Seoul. Hwang Jeong-rye went to hospital in Seoul on June 9 for a back problem and has been stuck there ever since – locked in along with 78 others as South Korea scrambles to control an outbreak of the deadly Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS.

“It is a prison without bars … It hurts me because she wants to see my face even at a distance,” said Jeong Yeon-seok, fighting back tears after catching the eye of his 72-year-old mother on the sixth floor of the Mediheal Hospital.

Thousands of South Koreans have been put under quarantine, including those inside two hospitals that are under a two-week lockdown – meaning no one can enter or leave.

MERS has infected 165 people in South Korea, with 23 fatalities, in its largest outbreak outside Saudi Arabia. All of the infections known to have occurred in South Korea took place in health care facilities.

Worryingly for the likes of Jeong and his mother, most of those to die in the outbreak have been elderly or had existing ailments.

Each day at 11 a.m. and 4 p.m., Mediheal staff guarded by police officers collect items such as instant coffee, fruit and cigarettes left for patients by relatives or friends at a back door to the hospital.

Jeong, 45, delivered two bags of home-made leaf-mustard kimchi, shampoo and towels for his mother.

Mediheal was locked down by officials on June 11, after a patient there was diagnosed with MERS. The infected patient has been moved to another hospital, and none of those remaining at Mediheal has tested positive for the virus.

“My son comes here every day, seeing me from outside the hospital, and calls me several times. It is just so sad, it is making me cry,” Hwang, who lives across the street from the Mediheal Hospital, told Reuters by telephone.

“It is boring and baffling because we are locked up here six people in our room, so we are killing time by talking with each other or watching TV.”

Mediheal Hospital said the precaution was necessary, and that staff were trying as much as possible to help patients who might otherwise have been helped by family members.

In addition to the two hospitals under lockdown, another has been completely shut and the prestigious Samsung Medical Center in Seoul, where the most infections have occurred, has stopped taking new patients.

About 6,700 people are in quarantine, some in hospitals but most at home, including an entire village of 105 people.

At Changwon SK Hospital, which was sealed off with 54 people inside after a MERS patient visited, officials brought in exercise bikes to help patients stay fit and cope with boredom.

A patient, surnamed Jeong, at the hospital in the southern part of the country, said a sense of camaraderie had built among the patients.

“We are watching each other if anyone coughs. I heard someone at another floor had coughs but was tested negative. But we have some kind of unity as well and tell each other to keep clean,” said the man, who was admitted to hospital after breaking his finger.

“I want to go outside and get some fresh air.”

Reuters

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Seoul. South Korea confirmed five more cases of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, on Wednesday, bringing to 30 the number of infected people since the outbreak began in the country two weeks ago. Two people have died.

While there has been no sustained human-to-human transmission, the nightmare scenario is the virus changes and spreads rapidly, as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) did in 2002-2003, killing about 800 people around the world.

MERS was first identified in humans in 2012 and is caused by a coronavirus from the same family as the one that triggered SARS. But MERS has a much higher death rate at 38 percent, according to World Health Organization (WHO) figures.

There is no cure or vaccine.

China last week reported its first MERS case, that of a South Korean man who tested positive after breaking a voluntary house quarantine and traveling to Hong Kong and on to mainland China.

South Korea reported its first two deaths from MERS on Tuesday, fueling fear in the country which has reported the most cases outside the Middle East, where the disease first appeared.

South Korea has quarantined or isolated about 1,300 people for possible MERS infection.

Of the five new cases, four had been in the same hospital as the first patient, a 68-year-old man who had just returned from a trip to four countries in the Middle East. The other, a 60-year-old man, caught it from another infected person.

Media said health authorities were conducting tests on an elderly patient who died on Sunday after sharing the same hospital ward with one of the two MERS-infected people who had died. Officials said it was likely she died of existing illness.

More than 200 schools, most in the province of Gyeonggi around the capital, Seoul, and where the first death occurred on Monday, were shut for the week, the Education Ministry said.

The new cases would bring the total number globally to 1,166, based on World Health Organization (WHO) data, with at least 436 related deaths.

The WHO has not recommended trade or travel restrictions for South Korea, although South Korean border control authorities have put a ban on overseas travel for people isolated for possible infection, a health ministry official said.

Pressure is growing for the government to identify the hospitals treating infected patients as fear and confusion mount.

Public health authorities have insisted it was “helpful” to keep the names of the hospitals from the public, but in an opinion poll published on Wednesday 83 percent of respondents demanded that the government identify them.

Ian Jones, a specialist virologist at Britain’s University of Reading who has followed MERS since it emerged, said transparency would help in the effort to stop the outbreak.

“Being open about the cases, their locations and their condition, is best for control — even if this causes some alarm in the short term,” he said.

Some experts have said the 38 percent death rate from MERS might be overstated as patients with little or no symptoms might go undetected. The death rate from SARS was 9 to 12 percent, rising to more than 50 percent for patients over 65.

Symptoms of MERS can include cough, fever and shortness of breath. It can lead to respiratory failure, the WHO said.

Reuters

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Seoul. North Korea is a militarized, male-dominated society, but it is women who are making the money as the insular nation allows an unofficial market-based economy to take shape.

Women earn more than 70 percent of household income in North Korea, mainly as traders in the informal markets that have proliferated in recent years, research by the South Korean government-run Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU) found.

That is despite women making up only about half of the 12 million economically active North Koreans, experts say. Most men are stuck in state jobs that pay little or serve in the army.

“We North Koreans say men are fighting on the socialism front but women are fighting in the battle of life,” said a 26-year-old surnamed Jung who fled to South Korea in 2012 and regularly sends money north to support her mother’s grey-market business raising pigs and selling corn-based alcohol.

“There are no state provisions and my father has an unpaid job, which he must do almost as a duty,” said Jung, a college student in Seoul who asked that her full name not be used to protect her family members still in the North.

The North’s centrally-planned economy has not recovered from the collapse of the Soviet Union, Pyongyang’s economic and military backer during the Cold War. That was followed by a devastating famine in the 1990s that killed an estimated 800,000 to 1.5 million people, when women began selling foraged mushrooms and scrap copper cable to feed their families.

With state rations a distant memory, North Koreans have increasingly turned to the informal economy to support their families, and women are playing a disproportionately active role.

Still, men dominate North Korea’s military and government, which command absolute power in the nation of 24.5 million. The only women seen in the upper echelons of Pyongyang’s current elite are both relatives of leader Kim Jong Un — his sister Kim Yo Jong and his aunt Kim Kyong Hui, the sister of late leader Kim Jong Il.

The grey market economy is not strictly legal but is widely tolerated, with corrupt officials among its main participants.

Traders who set up stalls in some of the roughly 400 markets that have sprung up around the country pay a stall tax to party officials, according to refugees and experts.

Incompetent husbands

The money earned by most independent traders is not big.

A survey of 60 women who defected from impoverished North Korea in 2011 and 2012 by the Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights found many of them earned informal monthly incomes of 50,000 to 150,000 North Korean won per month, or about $6 to $18 at current black market rates tracked by Daily NK, a Seoul-based website. By comparison, state jobs pay 2,000-6,000 won a month — less than the 8,490 won cost of a kilogram of rice in the city of Hyesan, according to Daily NK data.

Most defectors come from the rural northeast and traders in urban areas are believed often to earn far more.

Reuters cannot independently verify data on employment or incomes as North Korea, one of the most closed nations in the world, does not release economic statistics and a majority of North Koreans participate in informal work.

Some of the most eligible bachelors in North Korea nowadays are the party cadres who supervise the marketplaces, women defectors in Seoul say.

“If you want to live better up there, you’d better be a woman selling stuff in markets or marry a man who lives on bribes or taxes from these women at markets, or works for the regime’s trading firms,” said Kim Min-jung, a defector who runs a matchmaking service for 1,500 women who left the North.

North Korean women, Kim said, complain that men there are like “lights that are switched off all day.”

“That points to how useless males are in terms of making money for their families,” she said.

With women holding more economic power, more of them are also seeking divorce, according to experts. The main reason cited is financial incompetence, according to a recent survey of 103 defectors by the Seoul-based Korean Bar Association.

In recent years, most North Korean defectors to the South have been women. Less tied to workplaces, women often have more freedom of movement.

The female takeover of North Korea’s main street economy is changing a paternalistic culture that considers the ideal women a stay-at-home wife.

While state media promotes institutional gender equality, society has long been dominated by men. Money is changing that.

“North Korea’s living standards depend on women’s business abilities and skills, not on the state. Women are replacing the role of the state via the market economy,” said Kim Eun-ju, who heads the Center for Korean Women and Politics in Seoul and regularly interviews recent defectors.

“Now men are even looking for potential wives in marketplaces,” she said.

Jung, the college student defector, said: “North Korean women are independent and strong but will get more so as the state can’t provide much for individuals.”

Reuters

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Seoul. North Korea’s recent test-firing of a ballistic missile from a submarine was “very serious and concerning”, South Korea said on Monday, with one defense official suggesting Pyongyang could have a fully operational platform in two or three years.

Pyongyang’s official KCNA news agency said on Saturday that North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, oversaw the test-launch of the missile from an offshore location. Such a development could pose a new threat to the isolated country’s neighbors and the United States.

“We urge North Korea to immediately stop developing SLBMs [submarine-launched ballistic missiles], which hinder the stability of the Korean peninsula and Northeast Asia,” Kim Min-seok, spokesman for South Korea’s Defense Ministry, told reporters on Monday.

He said North Korea still needed time to develop additional equipment in order to make its submarine-launched missile system fully operational.

However, a South Korean defense official said separately that North Korea could develop a fully operational submarine with ballistic missiles within two or three years.

The official, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue, said photographs from North Korea showing a rocket launched from the sea appeared to be authentic.

North Korea’s state media often boasts of successful military and space accomplishments, including the launch of a functional communications satellite, which are not independently verified by outside experts.

It is believed to have launched a long-range rocket and put an object into orbit in December 2012, defying scepticism and international warnings not to pursue such a program, which could be used to develop intercontinental missiles.

Reuters

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Seoul. Close by the luxury high-rises of Seoul’s most expensive neighborhood, 80-year-old Kim Ok-nyo burns charcoal to heat her two-room shack in Guryong, a shantytown of 2,000 residents.

Demolition of Guryong, the last slum in Seoul’s glitzy Gangnam district made famous by Psy’s Gangnam Style song and video, is expected to start this summer after redevelopment plans were mired for years in squabbling among the city, district and developers, and even battling residents.

Left behind by South Korea’s economic miracle, Guryong is a grim symbol of growing income inequality in a country where nearly half the elderly live in poverty, the highest rate in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) grouping.

Kim, a widow who shares her cramped wooden dwelling with one of her sons, is ready to leave the fire-prone slum, where the church she attended burned down about five months ago.

“I am scared that I will continue to live here and die here,” she said. “I want to die in a slightly better place.”

After her husband died of a heart attack nearly 30 years ago, Kim moved into the farmland-turned-slum, doing temporary work at building sites, and once even cleaning at one of the nearby high-rise apartments.

“I envy them,” the mother of five said in her shack, which is too small to accommodate even a television. “Why wouldn’t I? I pray every day that some day my kids can have a life like them.”

Kim, who depends on a monthly government living subsidy of 200,000 won ($187), uses a shared toilet around the corner and takes showers and does laundry at public baths.

“Later you will see all kinds of bugs, like cockroaches, and rats,” she said. “Bug killers don’t work.”

In December, city and district officials agreed on a redevelopment plan to build thousands of units of low-cost housing, including subsidized homes for current slum residents.

“We need to develop the area quickly to improve housing security for people there, because these illegal shacks are old, so they are vulnerable,” said Cho Gyu-tae, a Gangnam official handling the redevelopment.

Slum residents were old and ailing, said Ahn Young-chan, a 79-year-old grandfather and victim of backaches, who has lived in the shantytown since it sprang up in the late 1980s.

After the failure of previous resettlement efforts, he is wary of getting his hopes up.

“We have to wait and see,” he said. “Honestly we don’t have power. We have no choice but to follow what the authorities tell us.”

Reuters

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Seoul. The foreign ministers of South Korea, Japan and China meet on Saturday for the first time in three years, to try and improve frosty ties and restore a regular three-way summit of their leaders, stalled because of tension over history and territory.

The three officials also held bilateral meetings in which they agreed to cooperate in response to North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs.

Arriving for a meeting with South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se, China’s Wang Yi said he would discuss all the issues of interest to Beijing, signaling the subjects of the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the THAAD missile defense system were not off the table.

“They pledged to work together to resume meaningful dialogue for substantive progress on ending the North’s nuclear program and to cut off advances in its nuclear capability,” South Korea’s foreign ministry said after a meeting of the South Korean and Chinese ministers.

Yun also held separate talks with Japan’s Fumio Kishida.

The meetings take place against the backdrop of South Korea and China’s cool ties withJapan over what they see as its reluctance to properly atone for its wartime past. Both also have territorial disputes with Tokyo over islands.

The three-way talks, set for later on Saturday, will be a stepping stone towards restoring what had been an annual summit of the three countries’ leaders to discuss cooperation, Yun said this week.

An annual event since 2008, it has been on hold since May 2012.

Yun and Wang discussed China’s invitation for South Korea to join AIIB and Yun said Seoul was reviewing its options, Yonhap news agency quoted an unnamed official as saying.

Japan and South Korea, major regional U.S. allies along with Australia, are notable absentees from the Bank, though Japan says it is reviewing prospects of joining.

The United States, worried about China’s growing diplomatic clout, questions whether the Bank will have adequate governance and environmental and social safeguards.

China fears a security threat from potential deployment of the U.S. military’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system in South Korea, despite the two allies saying the move aims to counter North Korea.

Japan-China ties remain frosty despite Abe meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping for the first time last November.

Both China and Japan claim a tiny group of islets in the East China Sea while South Koreaand Japan have a separate island dispute.

Reuters

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