2009 defection summary

According to KBS (h/t RoK Drop):

The number of North Koreans who fled to South Korea in 2009 is known to be close to three-thousand.

A Ministry of Unification official said more than 2,200 women and almost 680 men from North Korea entered South Korea in 2009, totaling more than 2,950 in a preliminary tally.

The official added that this makes the cumulative number of North Korean escapees total approximately 18-thousand, which is almost certain to surpass 20-thousand in 2010.

Soms interesting supplementary information was posted at Yonhap:

The number of North Korean defectors hiding in China is estimated to have shrunken in recent years to almost one tenth the level seen in the late 1990’s, a U.S. demographer said Thursday.

The assessment is a controversial but important factor in shedding light on the conditions of those North Koreans who live in China. The defectors live under the constant fear of deportation because their country considers defection a capital crime.

Activists and relief groups say tens of thousands of North Korean defectors live in China, but Dr. Courtland Robinson at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health said the number may have dropped to between 6,000 and 16,000 as of 2007.

“About a decade ago, people were literally being starved to death and fleeing to China,” Robinson said in an interview, putting the 1998 figure between 50,000 and 130,000. Famine had reportedly killed as many as 2 million people in North Korea in the mid-1990s.

An official at South Korea’s Unification Ministry, which handles affairs involving North Korea, said he could not support the figures given by either activists or Robinson, arguing it was impossible to determine the exact number of those defectors in hiding.

Robinson, speaking on the sidelines of a conference on North Korean defectors in Seoul, said he had turned to local residents in China as informants to assess the number of defectors living in their towns. He then applied demographic methods to come up with what he called “plausible ranges” of a population.

“The very essence of these measurements is to start selecting sites randomly, not sites where you think North Koreans may be living,” he said.

“It’s a combination of things that has contributed to the decrease. Tightened border security on both sides is one,” Robinson said. “Defectors have also evolved in terms of their understanding of how difficult it is to live in China.”

China reportedly stepped up its crackdown on North Korean defectors ahead of its hosting of the Summer Olympics in August 2008. Under a treaty forged in 1998, China is believed to arrest and repatriate North Korean defectors even though they could face imprisonment, torture and even execution.

Chinese residents are reportedly rewarded with cash if they report North Korean defectors, who find it difficult to hide their identities or get a job because they can’t speak Chinese.

Robinson said defectors have apparently accelerated the pace at which they “move on through China,” heading to countries such as Thailand where it is deemed safer or easier to go to South Korea.

Over 16,000 North Koreans have come to South Korea since the 1950-53 Korean War that ended in a truce rather than a peace treaty. The annual number of defectors is increasing year by year and the Unification Ministry expects the accumulated figure to top 20,000 this year.

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