A North Korean defector living in South Korea was detained on Tuesday after ramming a stolen bus into a barricade on a bridge near the heavily militarized border, in an apparent attempt to get back to the North, Yonhap news agency reported.
The incident took place at around 1:30 a.m. (16:30 GMT on Monday) at the Tongil Bridge in Paju, northwest of the capital Seoul, after the man ignored warnings from soldiers guarding the bridge and attempted to drive through, Yonhap said, citing city police.
Paju police referred queries on the incident to provincial police authorities. The northern Gyeonggi police agency could not be reached for comment.
The man aged in his 30s who had defected more than a decade ago told police that he was trying to return to North Korea after struggling to settle in the South, the report said.
What’s going on in South Korea where someone in their 30s tried to get back to literally North Korea rather than stay? I know KPop is annoying, but cmon.
Actually he just had an exam coming up.
Plato’s cave, irl edition.
South Korea famously treats defectors like shit when they are just working class people that want a better life instead of parroting ridiculous US State Dept propaganda.
"Once defectors make it to South Korea, often after a perilous journey across multiple countries, they go through interrogation by the government intelligence agency. Then they are sent to the main Hanawon complex in Anseong, 40 miles southeast of Seoul, to prepare for their new lives in the South.
The facility offers medical and psychiatric care. It teaches defectors about South Korean society and gender equality, and provides occupational training and counseling for skills including cooking, baking, nail art, skin care, clothes-making and mending, and long-term caregiving.
After completing the three-month program, defectors receive subsidies and housing benefits, as well as continued support from local centers to help them assimilate during their early years living in South Korea."
Doesn’t sound like they treat them like shit. Sounds like they actually have a very efficient and well-funded system to welcome and integrate defectors.
Are you yourself working for North Korea or something? “OMG yeah North Korea so great, they treat you like shit in South Korea, definitely don’t go there, the music is also bad.”
I think the poster meant “they” as in South Korean society in general rather than the government.
Isnt sk like more hyper-capitalistic hell than most places with little in the way of social welfare systems? Scary place to try to start your life over, like jumping from the firing squad to the fire/meatgrinding machine
I’ve never been to South Korea, but Seoul metropolitan area is said to be a hypercapitalistic hell-hole. The major employers are the chaebols, or the family-owned corporations including Samsung, Hyundai and LG. They have toxic work cultures but is tolerated because they are major employers in the country, especially in Seoul, where half of South Koreans live. Nearly everyone is overworked for little pay resulting in poor birth rate because everyone have little time to spend with partners and families (the South Korean government actually created a new administrative capital city, Sejong, as an experiment to address the declining birth rate, and it worked by and large experiencing probably the only and highest population growth in the country).
Moreover, many North Korean defectors are still seen with suspicion and discriminated. So they feel alienated like the man in the article. I guess the best bet for defectors is to work in Sejong as a government clerk, where they could get generous welfare and employment benefits and protections, unlike corporate-employed workers.
Edit: autocowreck
Why doesn’t everyone like move to Sejong, the alternative is no alternative at all it would seem, fuck that shit
Sejong is still a new city to be fair. Also, there is not much jobs there so far, except for civil servants. But the worst crime of all in creating that new city is that public transport is lacking! How could city planners have that oversight! There is more info from Caspian Report about the Sejong city.
Maybe that person had trouble adjusting to SK life and was missing his country and/or people back home. Nothing to see here. It is only “surprising” because presumably they took some risk in leaving and because we only ever hear about NK in the context of its authoritarian government and it being some dystopian nightmare presumably, though if we’re being honest most of us don’t know two shits about the country and I bet to some people it’s simply home.
Why does anyone want to go back to any country that others are desperate to leave? For reasons…
Voice of America - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report)
Information for Voice of America:
MBFC: Least Biased - Credibility: High - Factual Reporting: High - United States of America
Wikipedia about this sourceSearch topics on Ground.News
even VOA admit it
Amazing how few people know that VOA is literal US propaganda and are down voting you.
Wow you sure saw through our clever deception. What tipped you off, was it when we slipped up and called it “Voice Of America”? I knew people were gonna catch that…
Do you work for VOA or something?
Our?
You would be surprised how few people are aware that VOA is propaganda. They think it is something like NPR.
It is not.
Good job in knowing something most people don’t?
What’s with the sarcastic tone, again?
I imagine that, if you sat down and asked people “Is voice of america propaganda” you would get a whole bunch of people saying “is it? I didn’t realize!”. People are dumb about applying specific definitions, and propaganda is largely viewed as the stuff that comes out of leaflet bombs, or that gets played on loudspeakers in dingy german factories that Captain America is about to blow up. But, if you asked “Is VOA Biased” 97% of people will say “well yeah, duh, its called ‘Voice of America’”.
I truly do not believe your premise that there’s huge swathes of people unaware that “Voice of America” is biased towards American interests. People are dumb, but they aren’t so dumb as to be unable to read the damn name.
The only response that deserves your previous sarcasm is this one. There is a difference between federally funded news programs like NPR, and outright propaganda outlet with no journalistic standards like the VOA, but I can’t believe you actually believe most people know that.
But hey, I guess informing people of that deserves an asshole amount of sarcasm.
My apologies, my initial comment was heavy-handed because I was writing with the apparent “lacks reading comprehension” demographic in mind, and I wanted to be sure they’d understand my scorn.
Now onto the “please just stop” portion of this: I think you’re lacking some critical background here. VOA, though obviously incredibly biased from charter to name to office carpet, has a great deal of journalistic integrity. You can be a propaganda outlet and have a commitment to truthful reporting. If you want an example of that look to NPR, another openly biased news outlet, albeit one with a liberal-leaning bias towards the internal American issues it reports on most of the time. Both are propaganda, both do very good work reporting on US news and interests. That you don’t know enough about VOA to be aware of this speaks to the notion that maybe your understanding of the subject is not nearly as comprehensive as you seem to think.
