Updates on the 22 Executed North Koreans

Original post here.

– Via the Joongang Ilbo, the South Korean NIS claims that they found oysters in the two boats, and that they notified President-Elect Lee’s transition team of the impending repatriation. (Note that various descriptions of the boats continue to be wildly inconsistent — fishing boats? rubber rafts? powered or unpowered?).

– Via the Chosun Ilbo, outraged North Korean refugees are finding their voice, and giving us some factual context:

The [Committee for Democratization of North Korea] slammed the South Korean government’s methods of questioning North Korean defectors. Han Chang-kwon, the head of an organization of North Korean escapees, said, “South Korean investigators kept threatening to return me to North Korea while I was being questioned for six months. The 22 would have been terrified by the questioning and might have not expressed their hope to find asylum here. Han demanded the NIS make records of the questioning public.

– Richardson, who has himself debriefed North Korean defectors, offers a very plausible explanation:

If they were asked as a group [whether they wanted to return home], the interrogators basically ensured they’d answer no; if any answered yes for the rest to hear and somehow they were all sent back to North Korea, that person would have been guaranteed being sent to a concentration camp or executed. This is – or should be – absolute basic knowledge to anyone dealing with potential North Korean defectors.

If that is indeed what happened — it’s only speculation for now — the ratio of malice to incompetence would depend what motivated it.