Did North Korean Defector Willingly Return To Kim Jong Un's Country?

Lim Ji Hyun defected from North Korea to South Korea in 2014, where she became a modest celebrity. On television, she recounted her tales of serving with a North Korean military artillery unit and described how she used to bribe her teacher with cigarettes so that she could play hookey and sell illegal smuggled bottles of liquor for money, according to the New York Times Tuesday. Now it appears as if she has gone back to North Korea.

A video published on YouTube Saturday showed Lim, 26, emotionally recalling her time in South Korea to another person who defected back to North Korea.

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“Every single day of my life in the South was a hell,” said Lim, “When I was alone in a dark, cold room, I was heartbroken and I wept every day, missing my fatherland and my parents back home.”

The Unification Ministry, the South Korean government agency tasked with handling issues with defectors, is investigating the incident. The agency will determine how and why she went back to North Korea, and determine she if defected back on her own or if she was abducted.

“I was lured to the South by a delusion that I would eat well and make a lot of money there,” she said. “It was not the place I had imagined. I had wandered around everywhere there to make money, working in drinking bars, but nothing had worked out.”

A North Korean famine in the ‘90s caused over 30,000 people to defect to the South, often through China. Defectors go through a South Korean orientation program to help them adjust to life in South Korea, but often it is a difficult transition.

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North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un has sought to crack down on defections, tightening border security and cracking down on South Korean movies and television smuggled into the North. Any person lured back to North Korea from defection, either on their own or though blackmail and abduction, is seen as a huge moral victory for Kim and his regime.

“I was lured to the South by a delusion that I would eat well and make a lot of money there,” said Lim. “It was not the place I had imagined. I had wandered around everywhere there to make money, working in drinking bars, but nothing had worked out.”