The inside story of the man who defected from North Korea and then went back again
For most people, an insanely dangerous journey across a 2.5 mile-wide border guarded by barbed-wire fences, land mines, tank traps and several thousand troops at either end would be quite enough. But on New Year’s Day, former gymnast Kim Woo Joo did it for a second time, returning to North Korea barely a year after he’d escaped the world’s most infamous hermit kingdom for a new life in the South.
Such ‘boomerang defections’ are very rare: of the 30,000 people who’ve escaped North Korea and settled in the South, only around 30 are known to have gone back. But what makes 29-year-old Kim’s boomerang even rarer is that he crossed both times via the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) which separates the two countries rather than take the more usual route via China.
A military security camera first picked him up at about 1pm on Saturday January 1 just south of the DMZ in Gangwon province. He was warned by loudspeaker to leave the area and appeared to do so: but six hours later, under cover of darkness, he was using his gymnastic skills to climb a 10-foot barbed wire fence on the DMZ’s southern perimeter. He was spotted on three more cameras, triggered a fence alarm and was later detected on thermal observation devices deep inside the zone, but nonetheless made it through unscathed back to the North – where, unsurprisingly, he has not been heard from since.
He has left behind few traces of his temporary life in the South. At his crossing point military investigators found footprints and feathers, presumably torn from his coat by the barbed wire. Reporters who went to the tiny £85 per month apartment in northern Seoul where he lived alone found it empty save for a blanket, neatly folded, left outside for collection. He worked mainly as a night cleaner in office buildings, made few friends and rarely spoke to his neighbours. He left bills for rent and medical insurance unpaid, and he used as little gas, water and electricity as possible. He stands less than five feet tall and weighs under eight stone. Were it not for the attention around his escape he would seem almost a ghost, one of the millions of subsistence-level Seoulites whose plight was part of the smash Netflix series Squid Game.
There are two main questions surrounding his escape: why go back at all, and why go back via such a dangerous route? The second is perhaps easier to answer: in one word, coronavirus. Controls on North Korea’s border with China, usually reasonably active with traders and workers crossing legally, have been hugely tightened in an effort to keep the virus out of the country, with guards reportedly ordered to shoot to kill. This has drastically reduced the scope for illegal escapes: in 2020, the year Kim defected, only 229 North Koreans came to the South, less than 10 per cent of the usual number.
As for the first question: some return to deliver money to family members, to help a relative in trouble, or even to try and bring others out. But many find that they simply can’t settle in the South, for their original escapes are time travel as much as simple journeys. North Korea is a country stuck several decades behind the modern world: there are few private cars, agricultural equipment is basic and manual, and only the most senior and trusted officials have access to the internet. South Korea, in contrast, is a hyperkinetic futurist maelstrom on the cutting edge of progress: Bloomberg’s 2021 Innovation Index ranks it as the second most technologically advanced country in the world after Germany. To go from one to the other, even via countries such as China and then Vietnam, Cambodia or Thailand, is to experience the most profound and disorientating culture shock imaginable.
Small wonder that newly-arrived defectors are enrolled in a 12-week residential programme run by the Ministry of Unification at the Hanawon Institute. Here they’re taught everything they need to survive in a modern society: how to use an ATM and a bank account, how to apply for jobs, how representative democracy works, and so on. The ministry also helps them with accommodation, arranges medical care and provides financial assistance, and once they leave Hanawon for society at large they’re assigned a mentor to check up on them and ensure that they have what they need.
But even all this can’t solve every problem. As if the dislocation of this new existence wasn’t enough, many defectors have suffered profound trauma in making the journey. They often leave family members behind, opening them up to reprisals from the authorities. They live in constant fear of being caught and sent back, sometimes for months or even years until they can reach South Korea. Female defectors are often forced into sex work.
And the welcome they receive in the South is by no means uniformly positive. Some find it hard to adjust to holding a much lower status job than they did back home. Chan-yang Ju, who left North Korea in 2010, said that “in the North my aunt was a doctor, and she and her family were very rich and important in North Korean society, but in the South she had to work in a restaurant.” She returned home in 2018. Female defectors sometimes find themselves in demand on the dating circuit – ‘northern woman with southern man,’ as a traditional saying goes – but that too is a double-edged sword.
Many report discrimination and being treated as second-class citizens, even to the extent of feeling obliged to disguise their accent in order to mask their origins. This was used in Squid Game (though the subtlety was lost on Western audiences) with Kang Sae-byeok – a North Korean defector who’s one of the main characters, only using her natural accent when talking in private to her brother.
Almost half of the defectors surveyed last year admitted to mental health problems such as anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, even though – or perhaps especially because – such topics are largely taboo in the North. Where North Korea’s total collectivism means that nobody can go under the radar, South Korea’s more atomised society makes it easier for people to slip through the cracks. Defector Joseph Park says that “South Korea is a society where you can live without relationships. In North Korea you need relationships to survive, and the system forces you to have relations as well.”
The South Korean government, recognising – perhaps belatedly – the extent of the problem, this week announced increased support for defectors suffering psychological and economic difficulties. Nearly 25 per cent of defectors are in the lowest income bracket, six times the ratio of the general population. But all this will come too late for Kim.
So what will happen to Kim Woo Joo now he’s back in the North? No-one knows for sure. At the very least he will probably be forced to attend propaganda meetings where he will tell people how terrible life in the South is. He and his family may be punished further, which in the North tends not to mean community service – such service is seen as the everyday responsibility of every civilian – but prison camps, which are among the most brutal places on earth. ‘Gone to the mountains’, North Koreans call it: the euphemism for someone who simply vanishes one day and is never heard from again. It must be the hope of every decent person that Kim is spared such a fate.
Additional reporting by Julian Ryall
Boris Starling’s latest novel The Law Of The Heart, a love story set in North Korea, is out now. Buy from Telegraph Books for £8.99
