It’s time to start considering what a North Korean refugee crisis would look like
There’s an undeveloped strip of land on the Korean peninsula where nature thrives, but wild animals occasionally explode. Walking across it would be a bad idea.
Known as the demilitarized zone (DMZ), it divides South Korea and North Korea, nations that technically have been at war since the 1950s. Running 240 km (150 miles) across the Korean peninsula, and measuring about 4 km (2.5 miles) wide, it is heavily guarded by two of the world’s largest militaries, strewn with landmines, and arguably the most fortified border on the planet.
The border situation for North Koreans.
Plenty of crossing points to the north. (Quartz)
If you want to flee North Korea, this is not your recommended route. It makes much more sense to head north instead toward China, where the Yalu and Tumen rivers straddle Mount Paektu to create a 1,420-km (880-mile) border. The Yalu is the deeper of the two rivers, but neither is all that hard to get across. In the winter, both can freeze over.
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing of late over North Korea and its erratic leader Kim Jong-un, with much of the world rightly alarmed over its ongoing tests of missiles and nuclear bombs—including a missile test on May 14. There’s been hope that China will apply more economic pressure against North Korea to help bring about a change.
But it’s impossible to game out scenarios for the region without taking into account the reality of North Korea’s borders. For most of the 25 million people contained within them, life is already harsh. Should central authority be replaced by civil war and competing factions hoarding resources, it would get even worse, causing potentially millions of desperate (and in many cases starving) people to head straight for China.
Today Beijing considers fleeing North Koreans “economic migrants,” meaning it doesn’t have to offer them protections it agreed to under the UN’s 1951 Refugee Convention. It routinely returns North Koreans to their country, knowing that many will be tortured or executed, in part because Beijing worries that a more lenient stance might only encourage more North Koreans to cross the border.
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