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Abstract
This article explores how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in South Korea articulate and implement disciplinary citizenship in the resettlement of North Korean refugees. Fieldwork based on in-depth interviews reveals that NGOs play a pivotal role in carrying out the state-led resettlement project at the local level. As disciplinary agents, NGOs mirror the state's policy in their emphasis on self-sufficiency and workfare as they encourage North Koreans to become economically productive citizens. Concomitantly, they emphasize civic contributions and volunteerism as a remedy for improving the social reputation of North Koreans as welfare recipients to that of contributing citizens. This focus on active, responsible citizenship aims at disciplining North Koreans to become docile subjects at the bottom of the social ladder, despite persistent economic difficulties and social marginalization in South Korea. Thus, refugees are pressured not only to achieve economic self-sufficiency, but to contribute to society in order to claim their sociocultural citizenship.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. A refugee is defined as a person fleeing their country because of persecution or ‘owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion’, according to the UN's 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Citation1967). The South Korean government has recognized North Korean border-crossers as refugees since 2002 (Joongang Ilbo, 23 February 2002). I use the term ‘refugee’ here in accordance with this official stance.
2. The legal ground for protecting North Korean defectors was the Special Relief Act for Patriots and Veterans, and North Korean Defectors established in 1962, which granted defectors benefits equal to those for the patriots of national merit.
3. The 1993 Act on the Protection of North Korean Defectors treated North Korean refugees as welfare recipients and transferred the ministerial responsibility from the Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs to the Ministry of Health and Welfare; this was later transferred back to the Ministry of Unification in 1997. Another example is that the government organized a large-scale support centre for North Korean refugees in 2010 and named it the North Korean Refugees Foundation.
4. Figure 1 shows an aggregate estimation of the number of North Korean refugees between 1949 and 1989 (a total of 607).
5. In 2012, fifty-five employment advocacy officers were designated as public servants working in nationwide job centres organized by the Ministry of Employment and Labour to help North Korean refugees find suitable jobs. Two hundred residential advocacy officers were assigned as public servants who belonged to local governments in order to facilitate administrative processes. Eight hundred security advocacy officers, who were police officers, were designated to protect and monitor North Korean refugees (http://www.unikorea.go.kr). Also, police stations kept Community Security Cooperation Committees made up of local lawyers, doctors and teachers to support the refugees (Korean National Police Agency Citation2010).
6. As of December 2013, 177 NGOs officially participated in the resettlement project, fifty of which were run by North Korean refugees (The Ministry of Unification Citation2014).
7. Until the early 1990s, defectors were rewarded with generous resettlement packages. For example, a pilot who defected in his MiG-19 fighter jet in 1983 received 1.2 billion won [US$1,000,000], which was about 480 times the annual salary of an average South Korean (Lankov Citation2006, 117).
8. Since 2009, the Unity Centre programmes have been subcontracted to NGOs by the Ministry of Unification for the purpose of providing long-term services for North Koreans in residential communities.
9. The 1993 Act on the Protection of North Korean Defectors, under the Kim Young Sam administration, greatly reduced the previous amount of resettlement funds and exhibited a laissez-faire attitude towards North Koreans, which had adversarial effects on them. Under the Kim Dae Jung government, however, the Act on the Protection and Settlement Support of Residents Escaping from North Korea in 1997 increased the amount of resettlement funds.
10. Note that this amount does not include a deposit (roughly around US$11,000) for a permanent rental apartment that the government provides for North Korean refugees.
11. The reduction of the baseline payment was also intended to discourage ‘chain defection’, in which a North Korean refugee brings his or her family members to South Korea, by giving the resettlement fund to a broker (Hankyoreh Sinmun, 4 January 2005).
12. For example, the Kim Dae Jung government enacted the National Basic Living Security Act of 2000, which expanded social programmes for low-income households in this period. This law emphasized the policy focus on workfare by mandating that welfare recipients ought to work as it was necessary for self-reliance. This was consistent with the resettlement policy for North Korean refugees.
13. South Korea's public social expenditure was only 9.7% of its gross domestic product in 2012, while the average public social expenditure in the OECD countries was 22.1%. South Korea was ranked second to last among the OECD countries (Adema, Fron, and Ladaique Citation2011, 21).
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Jung-eun Lee
JUNG-EUN LEE is Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at El Camino College.