On Thursday, under a thick fog, a North Korean soldier ran across the demilitarized zone to safety in South Korea. He was chased by fellow soldiers and South Koreans fired a few warning shots in response.
This is the second such incident in a little over a month – another North Korean soldier was shot and wounded as he made a dramatic escape in November. According to South Korean officials, four North Korean soldiers have defected this year across the border.
It’s hard to draw conclusions about North Korea from just four incidents as people’s reason for leaving can be very personal, but experts are watching these military defections closely for clues about what’s happening in the secretive country.
Escape through the DMZ
The vast majority of defectors choose to flee North Korea via its northern border with China. A person has to be highly motivated to leave North Korea to try to cross the DMZ, said David Maxwell, a fellow at the Institute for Corean-American Studies and a retired U.S. colonel who served for years in South Korea, including patrolling the DMZ.
It’s a dangerous proposition. The DMZ is four kilometres wide: two kilometres on each side of the border. Both the North and South have fences along their side, with a largely empty area in between. The line in the middle between the North and South doesn’t actually have a fence. Instead, it’s got signposts every 100 metres warning people away.
There are some guard posts inside the fences belonging to both militaries. The DMZ, in general, is heavily militarized, and there are lots of landmines and military patrols in between the two sides. Maxwell suspects that this second North Korean defector was working at one of the guard posts, inside the fence, when he used the cover of fog to slip away.
WATCH: The U.N. Command has released video of a North Korean soldier’s dash across the DMZ in an effort to defect to the South, while under fire by his fellow countrymen. WARNING: Video contains graphic images. Discretion is advised.
He might have left for very ordinary reasons, like not trusting his officers, said Maxwell. But to him, the real question isn’t so much why people leave, as the poverty and oppression in North Korea is obvious and many would want to seek a better life elsewhere. He thinks it’s worth asking why more people don’t go.
“I think many of them are restrained by the threat of what would come of their relatives,” he said. “This soldier, likely his family, his parents, his grandparents will all be going to the gulag. They will suffer horrendously for his actions. That often prevents people from defecting.”
“To overcome that, something’s got to be really bad. His life has to be threatened.”
Health problems
Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division, said he’s concerned about the poor health of the soldiers who defect. The one who fled in November was found to have untreated hepatitis and intestinal parasites.
“This is shocking because DMZ-based soldiers certainly had to pass many loyalty tests to Kim Jong-un and the DPRK government before being placed on duty in such a high-profile and militarily sensitive post,” he wrote in an email. “Presumably, they would also get the best rations and health care that the government has to offer in order to carry out their assignments — but apparently North Korea has very little left to give them.”
If the soldiers are in such poor shape, he wrote, he wonders how ordinary people are doing.
Roberta Cohen, co-chair emeritus for the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, a U.S.-based NGO, is also concerned about defectors’ health. “You would have another reason for soldiers to be leaving: that they’re not privileged, at least the ordinary soldiers, and they don’t have adequate medical care, they don’t have adequate food.”
Chain of command
When a soldier defects, his fellow soldiers face consequences, said Maxwell. Those in his chain of command might be punished for letting their soldier defect, which might make them, in turn, more likely to flee themselves.
“We have to consider that a soldier’s ability to defect is an indicator of a breakdown in the chain of command.
“For a soldier to defect, somebody was not doing their job guarding the area where this soldier was from, or he could have been the guard. So for him to do this on his own, he had to get through the defences there and be unobserved. So there was a breakdown,” he said.
What he would be most troubled to see is an incident where a small group of soldiers defect together.
“The entire system in the North is to prevent any kind of conspiracy at any level, and the system that they have, everybody reports on everybody else. But if they start to defect in numbers, small numbers, that means that they either no longer fear that system or conditions are so bad that they’re willing to conspire and take the risk of talking to someone else about defecting.”
If a group of people defected, that would be a sign of instability in the regime, he thinks, which is worrying.
“Regime collapse is not likely to be a benign event.”
WATCH: North Korean defector Ellie Cha describes the moment she realized that Vietnamese authorities were sending her family back to China, where they might be deported back to North Korea.
What he’s not worried about is the occasional shots being fired around the DMZ when someone escapes. There have been “hundreds” of incidents where both sides fired at each other, he said, and it’s never escalated much.
“It’s an example of the professionalism of the militaries on both sides that these incidents have not escalated, have not gotten out of control. I think miscalculation will come from the political leaders, not from the military leaders on the ground at the tactical level.”
— With files from Reuters
Comments