She’s Fled Both Koreas, and Controversy Has Followed

With her accordion and a suitcase of spring clothes, Ma Young-ae flew from Seoul to Atlanta two years ago for a monthlong tour playing folk songs in church basements.

But when it came time to return to Seoul with her musical troupe, Ma and her husband, North Korean defectors who had quarreled with the South Korean tour organizer, refused to go to the airport.

What might have been just another spat between a prima donna and her manager has turned into a diplomatic incident that could strain relations between the United States and South Korea, one of its closest allies.

Ma, 50, has filed for political asylum in the United States, claiming repression by the South Korean government. About 20 other North Koreans have filed similar petitions in U.S. immigration courts making the same argument, and in at least one case last month, asylum has been granted.

Ma, a petite beauty with a heart-shaped face and daubs of purple eye shadow, defected from North Korea to China in 1999 and came to Seoul in 2000. She said she got into trouble when she became active in human rights organizations in the South that criticized the regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.

“ ‘Don’t talk about starvation. Don’t talk about human rights,’ ” Ma said she was warned repeatedly by South Korean intelligence officials assigned to watch over her.

“The South Korean government doesn’t want anyone making statements that would antagonize Kim Jong Il,” she said in an interview in her lawyer’s office in New York.

Like Cuban exiles, North Korean defectors tend to be unabashedly anticommunist -- a stance at odds with the South Korean government’s policy of rapprochement with the Pyongyang regime.

“The South Koreans are practically keeping these defectors under house arrest. They don’t want anybody to rain on their sunshine,” said Michael Horowitz, a conservative activist with the Washington-based Hudson Institute, referring to the “sunshine policy” of cooperation with North Korea.

Ma is not the only North Korean defector to voice complaints. Many have said they were followed by intelligence agents and refused passports that would allow them to leave South Korea.

A former missile scientist who testified before Congress about North Korean weapons of mass destruction in 2003 has complained that his wife, a fellow defector, received so many threatening phone calls from South Korean agents while he was in the United States that she was hospitalized for stress.

The scientist is among the North Koreans applying for asylum in the United States.

In 2004, Congress passed the North Korean Human Rights Act, which among other provisions ordered that North Korean defectors be granted political asylum in the United States. But that was directed at refugees coming directly from North Korea -- not those who have already settled in South Korea.

There is little dispute that North Koreans live under one of the world’s most oppressive regimes or that they face persecution when they try to escape into China.

Beijing routinely arrests and repatriates North Koreans. Over the weekend, six North Koreans who had been in hiding in China were flown to the United States for resettlement under the human rights act.

But, as Horowitz said, “once you go to South Korea, there is the strongest possible presumption that you are living in a democratic country and it makes it difficult to get asylum.”

He said U.S. courts had avoided ruling on the petitions of the North Koreans to avoid offending the South Koreans.

An exception is the case of a former North Korean military officer who last month was awarded asylum by a U.S. immigration court in Los Angeles. The officer, Seo Jae-sok, had been living for six years in South Korea before he entered the United States through the Mexican border in 2004.

Although Seo has claimed he faced discrimination and harassment in South Korea, his lawyers argued the case primarily on conditions in North Korea.

“Our cases are based on the horrors of life in North Korea. If you had to prove persecution in South Korea, it would be a rare case that would win,” said Jesse Moorman, a lawyer with the firm IRC, which has 15 similar cases pending.

He said Seo’s case marked the first time asylum had been granted under the North Korean Human Rights Act.

Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, confirmed the verdict and said the government did not intend to appeal.

U.S. activists said they expected more North Koreans to be granted asylum in the United States because of President Bush’s personal interest as well as that of Christian groups.

The Bush administration’s stance on North Korean human rights has at times caused friction with South Korea.

Officials in Seoul are irritated by the suggestion that they are ill-treating North Koreans. They acknowledge that defectors have some limitations placed on their freedom of movement but say it is for their protection. At least one defector, a nephew of Kim’s mistress, was gunned down by presumed North Korean agents outside his home in Seoul in 1997.

At a news briefing last month, South Korea’s top official on North Korea singled out Ma Young-ae, calling her claim of persecution an insult to South Koreans.

“The government, our people and the press are very much interested in the issue of North Korean defectors, so how could we possibly oppress them?” said Lee Jong-seok, minister of unification.

Before her eventual escape to South Korea, Ma said, she lived in Pyongyang, where she worked for the North Korean army, playing in a band and serving in an intelligence unit. Ma, who lives in Ridgefield Park, N.J., told her story through an interpreter.

In 1999, she was accused of disloyalty. After five weeks of interrogation with little food or water, she managed to slip away and sneak across the border to China, she said. She was arrested by Chinese police and beaten to the point where her collarbone was broken, she said, but eventually escaped again. She made it to South Korea in 2000 and was given citizenship.

Initially, things went well, she said. She started a restaurant serving Pyongyang-style noodles. She played accordion with a group of defectors calling itself the Pyongyang Arts Troupe. A widow, she married a fellow defector. But as she became increasingly involved with political activities, giving interviews to journalists and appearing at human rights demonstrations, Ma said, her fortunes changed.

In 2003, she was arrested on charges of smuggling her 13-year-old son into South Korea on a forged passport and given a suspended sentence.

“So many other defectors had paid brokers to bring in family, but only I was arrested,” Ma said.

The trip to the United States was organized by a group called the South Korean Youth Exchange Federation. She said she was advised at the outset not to say anything critical about the North Korean or South Korean governments. She also said the organizer of the trip took her passport when they arrived in the United States.

After numerous quarrels, she said, the organizer told her, “You’ll be dealt with when we get back to South Korea.”

Ma said: “I was afraid. I didn’t want to go back.”

Ma’s allegations are disputed by Chung Kyung-seok, the youth federation director and the manager on the trip to the United States. He said Ma and her husband were belligerent from the outset, and he suspected they might have been planning all along to remain in the United States.

“I think she thought she would earn a lot of money in the United States,” said Chung, who spoke of the case with some bitterness. “The minute I heard that she had applied for asylum in the United States, I thought, ‘This is how she repays all the benefits she has received in South Korea.’ ”

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Times staff writer Anna Gorman in Los Angeles contributed to this report.