Song Chun-son, alias “Chrysanthemum”, will spend three years in a prison in South Korea for a case illustrating the conflict between the two Koreas over refugees from the North. A court in Suwon, near Seoul, on Tuesday, November 23, convicted the North Korean 40-year-old for violating the National Security Act. Mme Song would have participated – under duress, according to her – in a plot orchestrated by the North Korean services to convince refugees from the North to return to their native country.
This detention is another tragic stage in the chaotic life of the native of Onsong, near the Chinese border. In 2003, she fled food shortages in North Korea to China. Chinese police arrested her in 2007 and sent her back to her country, where she ended up in a labor camp.
Released in 2009, she embarked on an illegal brokerage activity, giving the money sent by the refugees to their families back in the North. She was spotted in 2014 by the North Korean National Security Agency, which recruited her under the code name “Chrysanthemum”. In 2018, she managed to flee to the South, where she arrived after a journey through Vietnam, Laos and Thailand. She then trained as a nursing assistant and worked on a farm.
“Cooperate to stay alive”
Her past caught up with her. Southern counterespionage established that before her arrival, she had helped a North Korean refugee in the South to return to her country. Mme Song admitted that she put a North Korean agent, Yon Chol-nam, in touch with a man she knew when she worked as a broker. She allegedly called him to ask him to help Mr. Yon, claiming that the agent was her husband and that he worked for North Korean families trying to contact their refugee relatives in the South.
With the help of the refugee, Mr. Yon tried to persuade several people to return to the North. One of these targets, Kang Chol-woo, and his partner, also a refugee, gave in and returned to the North in 2016.
Mme Song explained that she had no choice but to obey the services of the North. “She had to cooperate to stay alive”, declared to New York Times her sister, Chun-nyo, arrived in South Korea in 2019. “The accused acted as an agent of the National Security Agency, participated in an operation against South Korea, for the return of a North Korean refugee to his country”, however, estimated the Suwon court.
Instrumentalisation
The case illustrates the shadow war that Seoul and Pyongyang are waging around the more than 33,800 refugees from the North who have come to the South since the 1990s. Upon coming to power in 2011, leader Kim Jong-un pushed the repatriation, by all means, of these refugees. Twenty-eight have reportedly returned in the past ten years. According to the South services, some return voluntarily to North Korea because they cannot find their place in South Korean society. Others would be kidnapped or the target of blackmail.
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