THREATS FROM NORTH KOREA: South Korean defects to North Korea in rare northward crossing of heavily armed border

 

A South Korean has crossed the heavily fortified border in a rare defection to North Korea, Seoul said on Sunday.

South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said it carried out a search operation after detecting the person at around 9:20pm on Saturday on the eastern side of the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas.

“We’ve confirmed that the person crossed the Military Demarcation Line border about 10:40pm and defected to the North,” the JCS said.

It said it could not confirm whether the person was alive, but sent a notice to the North via a military hotline asking for protection.

It was unclear if this was a rare case of a South Korean hoping to defect to the North, or it could be a North Korean who briefly entered the South Korean territory for some reason before returning to the North. The border crossing, which is illegal in South Korea, came as North Korea carries out strict anti-coronavirus measures since shutting borders in early 2020, though it has not confirmed any infections.

A public and political uproar emerged after North Korean troops shot dead a South Korean fisheries official who went missing at sea in September 2020, for which Pyongyang blamed antivirus rules and apologized.

Two months earlier, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un declared a national emergency and sealed off a border town after a North Korean defector who he said had Covid-19 symptoms illegally crossed the border into the North from the South.

The North’s prolonged lockdowns and restrictions on interprovincial movement have also pushed the number of North Korean defectors arriving in the South to an all-time low. Cross-border relations soured after denuclearization negotiations between Pyongyang and Washington stalled since a failed summit in 2019.

South Korea and a US-led UN force are technically still at war with North Korea since the 1950-1953 Korean war ended in an armistice rather than a peace treaty.

The two Koreas are split along the world’s most heavily armed border, called the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). An estimated 2 million mines are peppered inside and near the 248km (155-mile)-long, 4km (2.5-mile)-wide DMZ, which is also guarded by barbed wire fences, tank traps and combat troops on both sides.

Defecting via the DMZ is rare. At the height of their Cold War rivalry, both Koreas sent agents and spies to each other’s territory through the DMZ, but no such incidents have been reported in recent years.

About 34,000 North Koreans have defected to South Korea since the late 1990s to avoid poverty or political oppression, but a vast majority of them have come via China and Southeast Asian countries.

Source: South China Morning Post