"Most people escape due to poverty, but we have to pay attention that those who have stable life in North Korea also escape, some defect for their children's education," lawmaker Park Byeong-seug told the Yonhap news agency. Of these, 3.5 percent were soldiers and government agents.
The number of North Koreans defecting to the South actually decreased in the first eight months of 2017 compared to the previous year, with a total of 780 people defecting in the January to August period, according to government data reported in local media. "For all the regime's spending on sophisticated weapons, monuments to the Kim family and bribes for elites in Pyongyang, even trusted soldiers suffer terrible malnourishment," Brian Hook, senior policy adviser to the Secretary of State, wrote in the The New York Times last week. One walked across the border-taking the calculated risk that land mines were disabled after a fire at the border in April-and the other swam across the river Han, the estuary of which is on the border between North and South, attaching pieces of plastic foam and tree branches to his shoulders.Ī third soldier, a member of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's guard who was being trained at his villa near the border with China, also crossed the Amnok River to defect in June, South Korean news agency Yonhap reported in July, citing a North Korean human rights civic group.Īccording to local media reports, the defections are linked to increasing food shortages and the prospect of a better life in the South. In June, two others-both, like Oh, in their early 20s-fled North Korea through the DMZ. Oh, as the defector has so far been identified, was not the first North Korean soldier this year to stage a daring escape. But it was also a sign of how desperate many in North Korea appear to be to escape their harsh existence in the country dubbed the hermit kingdom. The 24-year-old's dramatic defection across the Joint Security Area, the only part of the 160-mile-long Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in which soldiers from the two countries face each other, was the third of its kind since the end of the Cold War, the first in a decade. He collapsed on a pile of dead leaves, bleeding profusely, but held on long enough to survive the transfer to the Ajou University Hospital and the many surgical operations that followed.
When the jeep appeared to hit a ditch just few feet away from the military demarcation line, the soldier was left with no choice but to quite literally run for his life, as his former colleagues followed, firing as many as 40 bullets. On a cloudy November afternoon, a North Korean soldier jumped in a truck and sped across the border into South Korea in a dramatic bid to flee his homeland.
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