By Lee Tae-hoon
It is common for North Korean defectors here to send money to their poverty-stricken family remaining in the communist regime. The widespread, but little-known practice should be legalized, a civic group and a lawmaker of the main opposition Democratic Party (DP) said Monday.
“Of some 20,000 North Koreans who have defected to South Korea, nearly all of the economically-active ones send money home,” Shin Mi-nyeo, head of the Organization for One Korea (TOOK), told The Korea Times.
TOOK is a civic group dedicated to supporting new defectors since 1988.
She claimed that many of those with even little income, such as elderly women, also regularly send money to their family and relatives that they left behind in the North, even if they have to borrow money from others.
“They can’t help but send money home as they know how bad the economic situation is there and the sufferings the ones they left have to go through,” Shin said.
Shin has been carrying out a one-on-one survey with North Korean defectors on their remittance practices, the first-ever to be undertaken on the matter.
Of the 80 defectors that TOOK has randomly picked and interviewed for the survey thus far, roughly 80 percent of them answered that they send money to their family home through brokers, Shin told the paper.
She plans to survey more North Korean defectors and announce the results at a seminar.
Rep. Won Hye-young of the DP, who has closely worked with Shin regarding the issue, noted that defectors remit on average 1.5 million won ($1,250) to 2 million won to their loved-ones in the North each year.
The two claimed that defectors often find themselves hopeless when brokers, who usually charge some 30 to 50 percent of the funds, cheat them or deliver much less than they promised.
“The United Nations and other international bodies should address the issue and help North Korean defectors remit money to their family in the North through legal channels,” Won said.
A survey of 1,024 that the lawmaker conducted on Sept. 4 shows that 71.5 percent of the respondents support the idea of the U.N. creating a legal channel for the defectors to financially support their family members remaining in the North.
Critics, however, say such a measure will only aggravate inter-Korean relations and make the recipients of the funds an easy target of political retaliation by the Stalinist regime, which has beefed up border security to curb defection among its citizens.