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"To flee North Korea and arrive in the rich, wired, consuming culture of South Korea is to feel clueless, fearful and guilty," the Washington Post says of North Korean refugees here. "At the movies for the first time, they panic when the lights go down, afraid someone might kidnap them."
In an article titled "North Korean Defectors Bewildered by the South" on Monday, the daily focuses on the difficulties these refugees have in adapting to their new environment. "When they start to make progress, they feel guilty," it quotes Gwak Jong-moon, the principal of the Hangyoreh Middle-High School, an educational institution in South Korea for teenage North Korean defectors, as saying "One hundred percent of the time, when you throw a birthday party for these young people, they cry for the family they left behind."
Defectors are rarely warmly welcomed in the South, the paper says. "When I said I was from North Korea, I was flatly rejected," said Kim Kyung-il, who is running a North Korean human rights organization. "Bosses thought that hiring me would get them in trouble."
A report released by the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington in March is quoted as saying "most North Korean defectors suffer from physical and mental post-traumatic stress disorder."
An official at Hanawon, the government-run institution established to train and help defectors settle in South Korea, said, "Paranoia in North Korea helped people survive, but here in South Korea, it is an obstacle to assimilation... Many defectors are scared to do anything."
The paper points out that North Koreans "filter into South Korea at the rate of about 35 a week," with about 15,000 settling here.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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