SEOUL: A person who crossed the border into North Korea on New Year’s Day was likely a defector who had slipped through the same heavily fortified frontier in the other direction to settle in South Korea in late 2020, South Korea’s military said Monday.
South Korean surveillance equipment earlier detected an unidentified person entering North Korean territory across the eastern portion of the border on Saturday. The military said its security camera showed the person crawling over a barbed-wire fence established along the southern edge of the border.
On Monday, the Defense Ministry said in a statement it suspects a North Korean defector was the latest border-crosser and that it is trying to confirm related information.
A ministry official said the statement refers to a former North Korean citizen who was captured at the southern part of the border, also on the eastern section, in November 2020. The man identified himself as a former gymnast and told investigators that he had crawled over barbed wire fences to defect before being found by South Korean troops, the official said requesting anonymity citing department rules.
Ministry spokesman Boo Seung-Chan said earlier Monday that North Korea has not responded to a South Korean message sent the previous day to ensure the person’s safety.
In September 2020, North Korea killed a South Korean fisheries official found floating in its waters along a sea boundary. South Korea said that North Korea troops were under orders to shoot anyone illegally crossing the border to protect against the coronavirus pandemic.
The South Korean ministry didn’t provide further details such as why it believes the defector went back to the North.
About 34,000 North Koreans have fled to South Korea for economic and political reasons since the late 1990s, and only about 30 of them have returned home in the past 10 years, according to South Korean government records.
Observers say those returnees likely failed to adjust to new highly competitive, capitalistic lives in South Korea, had big debts or were blackmailed by North Korean agents who threatened to do harm to their loved ones if they didn’t return.
Defecting via the border is rare. Unlike its official name, the Demilitarized Zone, the 248-kilometer-long, 4-kilometer-wide border is guarded by land mines, tank traps and combat troops on both sides as well as barbed wire fences. A vast majority of the North Korean defectors in South Korea have come here via China and Southeast Asian countries.
Saturday’s border crossing has raised questions about South Korea’s security posture as the border crosser’s entry into the DMZ was not immediately notice by South Korean troops though their surveillance equipment was later found to have detected the person. The military acknowledged it had sent soldiers but failed to locate the person before he or she crossed the border.
In recent years, the South Korean military faced similar criticism when North Koreans snaked through DMZ areas unnoticed to defect, including one who knocked on the door of a South Korean army barrack.
Seoul: North Korea defector likely made rare border crossing
https://arab.news/w2s8p
Seoul: North Korea defector likely made rare border crossing
- Security camera showed the person crawling over a barbed-wire fence established along the southern edge of the border
Single ‘digital nation-state’ is not a far-fetched notion, Melania Trump tells UN Security Council
- US first lady argues that AI and global connectivity could reshape education, help reduce conflict and empower children worldwide
- Societies rooted in knowledge foster innovation, tolerance and moral reasoning, while those shaped by ignorance risk disorder and conflict, she says
NEW YORK CITY: The idea of a single digital nation-state is “not so far-fetched,” US First Lady Melania Trump told the UN Security Council on Monday.
She argued that artificial intelligence and global connectivity could reshape education, help reduce conflict and empower children worldwide.
The US holds the rotating presidency of the council for March, and as she presided over its first meeting of the month Trump said technology was erasing borders and creating what she described as a shared intellectual future.
“Perhaps this idea isn’t so far-fetched,” she said, pointing to the rise of digital currencies, blockchain-based payment systems, and AI-driven databases she argued were already transforming media and financial markets.
Trump thanked the US’s fellow council members — the UK, France, Russia, China, Greece, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Denmark, Panama, Liberia, Somalia, Colombia, Pakistan, Bahrain and Latvia — for their role in efforts to maintain international security.
The responsibility for preventing conflict “must be applied evenly and should never be carried out lightly,” she said. Her remarks focused in particular on the role of education as the foundation of peace and stability.
“A nation that makes learning sacred protects its books, its language, its science and its mathematics. It protects its future,” Trump said, arguing that societies rooted in knowledge foster innovation, tolerance and moral reasoning, while those shaped by ignorance risk disorder and conflict.
Education is widely recognized as a fundamental human right, she added, yet many children and young adults around the world remain barred from the chance to attend high school or university. The losses arising from this squandered potential, from potential medical breakthroughs to possible advances in food security and technology, are borne not only by the individual countries involved but by humanity as a whole, she said.
Trump called for the expansion of global access to technology to help bridge the digital divide, noting that about 6 billion people, 70 percent of the world’s population, now use mobile devices and the internet.
“If our nations band together, we can close the technological divide,” she said, describing a world in which a farmer on a remote Greek island, a student in Somalia and a resident of New York City can all tap into centuries of accumulated human knowledge.
AI was democratizing access to information once confined to university libraries, she added, and redefining participation in the global “economy of ideas.”
She continued: “Conflict arises from ignorance. Knowledge creates understanding, replacing fear with peace and unity.”
Trump called on council members to safeguard learning and promote access to higher education, urging them to “build a future generation of leaders who embrace peace through education.”
She added: “The path to peace depends on us taking responsibility to empower our children through education and technology.”
