The case of North Korean defector Lim Ji-hyun made the news last week. She'd become something of a media star in South Korea, then disappeared from view before appearing on TV in Pyongyang denouncing the South and tearfully claiming she'd been forced into making all those rude remarks about the glorious fatherland. Kidnapping, needless to say, is strongly suspected.
Here she is in her old life in Seoul, left, and back in Pyongyang, right.
You can see her interview on North Korean TV here, though there's no translation. She doesn't look well.
The fact that she's now living with her parents - ie she left her parents behind when she defected to the South - suggests the kind of hold that they have over her. The obvious irony of the situation, with her claiming to have been coerced into critiicising the North while she's clearly being coerced now into critiicising the South, doesn't help to lessen the anguish we have to feel on her behalf.
From the Sunday Times (£):
A North Korean defector who became a television celebrity in the South but turned up last week weeping on a Pyongyang propaganda outlet is feared to have been duped and abducted in an operation by female communist agents.
Lim Ji-hyun is believed to be the highest-profile victim of a recent kidnapping directive by Kim Jong-un, the northern regime’s leader, in revenge for the embarrassing mass defection last year of 12 waitresses from a North Korean state-run restaurant in China.
Female state security operatives have been dispatched to pose as defectors to infiltrate the broker syndicates that smuggle fugitives across China to seek asylum in other Asian countries.
The North’s agents are under orders to monitor, befriend and kidnap
new defectors as well as to abduct former defectors turned brokers, according to South Korean intelligence and exile groups.
Pyongyang has also deployed a cynical new tactic of exploiting family ties to lure fugitives, such as Lim, who have made it to South Korea.
Kim’s agents contact the defectors, claiming they are brokers arranging the escape of family members who need their help in China, or they force relatives still in North Korea to make calls, asking the defectors to come to China to fetch them.
When the defectors travel to China, expecting to deal with brokers, they are seized by North Korean agents and bundled across the border. Chinese officials make no attempt to intervene and are themselves under orders to return North Korean runaways.
This is suspected to be what befell Lim, who disappeared three months ago after reportedly saying she was planning a “shopping and business” trip to China.
She was not heard of again until her tearful video appearance denouncing the “evils” of life in the South.
Lim had become a popular figure in the South for her television appearances describing the brutality of life in the Stalinist dictatorship and took part in a dating show for couples from across the border.
In April Lim thanked her official fan club via her website for “the happiest birthday of my life”, only to go missing a few days later.
Her next on-screen appearance was very different. Using what she said was her real name, Chon Hae-song, she called herself “human trash”, a North Korean epithet for defectors, and claimed that “everything I said was scripted to make North Koreans look barbaric, ignorant and stupid”.
Lim disappeared only a month after Kim issued the order to capture defectors, according to the timings given by a security source in North Korea to Radio Free Asia.
The dictator is furious that the South has not returned 12 waitresses who defected last April from a North Korean restaurant that earned hard currency for his regime in the Chinese port of Ningbo.
The women are now at university in South Korea, but Pyongyang insists that they were kidnapped by Seoul’s agents.
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