Death of a Defector
A female defector committed suicide is causing a bit of a stir in the North Korean defector community
BEIJING - A North Korean defector who had entered South Korea early this year ended her life by throwing herself from a window of a 10th-floor apartment in downtown Seoul this week.
Kim Young-sil, 36, committed suicide in the early hours on Tuesday, South Korea’s Yonhap said, adding that her death came as a cold shock to some 1,000 North Korean settlers who live in the same apartment complex.
Kim had been previously repatriated back to North Korea from
China at least four times in her attempt to flee the starving country before she finally made it to South Korea. She was known to suffer from depression due to her post-traumatic stress from repatriation.
North Korean refugee groups in the South, however, vehemently point out that behind her death lie more fundamental problems such as the cold attitude and indifference as well as a lack of accommodative policy in South Korea for North Korean settlers, all of them acting as a trigger for her death.
While one cannot rule PTS or other mental issue, I do not consider someone who has tried to leave the country four times as being in a fragile mental state. Adjusting to a new country is difficult enough for refugees and immigrants of all stripes, but if her suicide has to do with South Korean society, it reinforces my belief that refugees ought to to be taken to America instead.
Also, the article talks about a wretched conditions of a refugee camp in Thailand. One hopes a change in administration would cause the government to stop sitting on their hands.
