SEOUL, South Korea – Three years ago, jobless and hungry, Kim Geum-hyok climbed Mount White Horse near his North Korean hometown of Kaesong, reflecting on the meaninglessness of life.
Not far to the south, across a river, the 21-year-old could see tall buildings in South Korea, brightly lit. The sight called him.
After two nights on the mountain, Kim crossed the world’s most heavily armed border to reach it. She climbed down, crawled under and over layers of barbed wire fences, and made her way through minefields. On the river bank, she hid among the reeds, improvising a life vest from the washed plastic trash. When night fell, she began to swim.
“I kept swimming toward the light,” Kim said of her seven and a half hours in the water, in an interview that a fellow North Korean defector posted on YouTube. “When I finally landed on the South Korean side and walked through the reeds and saw South Korean soldiers approaching, I was so exhausted that I collapsed.”
This month, after three years of living in the South, Kim returned by swimming through the same river he had crossed in 2017, South Korean officials said. On Sunday, North Korea said it may have brought the coronavirus into the country for the first time, and placed Kaesong, Kim’s hometown, under lock and key.
On Monday, a police department in South Korea said that before Mr. Kim left, an arrest warrant had been issued for an accusation of rape.
North Korea did not identify Mr. Kim in his statement. But South Korea said it was the only deserter in the South that had returned to the North this month. The South did not reveal his full name, but revealed enough information for reporters to establish his identity.
And other defectors who knew him, including YouTube interviewer Kim Jin-ah, a Kaesong woman, confirmed that it was him, uploading photos of Kim to social media.
Weeks before his departure, Mr. Kim, now 24, gave several interviews for Kim Jin-ah’s YouTube channel Lady From Kaesong, speaking about their lives in the two Koreas. She was wearing an alias and wearing sunglasses, and in some clips her face had been digitally altered. Much of what he said could not be independently verified.
“I visited his apartment once in late June and was surprised that it had no furniture,” Kim said in a video posted after Kim’s return to the North. “Looking back, I think he was already preparing to leave South Korea.”
Even before Mr. Kim returned, his story was unusual. Most of the 33,000 North Korean defectors now living in South Korea came through China and Southeast Asia. But some, like Mr. Kim, made the dangerous decision to cross the inter-Korean border.
However, for a deserter to return, to a desolate economy and a dictatorship that calls deserters “human scum,” is rare. Eleven have done so in the past five years, according to the Southern Unification Ministry. Like many deserters, those who return have often had trouble adjusting to the free-flowing capitalist society of the South.
In one of the YouTube interviews, Kim said that he had lost most of his hearing at a young age. “Because of that, I had a hard time communicating with people,” he said. “I was beaten because they told me to bring one thing and bring another.”
When still a child, Kaesong, a city of 300,000 inhabitants, was chosen as the site of an industrial park jointly run by the two Koreas. It opened in 2004, and Kaesong became a booming city, awash in cash. Mr. Kim’s cousins worked in the park, he said, and he sold eggs and vegetables himself.
But four years ago, the South closed the complex in a dispute over the North’s nuclear weapons program. The economy collapsed and Kim, like many others, was soon out of a job. (Last month, with inter-Korean relations at another low point, the North blew up an office in Kaesong that had jointly operated with the South.)
When he climbed Mount White Horse in June 2017, Mr. Kim told Ms. Kim that “he saw no hope for the future, he had no meaning in life, wondering if he should continue to live or die.” Seeing South Korea’s buildings at night forced him to “go there and check it out even if it meant my death,” he said.
Kim said he could not take his eyes off South Korean television during his interrogation by officials, who suffer all deserters after arriving in the South. In the north, all televisions are preset to government propaganda channels.
Mr. Kim settled in Gimpo, a city across the Han River from Kaesong. A doctor corrected the hearing problem he had lived with since childhood. He did not give Ms. Kim details about her condition or treatment, but told her that she cried that day.
He also told her that he missed his parents very much. He had enrolled in a vocational school as part of the resettlement program that the South offers to deserters. But he said he quit and found a job, hoping to send money to his family, as defectors often do through intermediaries in China.
Off camera, according to Ms. Kim, Mr. Kim confided something else.
He told her that the police were investigating him because another deserter had accused him of raping her. He told Ms. Kim that he had been so drunk on the night in question that he couldn’t remember a thing.
With Mr. Kim now in the North, it is impossible to contact him for comment. But Gimpo police confirmed that an arrest warrant had been issued against him.
On July 17, authorities say, Kim arrived at Ganghwa Island, which may have been the place where he first set foot on South Korean soil. At 2:20 in the morning of the 18th, he got out of a taxi on the north coast of the island. Around that time, he sent his last text message to Ms. Kim.
“I really didn’t want to lose you because you were like an older sister to me,” she wrote, according to Kim, who read the message on YouTube. “I will pay my debt to you no matter where I live, as long as I live.”
Ms. Kim, who was working in a 24-hour store when the message came, rushed to Mr. Kim’s apartment as soon as his shift ended, he told his viewers.
She learned that he had resigned from the department days earlier, demanding his deposit. She said he had also sold a used car he had loaned him, apparently to raise as much money as possible before going home.
South Korean officials concluded that Kim had crawled across a three-foot-diameter drain that runs under barbed wire fences on the north shore of Ganghwa. That led him to the Han River, which they believe swam back.
In a bag near the drain, officials found bank receipts stating that Kim had withdrawn 5 million South Korean won from his account, and then converted most of that to $ 4,000.
What happened to Mr. Kim after he crossed is unknown. North Korea said Sunday it was in quarantine, accusing it of creating “the dangerous situation in Kaesong city that can lead to a deadly and destructive disaster.”
