Exaggerating NK refugee activism

By Casey Lartigue Jr.

I remember laughing out loud a few years ago when a freelance reporter called to interview me about a "cottage industry" of North Korean refugee activists. They may look organized to professional talkers, but anyone working with North Korean refugee organizations knows almost all of them are poorly funded one-man operations.

I have also heard the accusation that North Korean refugees rush to give speeches and publish books so they can make money, as if the 2.5 million people (including self-publishers) who publish books in the USA every year weren't thinking about financial gain.

Let's look at the points about a cottage industry of North Korean refugees cashing in and being funded to attack North Korea.

Almost 34,000 North Korean refugees have escaped to South Korea since the late 1990s. What has been the yield of the alleged "cottage industry?" Less than 20 North Korean refugees have published books.

I will generously round up the number to 30, in case I have overlooked some. That generous projection would mean that .09 percent of North Korean refugees who have escaped to South Korea in the last two decades have published books. Whichever well-funded government agency or think tank that is engaging potential North Korean refugee authors apparently has been wasting a lot of money.

How much of a rush were those North Korean refugees to publish books? On average, it has taken North Korean refugee authors a decade to publish their books after arriving in South Korea. Lee Sung-ju escaped from North Korea and arrived in South Korea in 2002 and he published his book 14 years later. Lee Hyeon-seo escaped from North Korea in 1997, arrived in South Korea in 2008 and published her book in 2015. Park Yeon-mi escaped from North Korea in 2007, arrived in South Korea in 2009 and published her book in 2015. Fireball activist Lee Ae-ran arrived here in 1997 and she published her book 16 years later. Jang Yeong-jin escaped across the DMZ in 1997 and he published his book 18 years later.

The exceptions are Shin Dong-hyuk, who published the Korean version of his book after being in South Korea for only a year or two, and Thae Yong-ho, the former North Korean diplomat who published his book in Korean after being in South Korea for only two years.

Other fantastic potential authors are still fantastic potential authors. To cite three I know: Jung Yu-na escaped to South Korea in 2006, Cherie Yang escaped to the USA in 2007, Park Eun-hee escaped to South Korea in 2012. They have all been on TV, host popular YouTube channels, and have been encouraged by fans and friends to write books. For various reasons, they haven't joined that alleged cottage industry constantly growing in the heads of experts.

And what about those "defector-run associations" getting funding from governments and foreign sources? In 2016, a few volunteers with my volunteer association attempted to put together a database of North Korean refugee organizations. It was difficult even tracking down some of them. Just two years later when new volunteers checked again, many of those organizations, associations and projects had already shut down or downsized to the point of being irrelevant―and that was before COVID.

What about North Korean refugee activism overall? Sokeel Park of LiNK has been quoted as saying that 1 percent of North Korean refugees were engaged in activism.?Out of 34,000 people, that would mean about 340 North Korean refugee activists. And I have my doubts about that number.

The North Korean refugee I am co-authoring a book with now may one day get lumped in as an activist, even though she isn't. Han Song-mi has a poignant, brutally honest, and yet hilarious human-interest story that can inspire other humans who aren't the least bit interested in North Korea's politics or dictatorship.

I am usually on safe ground when I challenge the critics: Please send me an article, paper or speech where you have psychoanalyzed the North Korean regime or played your connect-the-dots games about the funding sources of you and your peers the way you analyze North Korean refugees. They focus on a handful of North Korean refugees, but ignore or downplay the gangster state they escaped from that threatens or destroys entire families. Unfortunately, many North Korean refugees remain silent because of the possible retaliation to their families by the regime.

So whatever happened to the freelancer making the charge of a cottage industry of North Korean refugees? I heard that he recently accepted a fellowship, paid for by Google. If a North Korean refugee had a similar opportunity to get funded to develop a podcast, newsletters, and other niche products, courtesy of Google, he might dust off his accusation of exaggerating a cottage industry for another article or book.

Casey Lartigue Jr. is co-author along with Songmi Han of the forthcoming book "Greenlight to Freedom" and co-founder along with Eunkoo Lee of Freedom Speakers International (FSI).