It was quite an honor to interview Yiombi Thona for a special issue of Groove Korea to commemorate the magazine’s 100th edition in 2014. The theme was “100 expats who made a difference in Korea.”
Even though the resulting article had to be cut short to fit the tight space, I’m happy it was part of Groove’s tribute fest.
It’s embarrassing to admit this, but I lived in Korea for years before hearing about Yiombi’s work through a colleague. The professor, author and longtime human rights activist fled the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2002 after revealing secrets to the opposition party about collusion between the government and rebel forces backed by neighboring Rwanda. He came here with nothing and went through years of discrimination and hardship before obtaining refugee status and settling with his family in the southwestern city of Gwangju. He eventually joined the faculty of Gwangju University and became well known for his human rights work — all while raising a young family and continuing to fight for dignity in a society that still viewed him as an outsider.
“For Congo people there is no U.N.,” he said that day in 2014, when I took the high-speed KTX train to Gwangju to conduct the interview in his office. The United Nations kept on renewing its “one-year” missions in the country with no real progress, he told me, saying the agency seemed uninterested in solving problems and often took advantage of the local people.
We also discussed his efforts to educate young people about human rights.
His teaching style at the university was interactive, he said, centering on debates and discussions. His “exams” were interviews, and his courses were very popular with students.
“Even some students who failed,” he said.
At first he needed to coax students to speak because they were so used to playing a passive role in class. In every class they discussed a human rights issue.
“I am preparing them to be human rights activists,” he said.
Later on, Yiombi went on to found a new graduate program at Chonnam University, which he called “a training program for NGO and human rights activists.” Its first cohort was made up exclusively of international students, and they were gaining a balance of academic knowledge and hands-on experience. That master’s cohort, he told me, would go on to become the program’s first Ph.D. candidates and eventually pursue careers with nongovernmental organizations.
Responsibility crisis
Yiombi’s 2013 memoir, “My Name Is Yiombi,” put a human face on the global refugee crisis for the Korean public.
But he doesn’t like the expression “refugee crisis,” saying it’s really a responsibility crisis. Refugees are nothing new, he pointed out when we spoke in Seoul in 2016 — they’ve existed since the time of Jesus. Why call it a crisis only because Europe is “a bit shaken” by an influx of refugees and some Europeans feel threatened?
During that second interview, he took time between important meetings to speak with me at a coffee shop in Seoul. Refugee and migrant issues were in the headlines, and he’d recently traveled to New York City ahead of Global Compact negotiations to deliver a speech at the U.N. General Assembly.
He got the invitation on short notice, just as he was heading for Mongolia to deliver a speech there on refugee rights. Upon his return, his U.N. contact urged him to rush to the U.S. Embassy in Seoul and apply for a visa immediately.
At first the embassy staff was unhelpful and told him there was no way he’d get a visa in time. The embassy workers knew only his nationality and didn’t realize he’d been elected to speak at the U.N. They said his application would take a month to process.
Upon realizing the significance of his visit, however, they expedited the procedure.
It was 4 p.m., he recalled.
“The door was already closed.”
But Yiombi was allowed in despite the late hour.
“I went in and they issued me the visa,” he said.
In New York City he addressed the General Assembly, which was discussing the movement of large populations and was still working toward the 2018 Global Compact on Refugees.
“I told them, ‘I’m very sorry. I don’t agree to what you call ‘burden sharing.’”
He was a refugee, he told them, not a burden. He hadn’t used one cent of Korean tax money and he had tax returns to prove he was contributing to the Korean tax system. No Korean could stand in front of him and say otherwise.
“This is not burden sharing,” he said. “This is responsibility sharing.”
Of the efforts to adopt the Global Compact, Yiombi asked me, “Do we need another agreement?”
The international community already had many agreements, he explained. What it needed to do was persuade countries that hadn’t signed the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees or the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees to do so, and persuade those that had already signed to honor their commitments. Countries that had signed the Refugee Protocol had already decided to help people in desperate situations, he pointed out — people who needed to flee their countries of origin because of a war, because of a humanitarian crisis, or because they might be persecuted.
The world didn’t need endless talk, he said. It didn’t need endless political declarations.
Breaking stereotypes
Yiombi’s slogan is “Lift them, don’t shift them.” That reflects his mission to dispel media stereotypes about refugees and migrants and show how much they benefit the countries that take them in. In 2016 we discussed the fearmongering in Europe, North America and elsewhere and how it perpetuated discrimination and negative attitudes.
“Even in Korea here we have this kind of speech,” he said.
Media coverage tends to zero in on isolated cases, he said, while ignoring all the good things migrants and refugees do.
“In Europe it’s the same thing,” he said. When he traveled to Belgium in connection with the Solutions Alliance, one of the international organizations he worked with at the time, he pointed out that migrants made up 64 percent of the country’s economically active population. Those people were contributing to the Belgian economy, he stressed.
He again brought up the Refugee Protocol, which most of the world’s countries had signed, saying the general public seemed unaware of the commitments that were already in place.
“I told them, ‘Why not to burn everything, to cancel everything, no U.N., everything, OK? Let us go in anarchy.”
Obviously that wouldn’t work, he said. But if you make principles, if you make rules, if you make laws, “please, let’s respect it.”
“Refugees are not criminals,” he said. “Refugees are not terrorists. Refugees are people with protection needs.”
2023 update
Our earlier conversations covered a lot of ground. Among other things, we discussed sexist social conditioning, racist police officers, inept immigration officers, and the struggle for justice led by the Korean survivors of Japanese military sexual slavery. Yiombi said he supported the survivors, adding that their fight was an important human rights issue that had unfortunately been politicized.
As of June 2023 Yiombi taught online graduate courses in refugees and immigration, human rights risk management, and the management of nongovernmental organizations. He was working on two books — one about the political situation in Congo, and one about how refugees in Korea and Japan work for change in their countries of origin. The latter was based on his doctoral thesis.
We talked about the fact that two of his children — Jonathan and Patricia, both in their 20s — had become popular media personalities in Korea. And after so many years overseas, Yiombi said he was finally planning to go back to Congo if his safety could be assured.
“We can’t estimate the time of our return back home,” he wrote in a message. “We are working on it. This can happen anytime.”
2024 update
When we spoke again in January 2024, the news was full of horrific images out of Gaza. The International Court of Justice had just ruled in a case brought by South Africa, accusing Israel of genocide against the Palestinians. The court had ordered Israel to take action to prevent acts of genocide in the Palestinian territories, and of course I wanted to hear Yiombi’s perspective.
His first comment was that the Ugandan judge on the International Court of Justice had rejected all six resolutions brought by South Africa. Even the Israeli judge, he said, had not gone that far.
Most likely, Yiombi speculated, the Ugandan judge’s ruling was a result of cooperation between Uganda and Israel.
“I’m not a lawyer,” he said. “But I’m a human rights activist.” The problem in the Middle East was a human rights issue, he said. Telling Israel, in effect, to “do your best to not commit genocide” was opening the door for more killing. It was as if the court had told Israel, “OK, you can kill,” but not at a genocidal level.
Yiombi condemned the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas, but he also condemned Israel’s response, saying Israel was targeting the Palestinians and not Hamas.
Israel knows very well where the Hamas leaders live, he said. He cited Josep Borrell, the European Union’s top diplomat at the time, who’d recently made headlines by accusing Israel of creating Hamas and financing it through Qatar in an effort to weaken the Palestinian Authority. (Israel has denied doing so, but many have leveled similar charges over the years.)
Yiombi also questioned how Hamas got into Israel, suggesting Israel may have intentionally let the attacks happen or even collaborated with Hamas as an excuse to overreact.
“But anyway, my problem is, with the judges, they should at least stop the killing first. They should stop the killing. But unfortunately, those people in Gaza, those children, those women, they are weak, voiceless.”
Yiombi wanted a total ceasefire and wanted everyone involved to be held responsible. Above all, he criticized the international community’s response to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, pointing to the role of Qatar in financing Hamas and saying Israel was flouting international norms because it knew it enjoyed support from powerful people.
“Nobody can say, ‘South Africa. Yes. Thanks to them for bringing this case there.’”
South Africa knew what the result would be, he said, but South Africa spoke up because of its past — because its people suffered the way Palestinians are suffering now.
“You know, South Africa got huge pressure from many countries to not do this,” he said. “But anyway, they did it.”
But South Africa’s intention was to end all the attacks on the Palestinian people, he explained.
“Stopping the genocide, it means stop killing. Stop. Stop bombing.”
Instead, he continued, the judges politely asked Israel to “be careful” not to carry out actions that could lead to genocide.
“But genocide is already happening.”
2024 and beyond: More info on the way
That’s just a fraction of our conversation that day, which also delved into the progress of Korea’s refugee system (not great, in his view) as well as life in Korea vs. life in Canada, where Yiombi resides now and teaches at the university level. His current focus is the dire situation facing his own country, the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has been torn apart by violence and conflict largely because of the Rwanda-backed paramilitary group known as the March 23 Movement. And at the end of March 2025, he announced on social media that he’s planning to run for president of Congo in 2028.
More details about Yiombi’s experiences in Korea and how he and his family coped with systemic discrimination will be part of my forthcoming book, “Piñatas for the Year of the Dragon: Conversations with current and former expats in South Korea.” I hope to finish it very soon and publish it as an independent author.
Photo courtesy of Adam Czelusta. Many thanks to Adam for permission to use it.