Marching Through Suffering by Sandra Fahy

Author:Sandra Fahy [Fahy, Sandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POL054000, POLITICAL SCIENCE / World / Asian, HISTORY / Asia / Korea
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-04-06T16:00:00+00:00

5

BREAKING POINTS

“That person who defects has reached the point where their very existence is dead . . . by the time they arrive at that point to put their decision into practice,” Jae-young Yoon (45) explained; to make the decision to defect, one had to already be dead in a sense. The people who shared their stories with me are exceptional in the sense that they represent a tiny minority of people who have left North Korea. Regardless of the varied factors that precipitated their departures, the mere fact of their crossing into China places them in an infinitesimal class of people in relation to the rest of the population of North Korea, the vast majority of which remains and possibly will never contemplate leaving. Just looking at the numbers, choosing to leave for any reason is an exceptional act. The estimated 26,124 North Koreans now in South Korea are exceptional, adept, and lucky, which does not exclude those who remain in the North from these same characteristics.1 In the history of the divided peninsula, the total number of defections has never been so high. However, if we consider that the population of North Korea is about 24 million, then the number of defections to South Korea and further afield is minuscule.2 Although defection is on the rise, particularly since the famine, the majority of people stay put.

In defecting, the risk to life is great. Travel into China without a legal permit is deemed punishable by up to five years of labor reform under Article 233 of North Korea’s Criminal Code, and deemed an act of treason against the nation under Article 62 of the Criminal Code; however, former North Korean officials report the existence of a shoot-to-kill policy that dates back to the early 1990s.3 China classifies North Korean migrants as illegal and economic, not as refugees. As such they are not provided legal channels to access refugee status. Getting through China and other countries to South Korea or elsewhere means risking everything. Even before the act of crossing from North Korea into China, the most typical route of defection, an exceptional decision has to be made. This chapter explores the resistance to this ultimate decision in the oral accounts of interviewees, and the threshold of physical and mental suffering at which it is made. The argument here is that defection was an option for an exceptional minority, but increased thresholds of suffering led to intranational choices for many others. I caution against the interpretation that increased suffering—albeit a measure not strictly or universally quantifiable—will lead inevitably to increased likelihood of defection. From this cautionary observation another follows. We cannot assume that those who defect are necessarily those who were worse off.

Could the vast majority of North Koreans have stayed because they are under duress? We may be quick to guess that people stayed for reasons of social pressure, coercion, or threats of violence and imprisonment, but the oral accounts suggest that the decision to remain inside North Korea is informed by more complex, nuanced factors.

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