Free Escape from North Korea by Melanie Kirkpatrick Page A

‘Who’s helping North Koreans?’ ” At this point in his story, Peters paused and looked around him. It was if he still had the prospective missionaries in his sight and was waiting to count the raised hands.
    Finally, he answered his own question. “Nothing.”

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    DEFECTORS
    U ntil the mid-1990s, when food shortages began to push women and children across the border to China, most of the North Koreans who fled were men, and virtually all were privileged citizens with access to escape routes closed to ordinary people. Most were classic Cold War defectors, men in influential jobs who peddled information or military equipment in return for resettlement and protection in South Korea or the West. They were diplomats posted abroad, students studying at foreign universities, and renegade pilots who flew their Russian-made MiG-15s across the DMZ.
    There is a one-word explanation for the gender imbalance among the early defectors: sexism. For all its talk of socialist equality, modern-day North Korea is a patriarchal society with a limited number of women in positions of authority. When the famine struck in the 1990s, women’s secondary status worked to their benefit; they found it easier than their husbands or fathers or brothers
did to slip away from their state-assigned jobs and sneak across the border. Young women had—and continue to have—an additional, albeit grim, advantage: They are marketable in China as brides or sex workers. Then, as now, men have a harder time finding jobs on the black market in China. Chinese families are less likely to take in men than women, which makes male refugees more vulnerable to arrest and repatriation. When famine struck in the 1990s, the flow of North Koreans to China became heavily female. Today, more than three-quarters of the refugees who reach South Korea from China are female. 1
    The early defectors almost always left North Korea for political reasons. In some instances, travel abroad had revealed new worlds, opening the defector’s eyes to the realities of the North Korean regime and offering possibilities that were unimaginable at home. Others were self-declared patriots who believed their defections would prevent war and hasten the coming of a unified Korea under South Korea’s freer political system. Still others were fleeing for their lives after committing some supposed transgression against the state that, had they stayed, would have condemned them to the gulag.
    Few ordinary citizens escaped North Korea during the pre-famine period. The borders were sealed, and news of the outside world was scarce. Unless he had relatives in China with whom to stay, a North Korean had nowhere to go. Moreover, China was poor; it did not yet offer the comparative advantages that economic prosperity afforded it by the 1990s. In any event, North Korea’s societal controls were such that a man who failed to show up at his state-assigned job for more than a few days was presumed to have deserted his duties, thereby putting his family at risk for punishment. The underground railroad did not take off until the late 1990s, when the number of refugees in China swelled near the half-million mark and Christian activists started helping them escape.
    In the pre-famine days, the rare North Korean who found his way to China was on his own. Evans Revere, a former American
diplomat in Beijing, recalled his astonishment at encountering two North Koreans who turned up at the door of the United States Embassy in 1982, asking for help to reach South Korea. “I may have been the first American diplomat in China to have had to deal with North Korean refugees,” he said. 2
    Revere was the duty officer one evening when the Marine guard at the embassy entrance phoned to say there were two guys sitting in front of his post. They were dirty and disheveled and had plopped themselves down on the floor of the vestibule. “I can’t understand their