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Won-Gi Jung
Won-Gi Jung is a reporter based in Seoul. He previously worked for the CSIS Korea Chair and East Asia Institute. Follow him on Twitter.
The South Korean military failed to immediately apprehend a male North Korean defector who crossed the border earlier this month, despite the fact that surveillance cameras captured the man’s movements 10 separate times at the heavily-fortified border.
On Tuesday, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said that human surveillance units only reported two of the 10 incidents where the North Korean man was recorded by automated cameras.
The man, who wore swimming flippers on his escape through the East Sea, was ultimately apprehended roughly six hours after he was first spotted and was later transferred to a hospital.
The revelation comes after the South Korean military also failed to swiftly catch a North Korean “redefector” who crossed the border back into the DPRK in July 2020, as well as a North Korean man who entered the South in November — an incident referred to as the “most embarrassing border security breach in years.”
According to the JCS, the recent male defector was spotted five times by coastal cameras and three times by fence cameras near a frontline military post starting at 1:05 a.m. on Feb. 16. An alarm in the border area also rang two times, but the on-duty military personnel failed to properly react, the JCS said.
Human surveillance units then reported the defector when security cameras spotted him for a ninth and 10th time between 4:16 and 4:18 a.m — more than three hours after cameras first picked up on his movements.
Jina Kim, a military expert at the Korean Institute for Defense Analysis (KIDA), said that incidents like these will become inevitable as South Korea continues to suffer from a depleting number of servicemen in the near future. Currently, more than half a million South Koreans are serving in the armed forces, but the country’s decreasing birth rate is expected to further dwindle military manpower in the coming years.
“The military should be more honest with the public [about its limitations] and acknowledge that these accidents can always happen,” she said. “It should communicate with South Koreans that it’s doing their best in the given conditions.”
As part of a greater reform to national defense, South Korea started to upgrade surveillance devices in the Demilitarized Zone in 2006. However, Kim says those upgrades are inadequate or woefully underfunded today.
“The military needs to secure enough budget to manage those high-tech devices,” Kim said. “There are separate budgets allocated for purchasing the devices and maintaining those devices, but the maintenance budget estimate is lower than what’s actually needed.”
But even with well-funded tech upgrades, some experts believe that South Korea shouldn’t put so much emphasis on perfectly monitoring its borders.
“One person can’t monitor areas equal to the size of more than 10 track fields,” said Kim Youngjun, a professor at the Korea National Defense University. “The situation itself calls attention to the need for improvement, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the military is failing to prepare for war.”
Edited by Kelly Kasulis
The South Korean military failed to immediately apprehend a male North Korean defector who crossed the border earlier this month, despite the fact that surveillance cameras captured the man’s movements 10 separate times at the heavily-fortified border.
On Tuesday, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said that human surveillance units only reported two of the 10 incidents where the North Korean man was recorded by automated cameras.
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Won-Gi Jung is a reporter based in Seoul. He previously worked for the CSIS Korea Chair and East Asia Institute. Follow him on Twitter.
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