Is a lifelong struggle against tyranny merely a 'casual experience'?

The author prefers to use the lowercase “n” to challenge the Kim family regime’s legitimacy.

Tuesday marked a profound historical milestone for human rights, the third anniversary of North Korean Escapee’s Day.

It is the fruits of the historic determination of Former President Park Geun-hye, who powerfully cried out to the north Korean people in her Armed Forces Day message, “Come into the embrace of a free Republic of Korea at any time.”

And it came as the result of a decisive resolution of former President Yoon Suk-yeol, who inherited the lifelong desire for “unification through a northward march” from founding father and former President Syngman Rhee to finally enact the day as an official state-designated national holiday.

That day is not a mere bureaucratic date on a calendar. It is a grand, historic declaration that the free world will never abandon the 25 million north Korean souls trapped under totalitarianism.

It stands as a magnificent beginning of the great unification saga to plant the flag of true liberal democracy across every inch of the Korean Peninsula.

Yet, the congratulatory speech delivered by President Lee Jae Myung during this year’s third anniversary ceremony pierced the hearts of thousands of survivors with cold betrayal.

The president completely avoided and cast aside the legally designated title of the holiday, “North Korean Escapee’s Day,” which was enacted by former President Yoon Suk-yeol.

Instead, he aggressively pushed the administrative label “Bukhyangmin” -- a sanitized, politically engineered euphemism meaning “people whose hometown is in the north” --which is arbitrarily used by the Ministry of Unification.

Most egregiously, he went on to trivialize our brutal struggle for survival as a mere “Bukhyangmin experience,” describing it as a casual asset. This is a blatant distortion of history and a cruel, secondary violation of human rights against the victims.

South Korean politicians and self-proclaimed democracy activists continuously preach the virtues of “democracy” and elevate the history of “non-violent resistance” against state tyranny into a sacred, untouchable realm.

To them, we must ask a fundamental question: Is not the life of a defector - who actively cast a vote of defiance against the world’s most brutal dictatorship by risking their life to cross a heavily armed border - the most courageous and sublime act of non-violent democratic resistance in human history?

Why is it that the protests they led are praised as sacred democratic movements, while the massive, life-or-death resistance of survivors who shattered the chains of the north Korean totalitarian regime is reduced to a casual, leisurely “experience”?

This sickening double standard and selective application of democracy is a wretched political hypocrisy and a direct insult to the concept of human liberty.

The terrifying truth behind this linguistic manipulation is that the aggressive enforcement of the term Bukhyangmin is a massive psychological experiment aimed at controlling the minds of the entire public.

On July 7, the current administration enacted a heavily criticized amendment to the Information and Communications Network Act, widely dubbed the “Gag Law” (Iptle-mak Act), which imposes up to five times punitive damages for alleged “manipulated information.”

The sudden, forced erasure of the word “escapee” from a state-sponsored ceremony immediately after this law took effect is no coincidence.

Pushing the Bukhyangmin framework is a calculated litmus test to see how submissively the public will accept state-mandated vocabulary and ideological policing before the full weight of the July 7 Gag Law is unleashed. It is a sophisticated and insidious form of thought control designed to pre-emptively suffocate critical dissent.

Furthermore, this administration is actively segregating defectors -- who are legally and constitutionally equal citizens under Article 3 of the Republic of Korean Constitution -- by resurrecting a twisted variation of the Songbun system.

Assessing individuals by their origin and forcing a deceptive title upon them to dilute their political identity is nothing short of a South Korean mutation of the brutal caste system used by the Kim dictatorship to divide its population into loyal, wavering and hostile classes.

Our lives are not a mundane routine that can be sliced, diced and packaged by your political word games and linguistic censorship.

From the very moment of our birth, we were forced to sing deceptive hymns of praise, chanting “Socialism is the Best” and “Nothing to Envy.”

Yet, the grim reality behind those glamorous slogans was a devastating, systemic psychological gaslighting, designed entirely to sustain a single dictator by destroying the souls of 25 million citizens.

We were denied the most fundamental and universal of all human rights -- the right to food. Stripped of the freedom of movement and entirely ignorant of what true liberty even meant, we were shackled as slaves in a giant, open-air prison, forced to live the lives of mere servants.

At the apex of this systemic deprivation and state exploitation, we collided with the catastrophic horrors of the 1990s famine -- a manmade genocide that starved millions to death. Stripped of the bare minimum right to life, we watched our parents and children vomit blood and collapse on dirt roads, and we were forced to bury their emaciated corpses with our bare hands.

More horrific still is the reality that this violation of human dignity did not end upon our escape.

From the very moment north Koreans crossed the border, we embarked on a blood-soaked journey through China, hunted like animals, sold into human trafficking and living under the constant, suffocating terror of forced repatriation.

Even at this very moment, our brothers and sisters are being forcibly repatriated and rotting away into nameless corpses in frozen north Korean prison camps, and countless families live in daily agony, completely unaware of whether their loved ones are dead or alive.

Does this active, bleeding, ongoing humanitarian catastrophe look like a “leisurely experience to casually chat over” to your eyes?

We issue a stern warning to those who casually weigh the gravity of human suffering against their partisan interests and desecrate the blood-stained history of survivors.

If that sanitized, privileged “experience” and your cynical word games are so profoundly valuable to you, then we demand that you step down from your ivory towers, crawl under the boot of the north Korean regime and experience that living hell and utter deprivation for yourselves.

The international community and the current administration must recognize a definitive truth: north Korean defectors are not passive objects of administrative classification, nor are they tools for political experimentation.

They are sovereign individuals who reclaimed their universal human rights against all odds -- living testaments and the purest witnesses to the fight against tyranny.

Cease these deceptive linguistic tactics and immediately repeal the oppressive laws meant to silence the free will of the people. We will not be shaken by these malicious word games.

We will stand tall and proud under our rightful identity as escapees, and we will continue to march forward until true liberal democracy is achieved across every inch of the Korean Peninsula.

Jihyun Park, a British Korean Conservative politician and regular contributor to the Korea Regional Review, is a North Korean escapee who fled twice from the country -- in 1998, which resulted in a forced repatriation, and in 2008, which was successful. She is a senior fellow for human security at the Center for Asia Pacific Strategy.

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This story was originally published July 17, 2026 at 9:53 AM.