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A source in Seoul claims that North Korea is now exploiting the growing defector community in South Korea for money and intelligence.
The approach is multipronged:
- Use families remaining in North Korea as hostages for extortion purposes. In one case, a defector told a broker that he would give the broker money to extract his parents from North Korea. However, the family responded that they could not leave North Korea, instead the son should just “send money:” that if the son did not send money that they would die of starvation. Rumor has it that North Korea is transmitting 300 such messages daily to the defector community in South Korea. Given that there are approximately 20,000 North Korean refugees in South Korea, and fewer households, 300 messages per day, if accurate, would imply almost constant bombardment of such messages.
- Use families remaining in North Korea as hostages to extract information from defectors or turn them into spies.
- Collect defector’s families in tent camps so that news of South Korea (and the Middle East) cannot spread within North Korea. Families are denied rations. The locations of these camps are reputedly Haesan, Musan, and Namyang.
The mainstream media are reputedly trying to verify these claims. Stay tuned.
