Scripted 'apologies' allow North Korean defectors to return

PYONGYANG, North Korea, June 17 (UPI) -- It was a uniquely North Korean press conference: a middle-age woman softly crying into a handkerchief as she thanked leader Kim Jong Un for giving her a second chance.

The image persisted in many people's memories after 2012, when the footage was released on North Korean state television.

But the event is neither remembered because it was broadcast to ordinary North Koreans, nor because the woman shifted between remorse and gratitude across the span of 80 minutes, as she read from a scripted apology.

Rather, the press conference was novel because Pak Jong Suk was a former North Korean defector who had mysteriously returned to her homeland from South Korea, where she had been living since 2006.

Sitting before dozens of flashing cameras in Pyongyang, Pak said South Korean spies in China drugged her and took her to Seoul, where she said she slaved under miserable conditions, cleaning subway stations and tending to a sick 90-year-old man.

Three years later, Pak's bizarre confession has become a yardstick for similar "testimonials" from North Koreans who have publicly claimed South Korean intelligence agents or Christian missionaries tricked them into leaving their families behind.

Many of these former defectors were unlikely candidates for repatriation to North Korea, where they struggled with food shortages and had little affection for the country they left, according to acquaintances.

The choreographed press conferences and "confessions" instead have become a tactic for North Korea's propaganda machine.

At a time in North Korea when rising access to media and communication technologies is weakening the state's monopoly over the minds of ordinary people, the re-defector press conferences are an attempt to bolster North Korea's image to a domestic audience that has come to know South Korea through conversations with relatives on the outside.

The measures to rein in defectors are coercive but analysts say some returnees do benefit for their cooperation with the state.

Christopher Green, the international manager for South Korea-based media outlet Daily NK, said there are underlying reasons for the re-defections, including the prospects of a better life for the returnee and sometimes the family.

In the case of Pak Jong Suk, "she really did get an opportunity to live somewhere different," Green said in a recent Skype interview with UPI. "Her son's employment was made much more stable by her return. There was a change in her socioeconomic status."

That, however, doesn't mean the returnees are not being stigmatized behind the scenes, or that they're not lying on camera about their basic story, Green said.

According to the friends Pak left behind in South Korea, she returned to the North because her son was being punished for her voluntary defection after authorities found him guilty of falsifying her death report. She was coerced into returning, they said, but the tactic took an unusual turn when she became a tool of North Korean propaganda.

Steven Denney, a doctoral student at the University of Toronto who co-authored a paper with Green on the re-defector press conferences, told UPI that North Korea's propagandists are going out of their way to show Kim's mercy to those who left the country.

"They're going to tightly control that message, which kind of leaves us in the dark," Denney said. "But it's interesting that they're even delivering that message."

North Korea most recently employed the tactic on the "Laos Nine," a group of adolescent defectors who were making their way to South Korea when they were intercepted in Laos by local authorities in 2013.

Last December, North Korea staged a press conference where the teenage group reappeared to tell their story – one that was completely aligned with state objectives but conflicted with the testimony of a South Korean missionary who sheltered the homeless youths in Laos.

In May, CNN reported the young repatriates had "said all the right things" in an exclusive group interview under North Korea's supervision, presumably because Pyongyang wanted to dissolve rumors the group was imprisoned or abused.

While it is impossible to confirm whether the teens or the other re-defectors are actually benefiting from North Korea's largesse, North Korean propaganda has some basis in reality, said Green, because it is able to exploit the real problem of prejudice that more than 28,000 North Korean defectors face in South Korea.

"The re-defectors do say on camera they were discriminated against in South Korea," Green said.

Re-defector claims of discrimination, Green and Denney said, line up with information seeping into North Korea about the South, usually from defectors to their families, who communicate through Chinese mobile phones smuggled into North Korea.

Green said his interviews with North Korean defectors indicate not all information about South Korea is good.

"North Korean defectors arriving in South Korea do receive resettlement funds, and yes, there are state-led initiatives to assist with their employment and help them get resettled, to help them join South Korean society with the minimum amount of suffering and hardship," he said.

"But this doesn't always work for various reasons, and that information is also getting back into North Korea."

Nearly all re-defectors who claimed to have repatriated from South Korea did become part of a lower class, according to their testimonies. That claim is compatible with the reality in South Korea for many defectors – who feel outside the social structure as they toil away in humble jobs.

What North Koreans hear about South Korea at the press conferences, then, reflects what defectors' families could know through private conversations, which is what makes North Korea's propaganda narrative cohere to some aspects of North Korean defector reality in South Korea.

But it is highly unlikely anti-North Korean prejudice in South Korea would compel a defector to return to the North, a country that typically punishes those who escape to the South.

"Almost all defectors with whom I speak tell me very openly that life in South Korea – a highly capitalist society – is competitive, and it's not always pleasant, but it is what it is," Green said.

"But nevertheless they tell us they would not dream of going back."