What should we call North Koreans who have fled the country?

Despite the number of North Koreans leaving their country over the past few years, the international community has failed to settle upon a suitable nomenclature to describe their status. On the one hand, this failure to chose a suitable term has been because of the different approaches on how to treat North Koreans outside of the country. On the other hand, the lack of consensus has sprouted because of a failure to reconfigure views held on the reasons for motivation to leave.

For each year during and after the famine, the number of people who crossed the Yalu or Tumen rivers on the border dividing China and North Korea increased. It is estimated that by 2009 between 100,000 and 300,000 North Koreans were living in border-region provinces in China. To date, an additional 25,000 are living in South Korea, with a few thousand more spread out around the world. As mentioned in the previous article, early North Koreans originally left the country for political reasons. This has helped frame the discussion on the label of North Koreans outside the country within a context of defecting. However, over the years, the predominant motivation for North Koreans deciding to cross the border has fluctuated greatly.

Not surprisingly, hunger and extreme poverty were the prime push factors to leave North Korea during the height of the famine in the 1990s. By the early 2000s, hunger was just one of many other motivations cited by North Korean fugitives, such as loss of status, frustration over lack of opportunities and political persecution due to family history. Within the timeframe of mass leaving from the country over the past twenty years, how we have chosen to perceive those people has changed a little.

In the mid-1990s, the impoverished North Koreans outside of the country began to be perceived as “refugees” or according to the UN “North Korean asylum seekers”. Economic factors are generally not included in a definition of "refugee," although the escape can become economically motivated as a result of war and natural disasters. An overwhelming majority (95%) of the refugees living in China cite economic factors as the main reason for escape. Political discontent, repression and other motivations are mentioned by only 5 percent of the refugees. In a narrow sense, this fact seems to confirm the Chinese government's claim that North Koreans are “economic migrants,” who come to work rather than “refugees” who are in need of protection from fear of being persecuted.

By emphasizing the economic nature of the migration, the Chinese authorities consider themselves free from any obligations stated in the 1951 “United Nations Convention on the Status of Refugees” and its 1967 Protocol. Under national law and in an agreement with North Korea these “economic migrants” have no legal right to enter or remain in China. This fact gives the Chinese authorities the arbitrary right to detain and eventually repatriate any North Korean migrant they can come by. In interviews, as many as 97 percent of North Koreans living in China say they have no intention to ever return to North Korea, regardless of the situation in China. The amount of preparation, time and strength invested in the escape from North Korea is wasted when the migrants are detained and sent back by the Chinese authorities. Not only are they repatriated back to the harsh conditions from which they first escaped but they also risk being punished under North Korean criminal laws.

With regard to the aforementioned situation in China, it becomes quite clear that North Koreans who chose, or rather were forced to leave their homeland, are both economic migrants, defectors and refugees, all at the same time. It is true that these people are mostly motivated by economic reasons but at the same time they need refugee-status because they risk persecution once repatriated to North Korea. The fact that there is a palpable fear of repatriation and the fact that over 90 % are ready to live under quite harsh and insecure conditions in China rather than returning to their homeland, shows that these people are as much refugees as economic migrants. Furthermore, the act of voting with their feet by crossing the border, indicates an overt dissatisfaction with the government policies and the negative conditions it creates. In the eyes of the North Korean authorities, this is considered as an act of defection which makes them “defectors”, a punishable offense. The three labels of "defector" "economic migrants " or "refugees" have slightly passive connotations when contrasted with the terms “dissident” and “exile” which connote active political engagement in opposition to an official policy, especially that of an authoritarian state. A dissident can be sentenced to confinement or house arrest. An “exile” can be considered a dissident who has been banished either internally to some isolated parts of the country or externally to a foreign country. In a sense, an exile is always forced to leave a certain place even if the act itself sometimes appears to be voluntary.

With those labels in mind, what should we call North Koreans who have voluntarily left the country?

Part 3 will answer that question. This article was written by Jusup Aslakhanov. EAHRNK does not necessarily endorse the views expressed in the article.