Word: defectors
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After three years living alone in South Korea - paranoid and scared to talk to anyone - North Korean defector Kang Ok Sil decided she'd had enough. She wanted to make a real effort to settle in her newly adopted country. She decided to marry a South Korean...
...Before the North's famine in the 1990s, only a privileged few with money and connections to border guards could make the crossing. ("If you pay enough, you can get anyone out," says Kang.) After decades under the strictest and most repressive totalitarian state in the world, the first defectors that arrived in the South were "always suspicious," she says, and most had left relatives behind who could be sentenced to prison or even death for having a defector in the family. "They did not only complain of difficulties finding jobs, prejudice and adapting to life in the south," says...
...Those lighter sentences mean more and more students have started to defy the long-standing ban and get exposed to life outside the North's borders. One defector says that when students are caught, they buy cigarettes for police officers to escape labor sentences, and sometimes even give officers the bootleg to watch themselves. "I used to believe strongly what the government told us - that foreign films are crazy and violent. We used to be terrified of watching South Korean dramas," says one North Korean university student in Seoul, who remains sympathetic to the regime. "But I've opened...
...Military defector Aung Lynn Htut is unconvinced. He warns that his former commander will do anything to discredit Suu Kyi, a longtime supporter of Western sanctions. Than Shwe met Webb as part of a campaign to portray the Nobel laureate as "the enemy of the Burmese people [who] is too stubborn to lift sanctions," he says. But even Suu Kyi's pro-sanctions stance is no longer a given. U.S. engagement was "a good thing," she admitted recently through a spokesman for her National League for Democracy party...
...never thought that Kim Jong Il was human and thus mortal.' OH YEON-JONG, a North Korean defector, after American and South Korean officials confirmed that the ailing dictator had chosen his youngest son, Kim Jong Un, to succeed...