 20 million. How will it handle this task? The experience of the refugees makes one suspect that the first few decades of a unified Korea will be a tough.
UPDATE: Chris Green at the Daily NK takes issue with the source of Lankov’s numbers:
However, the department within the Ministry of Unification, which controls defectors settlement in South Korean society, asserts that there is more to it than that. “As far as the Ministry has confirmed, only two defectors have so far returned to the North, one of them came back again,” an official with the Ministry explained to The Daily NK this evening. “That number (200) seems to be exaggerated. There are many cases where police officers who are supposed to take care of defectors and their lives lose a defector’s contact details or where defectors leave their places without notifying our officers.”
Among those who disappear from where they live, many simply move to China to live with Chinese families. Therefore, the official noted, there are “insufficient grounds” for the assertion that the 200 who disappeared have actually returned to North Korea.
Read the full story here:
North Korean refugees head for home
Asia Times
Andrei Lankov
8/13/2010
US State Department releases 2010 Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP)
Thursday, June 17th, 2010According to the Daily NK:
The U.S. Department of State released its 10th “Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP)” yesterday, once again classifying North Korea as “Tier 3,” meaning it is a country whose government does not “fully comply with the minimum standards” and is “not making significant efforts to do so.” The North joins Cuba, Kuwait, Sudan, Zimbabwe and another eight countries in Tier 3, the lowest on the list.
North Korea has been in Tier 3 since 2003, when it first appeared on the TIP.
The TIP recommends that Pyongyang move to “improve the poor economic, social, political, and human rights conditions in North Korea that render North Koreans highly vulnerable to trafficking; recognize human trafficking as a problem in North Korea; cease the systematic punishment of trafficking victims in forced labor camps and others.”
However, the report defines North Korea as a place which has made “little, if any, efforts to combat trafficking in persons through law enforcement efforts over the last year, and continued to severely restrict the movement of its citizens internally and across its borders.” It also adds, “The North Korean government continues to deny the existence of trafficking as a problem. Little information is available on North Korea’s internal legal system.”
The report explains that the most common form of trafficking involves North Korean women and girls who are forced into marriage or prostitution in China. Another form is the forced labor which is a key part of the North Korean system of political repression. As an example, the report mentions “labor mobilization campaign such as the ‘150-Day Battle’ and ‘100-Day Battle’ in 2009.”
North Korea’s notorious prison camps also come up in the report, which says, “An estimated 150,000 to 200,000 persons are held in detention camps in remote areas of the country; many of these prisoners were not duly convicted of a criminal offense. In prison camps, all prisoners, including children, are subject to forced labor, including logging, mining, and farming for long hours under harsh conditions.”
Meanwhile, the TIP also designates China as a country on the State Department’s “Tier 2 Watch List”, just one level above North Korea, and recommends that it “cease the practice of forcibly repatriating North Korean trafficking victims,” pointing out that repatriated North Koreans face harsh punishment upon their return.
Read the full sotry here:
North Koreans Vulnerable to Human Trafficking
Daily NK
Choi Yong Sang
6/15/2010
