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There is a surprising amount of talk about collapse and reunification in Seoul. But a new report from Dan Pinkston of the International Crisis Group, Strangers at Home, suggests that the South is far from prepared for it.
The report places the issue in a broader historical and cultural context of South Korea's relative closure to outsiders, walls that are just now coming down. The ICG documents a well-known litany of problems the refugees face, ranging from mental and physical health to unemployment—as many as half of all North Koreans in the South aren’t working—language barriers and education.
The report details changing resettlement policy and both the public and private institutions that support the refugees. The 1997 Act on the Protection and Settlement Support of Residents Escaping from North Korea has been amended a number of times in an effort to get it right, most recently in 2010 when new legislation established a North Korean Refugees Foundation. The report also surveys the growing NGO landscape as well as some innovative programs such as a microfinance effort between MOU and Hyundai Motors.
But the overwhelming point I took away from the report has to do with scale. The changing efforts to date—successes and failures—have been thrown at only 23,000 refugees, fewer than the West Germans took in some months both before and after the Berlin wall went up. Despite its intention to sound a warning, the report reveals that much of the commentary on unification is cheap talk.
