The appearance of the North Korean leader's sister at the Olympics, Kim Yo-jong, spread a positive image of the country's women around the world, but the reality is very different — one of poverty, famine and abuse.
In the North Korean regime — the most hermetically sealed on the planet and with the greatest capacity for indoctrination — it is above all ordinary women who seek to rebel, by fleeing, even at the risk of their lives. Mothers and girls, who bear the burden of supporting their children and their entire families, are well aware of the restrictions in North Korea. Perhaps it is from this awakening that is almost entirely female, as well as from diplomatic efforts towards reconciliation between the two Koreas — formally still at war since 1953 — and the United States, that a virtuous process of reform could be set in motion. Thanks to the pacifist commitment of South Korean president Moon Jae-in, the Northern dictator Kim Jong-un and US president Donald Trump are expected to meet in May in the North Korean capital.
According to analysts, putting an end to the last conflict of the Cold War would require a peace treaty between the two Koreas, with the virtuous introduction of a process of economic and social reforms in North Korea along "Chinese" or "Vietnamese" lines. For now, however, the country is living through one of its darkest moments. Kim Yo-jong, sister of Kim Jong-un, the cheerleaders and the athletes went to the Winter Olympic Games in Pyeongchang as part of a precise propaganda scheme, behind which a hungry, sick, impoverished population of 25 million people is kept in the shadows.
The image carefully crafted by Kim Yo-jong herself — director of the propaganda and agitation department of the Workers' Party — presented smiling, reassuring, demure women, in contrast with their fashion-conscious, beauty-obsessed, hyper-connected South Korean peers.
Kim Yo-jong sought to produce a nostalgia effect for a 1950s world — that of her grandfather Kim Il-sung's anti-Japanese and communist revolution — one that was (only apparently) purer and simpler. The North certainly was, under Soviet influence, more industrialised and advanced than the South, which was allied with the United States. But in seventy years the situation has been turned on its head.
Since 1953, the North Korean universe has been frozen within a patriarchal and sexist system of Confucian inspiration. A recent report by the Norwegian Refugees Council confirms that 70 per cent of North Korean refugees in South Korea are women. Prior to 2017, when controls at the Chinese border were tightened, women in exile accounted for 85 per cent. An anachronistic and increasingly class-ridden economic system, the sanctions imposed by the United States and the United Nations, and a new famine — reported by Care International but overlooked by the global community — have turned flight into a matter of survival.
The most serious problem weighing on North Korean women is how to feed themselves and their children. Two in five people in the Asian country are malnourished. And "among the most vulnerable are women and children," reads the Care International study Suffering in silence. "Almost a third of all pregnant and breastfeeding women, and over 200,000 children, suffer from acute malnutrition, based on our estimates."
This new famine is said to have erupted following last summer's drought, the worst since 2001. It is reportedly the crisis most neglected by the international media, after those — in chronological order — of Eritrea and Burundi in 2015.
The ban on independent journalists, the prohibition on local associations and organisations, and the extremely limited access granted to external agencies and NGOs have all contributed to concealing the famine — and to leaving it unaddressed. The North Korean situation — according to the same United Nations that imposed the latest sanctions on 22 December — is one of the emergencies for which the least funding was allocated in 2017.
"Sanctions in North Korea have always harmed exclusively civilians, not the regime," insists Professor Rosella Idéo, who has been analysing their effects for decades. "The elite — that one per cent, which includes supreme leader Kim Jong-un and his sister Kim Yo-jong, and descending through the hierarchy, their relatives and most loyal officials — grows immensely rich. No, Kim Yo-jong, described at the Winter Olympics as the smiling, lightly made-up feminine face of the dictatorship, does not look out for ordinary women. She is above all Kim Jong-un's devoted sister and the head of his propaganda. Comparing her to Ivanka, Trump's daughter, or to other leaders as several media outlets have done, until proven otherwise, is pure speculation."
There have been and continue to be other women of power in the North Korean regime, but very few — among them the older half-sister Kim Sol-song, born in 1975, an intellectual and polyglot. "In a regime so impenetrable, we do not know what her relationship with Kim Jong-un is like," Idéo continues. "She appears to manage significant business operations." Anna Fifield, Asia correspondent for the American daily Washington Post, wonders whether the younger sister Kim Yo-jong, who is close to Kim Jong-un, could one day replace him and become leader of the country. "In a word, no. North Korea," Fifield explains, "adheres to hierarchical and male-dominated Confucian rules, which would make it impossible for her to govern."
In another article, Fifield recalls that sexual violence in the Asian country is "an epidemic", indeed "a social norm", according to the investigation by the organisation Korea Future Initiative. "North Korean women too (like women in the South, ed.) would say #MeToo, if only they knew it was a movement and that sexual violence is something they could fight against."
For North Korean women, the first famine of the 1990s marked a watershed in their already difficult lives. It was probably then, when between 600,000 and 3 million people starved to death, that they began — more so than men — to turn to traffickers and smugglers to reach China, South Korea and other Asian countries. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, North Korea ceased to receive Soviet subsidies — for instance, low-cost oil and industrial components. The natural disasters of that period, such as droughts and floods and the resulting loss of harvests, prevented a number of schools from providing meals to their students.
Even rice could be impossible to find. Many people survived on grass, small animals, including frogs and birds. The lack of electricity left the country in darkness. Common infections were complicated by malnutrition. Malnourished women gave birth to stunted newborns with severe brain damage. How that generation of disabled survivors has been cared for remains a mystery to this day. North Koreans are still up to eight centimetres shorter than their South Korean counterparts. The Norwegian Refugee Council reports: "From 1999 onwards, increasing numbers of North Koreans began crossing the Tumen and Yalu rivers that mark the border with China."
Driven by desperation, in the 1990s, it was women who invented the market economy in North Korea. While men — fathers and husbands — were forced into unpaid compulsory labour for the state, in factories, rice paddies and construction sites, women transformed their Confucian role as "angels of the hearth." The medieval corvée system imposed on adult males, treated as slaves, produced nothing for their families, and pushed women to open the first small underground markets. Gradually, this trading in basic necessities was tolerated by the regime, as it represented the only source of subsistence. Women began to regard men as "good-for-nothings."
Women's ingenuity, however, was not enough. While skyscrapers, spas, nurseries and playgrounds have been springing up in the capital Pyongyang for some years now, "it is only to satisfy the elite, from whose ranks dissidents have emerged on more than one occasion. The rest of the country is a different matter," adds Professor Idéo. If the children of senior officials use the internet (under intelligence surveillance), peasants make do with hand ploughs. The website of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs states that "the healthcare system is severely lacking. In hospitals, including those in the capital, it is very rare to find staff capable of speaking even a single Western foreign language. Medicines are difficult to obtain." Moreover, malaria, hepatitis A and B, encephalitis lethargica, diphtheria, tetanus, polio, typhoid fever, cholera and plague are all widespread.
According to unofficial estimates, between 50,000 and 200,000 North Korean women currently live in China. Beijing regards them as irregular economic migrants, refusing to recognise their refugee status. Despite having acceded to the United Nations Convention on Refugees, it prefers to apply a bilateral agreement dating from 1986. The Chinese police can therefore send them back home, where they risk imprisonment, internment in labour camps, abuse or even death. Despite these risks, many women who survive forced repatriation attempt to flee again. The fact that the Chinese government does not consider their "economic desperation" a valid reason to grant them protection paradoxically fuels the spread of trafficking.
Lured by the deceitful promise of a better future, North Korean exiles are sold by traffickers into two main "human markets": the sale of brides and the exploitation of prostitution. On one hand, they are bought by Chinese men who cannot find a partner — due to disability, complex family circumstances, or the one-child policy (abolished by the Chinese Supreme Court in 2013), which created a demographic gap to the detriment of females. On the other hand, they are forced to provide sexual services, sometimes after being kidnapped — once they set foot on Chinese soil — in public spaces such as streets or train stations.
Many of the men who buy them as wives also treat them as mere property to be abused. This is explained clearly by sociologist Hyun-Joo Lim in an article published by The Conversation. Even if these women do not openly express political dissent against the North Korean regime, they are entitled to respect for their fundamental human rights.
This is one of the cases in which the bureaucratic distinction between economic migrants and political exiles appears absurd. In China, living in hiding alongside North Korean fugitives, there are said to be at least 30,000 stateless children, some of them born of forced relationships. These children are invisible to the local authorities. They have no right to medical care, education or citizenship.
If their Chinese fathers were to request recognition, their children would receive official documents — but this would endanger the North Korean mothers, whose identities are legally required to be disclosed. Some refugee women therefore choose to leave their children in the People's Republic and continue their journey towards their hoped-for destination of South Korea. By early 2018, more than 30,000 had already arrived. Helping them through these dangerous journeys are humanitarian organisations such as Helping Hands Korea's and the American 318 Partners, as well as evangelical missionaries, the latter with conversion aims as well.
Twenty-year-old Mi-young was sold as a bride to a Chinese family. She had fled because her father had been locked up in a prison camp and her small informal business was not profitable. She was looking for work to send money to her mother. A trafficker had promised her a job as a waitress, but the young woman found herself enslaved by a husband and mother-in-law. Thanks to Helping Hands Korea's — as journalist Silvia Yu recounts in the South China Morning Post — she managed to escape to Laos and, after crossing a river by boat, to Thailand.
At 24, Mi-young still dreams of South Korea. These wanderings across different countries are very common. According to the Reuters agency, 535 North Koreans arrived in Thailand in 2016 and 385 in the first half of 2017. South Korea currently counts 31,339 North Korean refugees. Many exiles are traumatised. A large proportion of the women feel guilty for having abandoned their children in China, or because they can no longer help or contact family members who remained in North Korea.
