UK Queen honors Anglo-Korean activist on ‘Underground Railway’

Every year, the UK’s Queen Elizabeth II honors Brits who have done the right thing with awards that are published on 29 December in the “New Year’s Honors List.”  This year, alongside England’s World Cup football team captain Harry Kane, three divers who helped rescue the Thai “cave boys” and a host of other do gooders, Anglo-Korean Sokeel Park, was awarded  the title “MBE” (“Member of the British Empire”).

The citation for Park, the South Korea country director of civic group Liberty in North Korea, or LINK, reads “For services to UK/Korea relations.”

His MBE catapults him to immediate prominence in the Anglo-Korean community but while Park, 34, resides in South Korea, it is his work with North Korean defectors that has offered him intimate insights into one of the world’s most mysterious countries.

The Anglo-Korean community is one of the UK’s lowest-profile ethnic minorities: The latest (2011) Census Data found less than 18,000 British citizens born in the Koreas (it did not include those born in the UK).

Park’s father arrived in the UK in 1968, after his biological grandmother married a Briton in her second marriage. But while his father fully integrated into British society, settling in Manchester and marrying a local, he always kept an eye on his homeland.

“In the 1990s, when North Korea appeared in the news, he would shout to us, and me and my older brother would have to run from wherever we were in the house to the TV set – before the Internet, you could not rewind the TV!” Park recalled of his youth. “Or, if Korea appeared in the newspaper, we would have to read it.  We had a handful of books and a handful of artefacts from Korea – today it is a whole different world.”

Park first visited South Korea as a teenager when his grandmother died, to scatter her ashes. He spent a year in South Korea prior to university doing language training. “I wanted to kind of fill in this Korean side of me,” he recalled. “It felt like, through osmosis, there were patches of Korean; a Korean skeleton. I wanted to flesh it out.”

Park would subsequently do a masters at the London School of Economics in international relations and international history, before interning at the UN in New York.  “That dissuaded me from a career in the UN,” he said. “It did not feel like a place where I could make an impact.”

But his interest in a pressing international issue was growing – and it was more than ancestral osmosis.  “North Korea is such an objectively fascinating place,” he said. “Once you start getting interested, is it easy to keep going deeper.”  Moreover, he realized that – unlike the vast UN bureaucracy – there were very few professionals working on North Korea. An internship at LINK in California led to his current position, which he has occupied since 2011.

LINK does not extract North Koreans from the country. That perilous task is done by “brokers” – often Korean-Chinese, sometimes North Korean defectors, who assist escapees across the China/North Korea border, usually for financial reward.

LINK does assist defectors in their long, difficult and dangerous journeys beyond the North Korean frontier. In a reference to the network that bought freed slaves from the slave-owning states to the north and Canada in the 19th century US, the trail through China to South Korea has been dubbed “the Underground Railway.”

“We have a network that reaches through China to Southeast Asia, that identifies and brings North Korean defectors through, without conditions,” Park said.  They are assisted and funded by LINK, which maintains a network of guides in China, and staff in Southeast Asia. From Southeast Asia, defectors are usually flown to Seoul by South Korean authorities.  “We are in constant contact and communications throughout, we oversee it from start to finish,” Park said.  “Last year was our biggest overall year – 326 people.”

This, he says, is despite increased border security following Kim Jong Un’s accession to took power in 2011. More fencing and motion sensors have been emplaced, while incentives have been offered to border guards who catch escapees, making them less susceptible to bribes. As a result, escaping has become riskier. “Defectors say they know they are putting their lives on the line when they come out,” Park said.

Transit through China is as difficult as getting out of North Korea.  “Not only are [defectors] in the most repressive regime in the world, but their only option is to escape is through China, one of the biggest countries in the world, with strong police surveillance,” Park said. “The other border is the most heavily fortified border in the world,” he added – a reference to the inter-Korean Demilitarized Zone, through which only tiny numbers of defectors have come.  Cuban defectors have told Park that if they had had to escape through China, they would never have attempted it.

Beijing’s policy is to forcibly repatriate defectors it catches back to North Korea.  For LINK, when defectors are captured in China, the news is devastating. “It starts when you get a message that people have been arrested,” Park said. “Emotionally, it is the hardest part of the job. Your heart sinks.”

Defecting is not just risky, it has become more expensive. For one person to cross the China/North Korea border now costs an “insurmountable” price of  $10-20,000, Park said; prior to the current regime, it was “just a few thousand dollars.”  Approximately three thousand dollars are required to transit a defector through China to Southeast Asia.

That process can be as short as a few days, but defectors often have to wait several weeks in Southeast Asia, during which they are processed by South Korean authorities.

The difficulty of escaping North Korea is clear in the numbers. Between the end of the Korean War in 1953, and the end of 2017, just 31,093 defectors (form a current North Korean population of 25 million) made it to the South. Many more would like to flee if they could. “Every defector [in South Korea] is the tip of an iceberg.” Park said. “Almost everyone wants to bring out family members.”

LINK also assists defectors to settle in South Korea – a country strangely alien to their own.  After being screened by intelligence, defectors go through a three-month, live-in assimilation course in government-run facilities known as “Hanawon.” Then they are granted government stipends, and assistance with housing and education. But many find it hard to fit in.

Park praises Seoul for its work on the material side, but notes that it is lacking on the psychological side: self-efficacy, identify, self image. Hence, LINK assists with coaching and counselling. “We do not consider them victims, we consider them heroes,” he said. “So, it is talking people up, not telling them they are coming from a crappy place to a richer place.”

There is “prejudice and uneasiness” toward North Korean defectors, Park admitted, but there is also unfamiliarity: Given South Korea’s population (50 million) few people have ever met a defector.  And even discrimination is not easily defined. For example, while many North Koreans study to lose their accents, so, too, do many South Koreans from provincial areas.

Education is another issue. “North Koreans are not on a level playing field,” said Park. “They spend thousands of hours memorizing Kim Il Sung’s revolutionary lines, while South Koreans spend thousands of hours learning English.” Many defectors find professional qualifications useless. For example, doctors in the South use a vastly wider range of medicines – hence some North Korea-qualified doctors end up working in the South as nurses.

But the biggest cultural differences are the freedoms (association, travel, speech) that South Koreans take for granted. Park recalled discussing the Kim regime with a recent defector: After speaking for a while, the man faltered, saying he could not express himself. “He was middle aged, and had never had the opportunity to talk about a system that had affected his life so much,” Park said. “It is difficult for people in the West to imagine what it is like not to have freedom of speech. When [defectors] leave and feel safe it is the first time they can share their inner feelings and thoughts honestly.”

Many defectors are motivated by their children. “They say, ‘I am not going to let my son or daughter live in this system and be constrained all their lives,” Park noted. It is such children who provide Park his greatest job satisfaction: “Being able to meet children at the point of freedom – and some I meet again when they are grown up – that’s just amazing.”

Park, whose work for LINK includes publicizing North Korean issues, suggests the wider world has tunnel vision toward the nation. “For so long, the lens through which we see North Korea has been the Kims and their nukes, but North Korea is not just a security problem,” he said. “Exclusively focusing on the security paradigm plays to the worst tendencies of the North Korean system. It needs a more wholistic approach.”

Part of that approach is recognition of change – largely in terms of the marketization of the economy, which has been underway since the late 1990s. “It is not a question of, ‘Is change possible?’ change has already left the station,” Park said.  “The North Korean government is navigating through these changes and I think the role of the international community and civic society is to try and accelerate change and opening.”

North Korean defectors are players in this process, Park says, given that they maintain contacts in the North, so act as channels of information and interchange.

Sources familiar with Park’s work reckon Buckingham Palace made a sound decision in awarding him.

“In a world where shady bankers and second-rate pop stars get knighthoods, someone doing what Sokeel is doing, which is genuinely helping people and sacrificing himself – as he could make a whole lot more money doing something else – it is hard to imagine someone more deserving,” said Daniel Tudor, co-author of “North Korean Confidential.” “It is hard to say anything about Anglo-Koreans as a group, so hopefully it will give them more visibility and contribute, as the MBE says, to ‘furthering Anglo-Korean relations.’”

Park himself has a sense of humility. “It makes me think of those toiling away for North Koreans who are necessarily working in secret and don’t get the recognition – and can’t.” As a “lad from Manchester” who has been “recognized by the establishment,” Park sees his award as “kind of surreal.”

One man’s reaction was more emotional – Park’s father, who had lost his wife to a heart attack in 2016. “Dad cried a lot, he used up a whole toilet roll [to wipe away his tears],” Park recalled.  “He said, ‘Your mother would have been so proud’.”