By Newsweek.com
August 9, 2024
Credits @FFHR.CZ
A North Korean defector fled into South Korea after crossing the de facto maritime border.
The man passed through the Northern Limit Line in the Yellow Sea, which Koreans call the West Sea, and arrived at Goyodong Island, which sits just a few miles off North Korea, local media cited military sources as saying.
"Our military has secured an unidentified individual, presumed to be from North Korea, and has handed him over to the relevant authorities," South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff told media in a text message. The statement said the details of his trip are being investigated, adding that no "unusual movements" by North Korean forces had been observed.
Decades-high tensions are flaring between the two Koreas. Pyongyang and the U.S. ally are technically still in a state of war, having never signed a peace treaty since the end of the Korean War in 1953.
The North harshly punishes those it catches trying to escape the country. Penalties range from labor and political prison camps, where they are subject to torture, to public execution.
The last defection across the Northern Limit Line in the Yellow Sea was in May 2023, when a family of nine made the trip aboard a wooden boat.
Newsweek reached out to the Korean Defense Ministry and the North Korean Embassy in China with written requests for comment.
The number of North Korean defectors reaching the South was 196 in 2023—triple the previous year but lower than pre-pandemic levels, according to Seoul's Ministry of Unification. Many were so-called "elite" defectors, including diplomats, international students and overseas workers.
Kim Jong Un is taking note, Hanna Song, executive director of the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights, told North Korea-focused media outlet NK New earlier this year: "North Korea will be a lot more conscious about who it sends abroad. New diplomats sent abroad will likely be more ideologically trained."
The story of one of these "elites" was revealed in July when Ri Il Kyu, a former senior counsel at the North Korean Embassy in Cuba, sat down for a tell-all interview with The Chosun Daily.
The flight of Ri and his family marked the highest-level defection since that of former Deputy Ambassador to the United Kingdom Thae Yong-ho in 2016.
Thae went on to become the first North Korean to win a seat in the South's parliament four years later and has been a vocal critic of his former government. Also in 2016, a former spy with North Korea's feared Ministry of State Security, Lee Chul-eun, defected after swimming across a stretch of the Yellow Sea.
Far more North Koreans flee across their shared border with China, which is more accessible and less heavily militarized than the Demilitarized Zone demarcating the Koreas, with some eventually seeking asylum at a South Korean Embassy in a third country.
However, in China, these refugees are at risk of human trafficking and sexual exploitation and live under the threat of repatriation to North Korea.
Source: newsweek.com
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