Note to self: Never defect to North Korea

[Pseudolus]

I'm sure it seemed a good idea at the time.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17767626

Spoiler:

In 1985, North Korean agents approached Oh Kil-nam and suggested he defect.

The agents offered him an important job working as an economist for the North Korean government and promised to provide free treatment for his wife's hepatitis.

Oh took the offer seriously. He had just completed his PhD in Germany on a Marxist economist. Back at home in South Korea, he had been active in left-wing groups opposed to the country's authoritarian regime.

His wife Shin Suk-ja was horrified by the idea of going to the North and opposed it from the start. "Do you know what kind of place it is?" she asked. "You have not even been there once. How can you make such a reckless decision?"

But Oh replied that the Northerners were Koreans too - they "cannot be that brutal", he told her.

So at the end of November 1985, Oh, his wife and two young daughters travelled via East Berlin and Moscow to Pyongyang.

When they arrived at Pyongyang airport, Oh began to see he had made a mistake in coming. Communist party officials and children clutching flowers were there to meet them. But despite the cold of a North Korean December, the children were not wearing socks and their traditional clothes were so thin that they shivered. "When I saw this I was really surprised and my wife even started to cry."

Communist party officials drove Oh and his family to what they described as a guest house. The building was inside a camp in the mountains and guarded by soldiers. There was no treatment for Shin's hepatitis and no job for Oh as an economist. Instead, for several months, North Koreans indoctrinated them in the teachings of The Great Leader Kim Il-sung, the founder of the current regime.

Oh and his wife began working for a North Korean radio station. "My wife began as a broadcaster but she was not able to carry on for long. Her health had deteriorated and at the same time she was quite critical of the North."

Oh was less independent. "I began to read scripts based on party directives - in the end, I was like a parrot."

While he was there he came across South Koreans who had been abducted, including two air stewardesses and two passengers from a Korean Air Lines flight that had been hijacked by North Koreans in 1969.

Oh was approached to go on a mission abroad. He was to be based in the North Korean embassy in Copenhagen, from where he could do what had been done to him - lure South Korean students in Germany to the North Korean embassy.

When Shin heard about the plan she was furious. "I remember the two of us talking about it softly under the blanket. I told my wife that by fulfilling this mission, we would preserve our livelihood in North Korea. But she slapped me in the face."

Shin said they would have to pay the price for his mistakes - he could not entrap others.

"She told me I had to find a way to escape when I got to Europe, that there would be a way to rescue the family."

On arriving at Copenhagen airport, Oh managed to escape from North Korean control. "I approached the immigration desk. I had a little piece of paper on which I had written: HELP ME. I explained that the passport they were seeing was not my real passport, that my real name was Oh Kil-nam, and that my real passport had been confiscated in North Korea."

After two months in jail in Denmark, the Danish authorities sent Oh to Germany. There he tried to free his family, but with no luck. "My biggest mistake was not to approach the German Foreign Ministry directly."

For Shin and her two daughters, Oh's defection was catastrophic. They were taken to Yodok concentration camp, where the North Korean government imprisons its enemies. The conditions in this slave labour camp are reportedly as bad as anything in Nazi Germany or Stalin's Gulag.

For a time, Oh heard nothing about the fate of his family. Then in February 1991 he managed to get six photographs of his wife and daughters and a tape cassette with a message from them.

"On the tape my daughters were telling me how much they missed me and my wife was saying that perhaps it would be OK for me to come back now."

Oh suspected a trap. "North Korea was trying to stop me from heading back to South Korea because I had experience of working in its propaganda division. I knew a lot of its secrets, including the fact that many people from South Korea, who were kidnapped and taken to the North, were working there."

But nonetheless the realisation that he could not get back in touch with his family was devastating. "By that time I had completely given up. My whole body was just broken down."

In 1992, he returned to South Korea. "I felt that my death was not far away. I just wanted to be close to my brother and my sister on my death bed."

Oh did not die but nor has he ever heard from his wife and daughters again. He does not know whether they are alive or whether they died in the prison camp.

"I do feel that I may be able to meet my family again, but it is just a hope, a glimmer of hope inside a dark tunnel.

"I hope there will come a day when I can meet my family again, hug them and embrace them, and cry tears of happiness. If it does happen it will be the happiest day of my life."

TL;DR: It was not, in actual point of fact, a good idea.

[Happy Skunk]

Lost me in the first three sentences

[Pseudolus]

Oh did they?

[oirg]

Also, even if you do defect, don't be in a threatening position of power when regimes change.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/17/wo...pagewanted=all

But North Korea watchers were startled this week by the state-run Korean Central News Agency’s announcement on Monday that Vice Marshal Ri, chief of the general staff of the Korean People’s Army and until now widely seen as one of Mr. Kim’s most trusted mentors, had been removed from all posts because of “illness.”
Since Mr. Kim replaced his father, Kim Jong-il, at the top of North Korea’s opaque hierarchy after the elder Kim’s death in December, analysts have scanned nearly every scrap of information coming out of the country for clues to the new leader’s intentions. With Monday’s development, some analysts said, one thing at least is clear: Mr. Kim is wielding his family’s favorite tool of control — using and discarding the senior officials around him like pawns on a chessboard.

[ShebaPoe]

Guy suggests he and his family move to north Korea

They go. It sucks.

While traveling abroad, he defects.

His family is enslaved and is probably dead.

In a way it's nice to see a Marxist get exactly what he wants. But not so nice for the wife and kids.

[MathinTucson]

There are a number of problems with Marxism in practice. One of them is that when you give too much power to politicians and bureaucrats, it never ends well. This guy didn't know that in 1985 and took his child to North Korea? He should be jailed for child abuse.

[OddSox]

Originally Posted by MathinTucson

He should be jailed for child abuse.

yup, I don't think he's been punished enough. I guess we'll just have to settle for him never seeing his family again.

[FormLetter]

North Korea could use a little democratic nation-building.

[Arthur Kade]

So, inquiring minds want to know, is this moran still a Marxist?

Goes to show you can get a PhD and still be a complete tard.

[whisper]

If you refuse to pay attention to the actual impacts of your policies, then you deserve to suffer the consequences of them.