The number of new North Korean defectors arriving in South Korea dropped to a record low in 2020, according to new numbers released by Seoul’s Ministry of Unification on Wednesday.
In total, 229 North Koreans settled in the South last year, a 78% decrease from the 1,047 defectors who settled in the country in 2019. South Korea has been publishing official data on new defector arrivals for roughly two decades.
The significant drop was likely influenced by North Korea’s strict border lockdown over COVID-19, which began in Jan. 2020 and is still ongoing, with no end in sight. Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director for the Human Rights Watch, said he’s “not surprised at all” and that the DPRK-China border has become increasingly difficult to cross in recent years.
“COVID-19 is certainly the largest factor, but it was just another huge hurdle that [escapees] faced,” he said. “You’ve already got serious barriers at the border now with barbed wire, a regular rotation of guards, punishments for guards who help people escape or look the other way, and a Chinese police and intelligence apparatus that is focused on chasing these people down.”
Currently, it’s unclear how many of the 229 new arrivals in 2020 actually left North Korean territory that year — many could have escaped before the pandemic and spent time in China, Southeast Asia or elsewhere before entering South Korea.
But pandemic-related controls on movement in China and Southeast Asia are “creating the bottleneck probably more so than even the North Korea-China border,” according to Sokeel Park, the South Korea country director at Liberty in North Korea (LiNK), an NGO that helps defectors settle abroad.
“If it was only the North Korea-China lockdown, then maybe some more people would be willing to take that bigger risk or pay bigger bribes,” he said.
Park told NK News that some North Koreans were still traveling along common routes towards Southeast Asia in 2020, but that the number that LiNK assisted “was vastly reduced” because of the pandemic.
“We can’t say that nobody left North Korea last year,” he said. “But it was almost impossible to leave.”
As time went on, the pandemic lockdowns appeared to have a greater effect on the number of defections: The first quarter saw 135 North Koreans settle in the South, but the numbers quickly dropped to just 12 between April and June. Another 48 people arrived between July and September and 34 more from October to December, according to the Ministry of Unification.
Of the new arrivals in 2020, 72 were male and 157 were female, giving males over 30% of the total share for the first time since 2005.
Under former DPRK leader Kim Jong Il, the number of new arrivals in South Korea per year was consistently over 2,000. But the numbers dropped immediately after Kim Jong Un came to power in 2011 and continued to dwindle to just over 1,000 in 2019.
The official total number of North Koreans who have settled in the South now stands at 33,752.
Meanwhile, South Korea announced last year that it was cutting funding to programs that help North Koreans settle in the South due to the sudden drop in new arrivals.
Robertson of the Human Rights Watch said that the drop in defectors could also affect escape routes in the future, even in a post-COVID-19 world.
“I assume that there will be a resumption of greater movements by [defectors] once the COVID-19 pandemic clears and people are able to start moving around a little more freely,” he said. “But the big question is whether the networks of people who facilitated those escapes in the past — churches or for-profit brokers, for instance — are going to be around to help or not.”
Edited by Kelly Kasulis
The number of new North Korean defectors arriving in South Korea dropped to a record low in 2020, according to new numbers released by Seoul’s Ministry of Unification on Wednesday.
In total, 229 North Koreans settled in the South last year, a 78% decrease from the 1,047 defectors who settled in the country in 2019. South Korea has been publishing official data on new defector arrivals for roughly two decades.
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