The crutch-wielding North Korean lauded by Donald Trump in a State of the Union address is seeking a seat of his own in the South's parliament to ...
North Korean defector and human rights activist Ji Seong-ho is running for a parliamentary seat in South Korea. SEOUL: The crutch-wielding North Korean lauded by Donald Trump in a State of the Union address is seeking a seat of his own in the South's parliament to defend other defectors who have fled their reclusive homeland but often find themselves marginalised.
Ji, who is standing for a proportional representation seat, feels the 33,000-odd defectors in the South have been neglected by the current government. A quarter of a century later and on the other side of the Demilitarized Zone that divides the Korean peninsula, Ji is running for South Korea's main opposition, the conservative United Future Party, in legislative elections.
Ji runs an organisation that has helped around 500 North Koreans make their way clandestinely through China. His office is lined with photos with top officials including Trump, who in his 2018 speech to Congress called the defector's story"a testament to the yearning of every human soul to live in freedom".Next to Ji's desk stand the wooden crutches made for him by his father that he waved in the air in front of the world's cameras. His father also tried to flee shortly after Ji's departure but was caught and tortured to death, he says.
"The entire society of North Korea is a prison," Ji says."When the peninsula is reunified, are we going to shake hands with the North Korean regime? How are we going to look the North Korean people in the face?" Defectors who do reach the South sometimes struggle to adjust to their new life in a democratic, capitalist society.
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