Richard Humphries/Polaris, for The New York Times
Posted on 10/19/2006 6:15:56 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
With Cash, Defectors Find North Korea’s Cracks
A MOTHER’S DETERMINATION Kim Myung-shim, above, fled North Korea in 2003 and then helped her three children escape. The last to flee, Lee Chun-hak, is now in an immigration detention center in Bangkok, where his mother visited him. She said she paid $3,600 to aid his escape from the North.
BANGKOK — Last March, Lee Chun-hak, a 19-year-old North Korean, went to the Chinese border to meet with a North Korean money trafficker. Using the trafficker’s Chinese cellphone, Mr. Lee talked to his mother, who had defected to South Korea in 2003. She told him she was going to get him out.
 Tongbai/Figaro Magazine/Gamma
ON THE OTHER SIDE A statue commemorating the North Korea-China friendship in Tumen, China, along the river that many defectors cross. |
Mr. Lee missed his mother and his sister and brother, and he had a persistent, if half-formed, desire. “I wanted to go to a country that is more developed,” he said, “even more developed than South Korea.”
In June, a young North Korean man appeared suddenly at his home with a message: “Mother is looking for you.” The man then took him by bicycle and foot to the border and handed him over to a North Korean soldier.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Some N. Korean defectors in S. Korea send stuffs to family members left behind. Sometimes they arrange a delivery of a Chinese cellphone to their family member inside N. Korea, if they live near the Sino-N. Korean border.
Despite repeated crackdown by Kim Jong-il to shut down such trades, it still continues. I think its momentum is irreversible.
“Please guide my son,” she said, “even though he’s doing well alone.”
Mr. Lee, showing her a pack of Marlboros, said, “He’s doing well — he doesn’t smoke expensive cigarettes like I do.”
LOL!
Ping!
DAMNN Tiger with any amount of money you could get anything communist or no communist country
Free countries should be air-dropping huge amounts of food all over North Korea, packaged in containers that tell the truth about "Dear Leader", and encourage revolt. And start smuggling in large supplies of guns and ammo to help the cause.
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