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2
INTRODUCTION
“In many cases, it is a minus for me to be tagged as a North Korean defector.
I sometimes feel that I am a second-degree citizen when I get phone calls from police
officers who want to check my whereabouts and recent activities”
A North Korean defector
1
It was not until recently that responses to humanitarian crises, such as hunger-stricken
people fleeing from North Korea, were accorded a higher priority in the policy agenda for the
Republic of Korea (hereafter referred as South Korea).
Although there were a continuous
incoming of those dissatisfied with North Korea’s politics, economy and the social system to the
South, it was not until the mid-1990s when such a phenomenon of Talbukja
2
has been noticed
as the North’s economic and food crises deteriorated
3
.
Until the 1980s, most Talbukja came to
South Korea across the heavily militarized “demilitarized zone,” a quasi-frontier between North
and South.
But, in the 1990s, Talbukja crossed the northern borders of North Korea into China
and Russian where some parts of the Tumen River are shallow and narrow.
4
A total of 1,050
North Koreans settled in South Korea during the period between the birth of South Korea and
1999. With the rapid increase from 2000, the number of Talbukja has increased to 6,300 as of
January 2005 according to the Ministry of Unification in South Korea.
5
Yet, while the increase is significant, the numbers are still small compared to the
numbers of Talbukja presently residing illegally in China and the potential number of migrants
who would seek freedom and economic opportunity in the South if the border between the two
countries were open.
Although it is difficult to get an exact figure of North Koreans who are
wandering around in Northeast China, the Russian Far East, Inner Mongolia, and in some of the
Southeast Asian countries, the number of these people would be estimated from the low official
number of 10,000 estimated by the Ministry of Unification in South Korea, to as many as
300,000 estimated by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who extrapolated results from
large-scale surveys of villages in the border region (HRW, 2002:2). The disturbing fact is that
because of their status as illegal residents, those Talbukja are in constant fear of being arrested
and deported by either local police or secret North Korean agents. Cases of human rights
violations are innumerous and especially the trafficking of North Korean women in China have
reached a particularly serious levels (Yoon, 1999).
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1
Kim Youngmin, a North Korean defector, interviewed by Jeany Choi, January 3, 2005.
2
The legal status of North Koreans who escaped from North Korea is not clear. The media has called them
"defectors" while human rights groups and the US Congress have labeled them "refugees" and "asylum seekers"
The Chinese government says they are "economic migrants." The term that will be used in this paper is Talbukja
which is most commonly used in South Korea. I explain later why I prefer to use this term.
3
Estimates of the number of famine deaths range between 20,000 and 100,000.
Human Rights Watch, “The
Invisible Exodus: North Koreans in the People’s Republic of China,” Human Rights Watch Report, Vol. 14, no.8
(c), (November 2002), p. 2; Hazel Smith, “North Koreans in China: Defining the Problems and Offering Some
Solutions,” in Tsuneo Akaha, Ed., Seminar Proceedings of Human Flows Across National Borders in Northeast
Asia, United Nations University, Tokyo Japan, 20-21, (November 2002), pp. 4-5.
4
See Appendix A for a map.
5
Ministry of Unification. "Focus on North Korea," 2004. Available at http://www.unikorea.go.kr.
6
To find out more about the sufferings of North Koreans in China, see Human Rights Watch, “Invisible Exodus”;
Convention