“As a defector, I think I should play a role in inter-Korean relations,” said Park, 38, who is expected to enter the National Assembly in elections to be held Wednesday. He is a candidate for the conservative party led by President Yoon Suk Yeol — who takes a hard line on North Korea — and is set to win through the proportional representation system, which guarantees a party a certain number of seats based on the share of votes cast for the party.
“But I also want to fulfill my role as Park Choong-kwon, a young South Korean man. I want to do both.”
There are currently two North Korean defectors in the National Assembly: Tae Yong-ho, formerly a senior North Korean diplomat who is seeking reelection, and Ji Seong-ho, a North Korean human rights activist who is stepping down.
Park — together with a run by another escapee, Kim Geum-hyok, 32, who was also standing for the conservative party but dropped out after it became clear he would not get in this time — brought attention to the ambition of millennial North Korean escapees who aspire for leadership roles in South Korean society.
The two men want to set the agenda for inter-Korean relations and key issues facing future generations in both Koreas, and to be leaders who bridge the gap between the two halves of the peninsula should they reunify. They want other younger South Koreans to care about reunification, too, even though the majority of their peers say it’s unnecessary.
“I felt there is a certain limitation to how much can be accomplished through civil society alone when it comes to North Korean human rights … but can be accomplished through policymaking institutions,” Kim said, describing what motivated him to pursue politics.
The pair know what they’re talking about.
Park escaped from North Korea when he was 23, after his doubts about the North Korean regime became too much to bear. He had been studying at North Korea’s National Defense University, a training ground for engineers and specialists developing the country’s missile technology, which the regime views as critical to its survival and security.
Kim was one of the few students at the prestigious Kim Il Sung University who were given the opportunity to study abroad. The isolated regime taps top students to bring much-needed expertise from overseas, even though doing so exposes them to the outside world.
But while in China, he embraced outside ideas to the extent that he attracted the attention of North Korean security officials. At the age of 20, he decided to flee.
As members of North Korea’s ultra-elite who had proved their political loyalty to the regime, Park and Kim were afforded elusive privileges and were supposed to lead the future of the repressive country.
“To the extent that the regime was investing in them, they were North Korea’s future,” said Hanna Song, executive director of the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights, a Seoul-based NGO that works closely with defectors.
They could have continued to live comfortably in the North. But instead, they risked their lives to flee. Now, they are trying to effect change within South Korea’s democratic system and bring their insights as millennials who grew up in both Koreas.
Song said they are showing what is possible when given the freedom to choose how to live one’s life: a right that North Koreans living under a totalitarian state do not enjoy.
“The fact that they’ve used, in a way, their experience in the North to turn that into something that they want [for] a brighter future for the entire Korean Peninsula could send really…
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