North Korean defectors battle adapting to life within the South

More than 30,000 North Koreans have defected to the South because the famine within the Nineties, in keeping with South Korea’s Unification Ministry. The variety of North Korean defectors dropped from greater than 1,000 in 2019 to 229 final yr, after the North introduced in strict border controls to forestall unfold of the coronavirus.
Some North Koreans who efficiently circumvent the tightened restrictions on the border will go on to face prejudice within the South.
A research launched in February by the Korea Hana Foundation (KHF), a state-run group that assists North Korean defectors with settling within the South, discovered that 17% of the three,000 people polled mentioned they’d skilled discrimination over the earlier 12 months.
Though that was down from the earlier yr, it pointed to prejudice in South Korean society in opposition to defectors from the North as ongoing.
Defectors report bullying, melancholy
According to the report, defectors encounter obstacles to training, lodging and employment alternatives.
Defector Yeong-nam Eom, who escaped North Korea in 2010 and is affiliated with Seoul-based nonprofit Freedom Speakers International (FSI), mentioned he skilled discrimination when making use of for jobs, much like encounters described within the report.
“At first, I sent out my resume more than 100 times with all my background,” he mentioned, “including my education and work experience in North Korea.”
“But not one company invited me to an interview,” he mentioned. “So then I only put my experiences in South Korea on my resume and I quickly started getting calls from companies.”
He additionally reported that different defectors struggled with adapting to their new life. One younger man instructed him that he skilled extreme melancholy after feeling excluded from South Korean society whereas understanding {that a} return to the North was inconceivable.
“He was not sure of his identity anymore,” Eom mentioned. “He did not feel as if he belonged anywhere, and he became more and more depressed until he came very close to committing suicide. He did not go through with it in the end, but he struggled to find his own future in South Korea for a long time.”
Another defector instructed Eom that he was badly bullied after disclosing to his new college classmates that he was initially from the North.
How do North Koreans expertise discrimination?
The overwhelming majority of these reporting experiences of prejudice within the KHF research mentioned it was due to cultural variations between the 2 nations, similar to accent, method of talking, societal manners or life.
Forty-four % of these participating within the annual research mentioned they have been handled in another way as a result of they have been from the North. Nearly 23% mentioned they have been criticized for not having the identical stage of training or work abilities as their South Korean counterparts.
As nicely as battling totally different variations of their shared Korean language, few defectors can communicate English, because the regime within the North doesn’t encourage its individuals to look past their borders, mentioned Eun-koo Lee, co-founder and co-president of FSI.
“It can be very difficult for defectors to find a job in South Korea for many reasons, but one big issue is that they have not had the chance to learn English and are often confused with ‘Konglish’ — a combination of Korean and English — that many people in the South tend to use,” she mentioned.
Song Young-Chae, an educational and activist with the Worldwide Coalition to Stop Genocide in North Korea, mentioned lots of the defectors his group helps to regulate into a brand new life within the South have a disaster of identification.
“When they were in the North, these people never thought for themselves and simply did as the state ordered them to do,” Song mentioned.
“Now they are free and they have choices, they can travel, they can speak freely,” he added. “It’s all very confusing for many of them.”
He added that some defectors discovered integration troublesome after turning into disillusioned by the politics of their new nation. They reported feeling annoyed by an obvious lack of solidarity between the South’s lawmakers and residents who weren’t taking a stand in opposition to human rights abuses within the North in the best way they’d anticipated.
How can North-South integration be improved?
Jung In-sung, the president of the Korea Hana Foundation, mentioned in a latest interview with South Korean information company Yonhap that the individuals of the South ought to do extra to welcome defectors and settle for them as “ordinary neighbors” with out prejudice.
Jung instructed the information company that assist has beforehand tended to deal with efforts to assist defectors obtain “economic self-reliance,” however that must be expanded in order that newcomers can “be completely included and united in our society.”

Education is one space the place South Korea is tackling this. “Defectors are given a place if they want to go to university after arriving in the South, but many find it difficult to catch up because it is very different to what they studied in the North,” the FSI’s Lee mentioned.
FSI arrange with a particular purpose of serving to North Korean defectors be taught English, a language they discover “particularly hard,” Lee added.
The nonprofit has to this point assisted greater than 450 defectors to enhance their English abilities and discover work.