Word: kang
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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...
...Life was difficult. I didn't know how things worked and I was lost," recalls Kang, who escaped to South Korea in 2002 via Thailand. "I realized that [marrying a South Korean] was the fastest way to create a new life...
...Kang, 40, is happy with her choice - so happy, in fact, that she now helps her husband Hong Seung Woo with the matchmaking agency he runs to connect North Korean women and South Korean men. Hong opened the business in 2006, a year after he and his wife were married. As of last September, there were officially over 17,000 North Koreans living in South Korea, triple the number from 2004, according to the Unification Ministry, the government agency in Seoul in charge of North Korean affairs. Almost 80% of North Koreans defecting today are women. "This is a shortcut...
...point where the leadership may have begun to feel threatened. Small traders and black markets existed outside of government control, and by definition at some point the regime was not going to tolerate that, analysts say. "The breakaway, snowballing market is a threat to the regime," says Lim Kang-taeg, senior research fellow at the Korean Institute for National Unification, a government-sponsored think tank in Seoul. "This is a significant blow leveled at the market, and will help the government tighten up control...
...activity, claimed the regime, compelled it to invade Kokang turf, even though the warlord's business proclivities had been an open secret for years. Indeed, both the Eastern Shan and Wa are also believed to have financed themselves through such shady means; the latter's southern commander, Wei Hsueh-kang, has been singled out by the U.S. Treasury Department as a major drug trafficker. Indeed, one battle-avoiding option for the junta is luring corrupt ethnic elders to its side. "Divide-and-conquer tactics are the SPDC's best friend," says KIA Brigadier General Gun Maw. (Read about...