The number of North Koreans defecting to the South last year plummeted after Pyongyang closed its border in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, the South Korean Ministry of Unification said yesterday.
The figure has been on a steady decline for the past few years, but slumped to just 229 last year, the ministry said, far below the 1,047 of 2019.
The vast majority of Northern defectors first travel to neighboring China, sometimes staying there for years before making their way to the South via third countries, and only a handful directly cross the Demilitarized Zone that divides the Korean Peninsula.
Photo: Reuters
However, the North has a ramshackle health system that would struggle to cope with a major disease outbreak and in January last year imposed a strict border closure to try to protect itself from COVID-19, which first emerged in China, its key ally.
The North has not confirmed a single case of the virus — although experts have long said that it is unlikely to have escaped the pandemic.
In September last year, the commander of the US Forces Korea said that Pyongyang had issued shoot-to-kill orders in its border areas to prevent the virus entering the country.
“It looks like the number of [North Korean] people entering the South decreased due to the effects of North Korean-Chinese border control and restrictions of movement from third countries due to COVID-19,” the ministry said in a statement.
Inter-Korean relations have been in a deep freeze since the collapse of a summit in Hanoi in 2019 between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and then-US president Donald Trump over what the nuclear-armed North would be willing to give up in exchange for a loosening of sanctions.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency
RSS