North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is considered a dangerously unknown quantity. Photo: AP



Minhee Kim wept when Kim Jong-il died. Minhee, who fled North Korea eight years ago, wept not out of grief but because the dictator's death reinforced that he was just a man all along, not the god she had once been brainwashed into believing him to be.

"I realised Kim Jong-il was in the end just a mortal human being and I was devastated that my life was ruined by this man," the 37-year-old said.

A refugee now living in South Korea says her life was ruined by the late North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il. Photo: Getty Images

Growing up, Minhee witnessed four public executions and lived through a famine that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

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She knew of whole families put to death because one member had resisted the regime. Her older brother was jailed for going to China to work as a shepherd out of hunger and desperation.

It was her brother's death in prison that sparked her determination to escape through China and Laos, making her one of an estimated 29,000 North Koreans who have settled in the south since 1948, including nearly 1300 last year.

Defectors, or refugees as Minhee prefers to be called, provide glimmers of information about the opaque hermit kingdom. Mostly they show how anachronistically closed, comically make-believe and sadly repressive it is.

The twin stressors of knowing so little about the regime in Pyongyang while watching its steady march towards atomic weapons capability is prompting a hardening in South Korea, where there is little optimism that current leader Kim Jong-un can be swayed from his intractable path towards becoming Asia's nuclear-armed problem child.

The centre-right government of President Park Geun-hye has taken a firm line in response to nuclear tests, closing the joint-run industrial park in the north, snuffing out the one diplomatic bright spot.

In response to Kim's Party Congress this week – the first in 36 years – Park warned that Kim's nuclear ambitions would end in "regime collapse" and said the South would take "stronger and more effective" measures to underscore this.

In a recent speech to the Journalist Forum for World Peace in Seoul, vice Foreign Minister Lim Sungnam said the South could "no longer afford to be pushed around by North Korea's deceit and intimidation".

"In a nutshell, the leadership in Pyongyang must be pressed much harder until it changes its fundamental calculation regarding the value of its nuclear arsenal and delivery capabilities," he said.

The conservative mayor of the booming port city of Busan – South Korea's Shanghai – Suh Byung-soo, told Fairfax Media that dialogue with the Kim regime was "not possible".

"They will not change," said Suh, who is a long-time confidant of President Park and a former head of her ruling party. "The only way is to continue pressure, back North Korea into a corner and force change to come. When a new regime emerges we will engage in dialogue and provide development assistance."

He said he was confident this would happen one day but he couldn't say when.

Indeed few are prepared to make predictions about internal change because, depressingly, more than four years into his reign, the younger Kim remains a dangerously unknown quantity.

"We knew what Kim Jong-il was thinking … Now we don't know anything about Kim Jong-un," said Suh Hoon, a former deputy director at South Korea's National Intelligence Service.

"Without knowing anything, we have to come up with an approach to deal with North Korea. We say 'pragmatic', we say 'realistic', but if we do not know who we are dealing with, I think it's very difficult to come up with a good strategy."

The third generation of Kim has made some minor pro-market economic reforms but he has also launched a crackdown on dissent, notably the violent purges of suspected rivals.

Minhee and fellow refugee Baek-Min, who spoke to Fairfax Media in the South Korean capital Seoul where they now live, are pessimistic about the prospects for change in the north. (Their names have been changed to protect them and their families.)

Fear and brainwashing are keeping the regime upright, they say.

Baek-Min, 46, was a soldier for 18 years before escaping the North in 2014. Partly by listening to South Korean radio and television, he figured out for himself that North's regime was a hypocritical charade.

But he believes he's in a minority. North Korean awareness has improved, he says, but it is "still at a primitive stage for revolution or a change of regime".

Minhee points out there have been "three generations of inherited regime that have indoctrinated and isolated North Koreans … It is really difficult to change their life all at once".

However it ends, it is hard to imagine a soft landing for a nation whose population is slightly bigger than Australia's and has been as culturally and economically isolated as North Korea has been.

Minhee and Baek-Min say the adjustment between two countries separated for 70 years has been difficult, needing a mental shift from sheltered communism to a free, capitalism where they have had to learn to fend for themselves.

Baek-Min cites "loneliness, discrimination against North Korean refugees and the different life systems" as taking some of the shine off his new life. He says he keeps telling himself: "You survived North Korea, why not South Korea?"

The reporter travelled to South Korea courtesy of the Journalist Forum for World Peace.