Category: China

Canadian couple held in near isolation in China

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A Canadian couple accused of spying near China’s sensitive border with North Korea have been kept separately in near isolation for more than 80 days and denied access to legal counsel, their son said on Friday.

Treatment of the couple, who are being held without charge at a remote facility in the border city of Dandong, has seriously strained China’s ties with Canada ahead of a planned visit by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper for a multilateral summit next month in Beijing.

Kevin and Julia Garratt were allowed to meet briefly for breakfast last week – the first contact they had with each other during their detention. “It’s not their physical health I’m concerned about, it’s more their mental health,” their son, Simeon Garratt, told Reuters by phone. “You put anybody in a situation like that for 80 days, where you can’t talk to anybody else and with no outside contact, and you don’t know what could happen. It’s not about food or water.”

Both Kevin and Julia were under 24-hour surveillance by two guards. Canadian consular officials visited every two weeks, Simeon Garratt said. They were frequently interrogated, he said, though the subject of the questions is unknown. Chinese authorities have repeatedly denied the family’s requests for access to legal counsel since the Garratts were detained August 4, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter.

The Vancouver couple had opened a cafe called Peter’s Coffee House in Dandong in 2008. State media has reported they are suspected of stealing national security secrets, but no formal charges have been laid and it is unclear what exactly they are accused of. It is unusual for foreigners to be charged with violating China’s state secrets law – a serious crime that is punishable by life in prison or death in the most severe cases.

Kevin Garratt told a congregation in Canada last year that he ran a prayer and training facility frequented by North Koreans, many of whom became Christians before returning to the isolated country.

[Reuters]

“Why is the world allowing a holocaust to happen again?”

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North Korean holocaust YeonmiAt the age of just 21, Yeonmi, this sweetly-confident, intelligent and tiny-framed young North Korean woman, who managed to flee the famine-torn country at the age of 13, is already a global spokesperson for her own people – a people terrorized into submission and silence while the wider world ignores what she describes as a “holocaust”.

In an interview, Yeonmi told how her first memory is of being told by her mother at the age of four “not to even whisper because the birds and mice could hear you”.

When she was nine, she was forced to watch her best friend’s mother being executed on the street before her eyes. Her only crime had been she had watched a James Bond movie and shared the DVDs with neighbors.

“Always I knew that in North Korea when they kill the people, they justify themselves by saying these are criminals trying to destroy our socialist paradise.  But I knew that lady. She was not that bad. She was not going to destroy our country,” she said.

That same year, Yeonmi’s life changed catastrophically when her father, a mid-ranking civil servant, was arrested and imprisoned for selling precious metals to China on the black market. Her mother, too, was interrogated and thrown into jail. Yeonmi and her sister, Eunmi were left to fend for themselves, at the age of nine and 11, foraging on the mountainsides for grasses, plants, frogs and even dragonflies to avoid starving to death. “Everything I used to see, I ate them,” she said.

Asked if any adults around knew the children were surviving alone, Yeonmi tries to explain. “People were dying there. They don’t care… most people are just hungry and that’s why they don’t have the spirit or time to take care of other people.”

Her bravery and willingness to speak out about conditions in her native land comes at a price. Police in Seoul – the South Korean capital where she now lives – have warned her she is on North Korea’s official list of public enemies. If she ever returns to her native country, she will instantly be executed.

Yeonmi is more than familiar with the method – she has witnessed it many times as a child, when her mother used to give her a piggyback ride to the big stadium to watch the public executions, considered a ‘celebration’ which everybody is under orders to attend. Along the route, victims are beaten with sticks and a rock placed in their mouths so that all their teeth are broken. Once they get there, they are shot three times – in the knee, the chest and the head. Nobody, not even the closest of family members, is permitted to show any sign of grief.

At the age of 13, Yeonmi’s sister fled across the border without telling the family and after four days, Yeonmi’s mother, terrified for Eunmi’s safety, decided they would follow her. Released just the previous day from hospital after an appendix operation and wearing shoes that were too large for her, Yeonmi could barely walk and her clothes were too flimsy for the freezing conditions in which they crossed three mountains and a frozen river.

When they finally reached the alleged ‘safety’ of China, they encountered a man who demanded to have sex with the 13-year-old girl who had “never even heard the word sex before”. Terrified, her mother offered herself in return and ordered her daughter to turn her back while she was raped.

Life in China was worse, if possible, even than it had been in North Korea. With no money and unable to speak the language, the family was on the brink of starvation. And though Yeonmi’s father managed to join them across the border, his health had been destroyed by prison life and torture. When he died shortly afterwards, the family were forced to bury him secretly for fear of being caught.

His death sparked the family’s second flight – this time across the Gobi desert to South Korea, where Yeonmi went to school and learned for the first time that everybody is born equal.

She explained the situation in North Korea as a “holocaust” the world is again choosing to ignore.

[Irish Independent]

China’s legal (and illegal) trade with North Korea

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With decades of breakneck growth, Communist China has become a testament to capitalism and urban living. North Korea, which also describes itself as a socialist state, is still sealed and secretive — almost.

China is North Korea’s largest trading partner by a long way, and despite Beijing’s official displeasure with the DPRK’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, this trade continues to grow. China has rebuffed any attempts to strengthen economic sanctions further against Pyongyang.

Dandong (China) is a thriving border town on the Yalu River within throwing distance of the Hermit Kingdom of North Korea. And Dandong is the lifeline, say critics, of the autocratic regime led by Kim Jong Un. Whole neighborhoods in the back streets of the city are lined with trading shops quietly run by North Korean officials.

Up to 70% of all China trade with North Korea runs through Dandong, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency, and it takes the form of both legal trade and illegal smuggling.

“Chen,” a smuggler who makes midnight runs across the Yalu several times a month to trade with North Korean soldiers, claims that Dandong is crawling with North Korean spies. “Don’t say anything sensitive around the North Korean waitresses,” he whispers to us. “They speak Korean and English.” And you can find them all across Dandong in North Korean themed restaurants, karaoke bars, and musical review shows.

If refugees are caught trying to escape from North Korea, they are shot, but in restaurants in the gaudy two-story tourist trap, North Koreans are allowed to work in China on special three-year permits. They are often the children of mid-level Korean Workers’ Party loyalists and their movements and earnings are tightly controlled.

And as the four-piece all-female North Korean band plays to the Chinese tourists drinking North Korean beer, I think how perfectly it sums up this city: extremely bizarre and perhaps a little tragic.

[Full CNN article] 

EU and Japan press for war crimes probes in North Korea

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The European Union and Japan are asking the United Nations to press for war crimes prosecutions in North Korea. The measure to be presented to the U.N. General Assembly in the coming weeks would ask the Security Council to consider targeted sanctions against North Korean leaders “who appear to be most responsible for crimes against humanity.” It added that these crimes were “pursuant to policies established at the highest level of the state for decades.”

The draft resolution, which was obtained by AFP, draws heavily from a U.N. rights inquiry released in February that revealed a vast network of prison camps and documented cases of torture, enslavement, rape and forced abortions among other violations.

“The draft resolution represents a clear shift towards recognizing that responsibility for the horrific abuses in North Korea lies squarely on the shoulders of the government,” said Param-Preet Singh from Human Rights Watch.

The draft calls on the Security Council to take stock of the report’s findings and take “appropriate action, including through consideration of referral of the situation in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the International Criminal Court.” It also calls for “concrete and positive results” in efforts to account for all Japanese nationals including victims of North Korean abductions during the Cold War.

A vote is expected at the 193-nation Assembly in late November.

North Korea’s ally China, which has a veto at the Security Council, was seen as likely to reject any referral of North Korean rights abuse cases to the International Criminal Court in the Hague.

[The China Post]

Chinese media blasts North Korea

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Chinese media has published a run of negative articles over its supposed ally North Korea, the BBC reports. The presence of these articles in China’s tightly controlled media could signal growing frustrations within Beijing over North Korea’s continuous confrontational stance with the rest of the world.

In the Beijing News, an article warns that people should remain suspicious of North Korea and its “flip-flop attitude.” The article states, “Because of the lack of integrity, its [North Korea’s] verbal statements are not going to convince any country … the most important question is whether Pyongyang will give up its nuclear programme.”

A second article in the Global Times, a state-run tabloid, features an interview with Jin Qiangyi, an international affairs expert at Yanbian University. Qiangyi said that China is unlikely to offer meaningful support to North Korea because of the ongoing nuclear standoff.

Qiu Lin, a prominent political commentator, pointed out that “North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un has not visited China since coming to power. This shows that his heart is not with Beijing … as they are unhappy with Beijing’s warning over its nuclear programme.”

North Korea and China are still allies, even if their relationship has grown frostier in recent years. China is North Korea’s primary trade partner — but tensions between the two countries have been growing since Kim Jong-Un took power in 2011, with China likely deciding that a close alliance with a belligerent pariah state just isn’t worth the trouble anymore.

North Korea’s responded in kind. In April, the regime allegedly released a memo encouraging officials to “abandon the Chinese dream.” The memo went on to criticize China for its closeness with “imperialists” because of North Korea’s belief that Beijing has sided with the US against their nuclear program.

[Business Insider] 

Smuggled phones help North Korean defectors send remittance money

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A cellphone smuggled into North Korea helped Lee Seo Yeon take on two missions: one emotional, one financial.

Once the 40-year-old defector Lee was certain she was talking to her sister, a broker took the phone on the North Korean end. Lee transferred 2 million won ($1,880) to a South Korean bank account belonging to a Korean-Chinese who was working with the broker, who confirmed the transfer and handed the phone back. The arrangement gave Lee’s sister 70 percent of the money, with a 30 percent cut for the go-betweens.

Smuggled phones, combined with a resourceful underground network of brokers inside and outside North Korea, are allowing defectors not only to connect with long-lost relatives, but to send them desperately needed cash. The process remains risky, both for people within the arm of North Korean law and defectors worried about getting cheated.

The Chinese phones are illegal in North Korea, but cheap and widely available. Since late in the last decade, they have become an increasingly common way for many of the roughly 25,000 defectors in South Korea, and others hiding in China, to talk to and help relatives who stayed behind.

One recent survey by a Seoul civic group of about 400 defectors suggested that one in every two defector families in the South send home money, mostly between 500,000 won ($470) and 3 million won ($2,820) per year.

They do this even though most defectors struggle to make a living in the highly competitive, well-educated South: Their average monthly wage is about 1.4 million won ($1,320), about half the pay of an average South Korean worker.

“Even though we have very small incomes here, we still eat rice at every meal,” Seoul-based defector Choi Jung-hoon said. “If we don’t buy new clothes, we can save some money to send to our family members in the North. That’s a lot of money for them.”

[AP]

US push for Human Rights accountability in North Korea

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Seeking to push the issue of human rights abuses in North Korea up the diplomatic agenda, Secretary of State John Kerry made a passionate appeal to world leaders to seek accountability for perpetrators of torture, rape and other atrocities.

“We simply cannot be blind to egregious affronts to human nature,” Mr. Kerry said at a meeting Tuesday in New York with the foreign ministers of Japan and South Korea and the top United Nations official for human rights. “We cannot accept it. Silence would be greatest abuse of all.”

It was the first time the top diplomats from the three countries had publicly spoken about human rights in North Korea, though none of them spelled out exactly how to seek redress.

Any referral to the International Criminal Court would have to be authorized by the United Nations Security Council, a measure that, at the moment at least, is unlikely considering that Pyongyang’s staunch ally, China, wields veto power.

The new United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Prince Zeid Ra’ad Zeid al-Hussein of Jordan, cited a landmark report published by a United Nations commission of inquiry earlier this year documenting grave rights abuses and calling for a referral to the Hague-based tribunal.

Prince Zeid said North Korean officials had signaled the country “was prepared to some degree to open to greater engagement with international human rights mechanisms.” But, he said, his office would continue to document rights abuses there, including the establishment of a field office soon, based in South Korea.

Kerry said that abuses detailed in the UN commission’s 400-page report “have no place in the 21st century.” The commission estimated that between 80,000 and 120,000 political prisoners are currently detained in four large camps, where deliberate starvation has been used as a means of control and punishment.

Rights activists say they are hopeful a resolution could be introduced in the General Assembly next month.

[NY Times/AP]

American about to swim to North Korea ‘to meet Kim Jong Un’

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South Korean border guards arrested an American man who they believe was attempting to swim across a river to North Korea.

The man told investigators that he tried to go to North Korea to meet leader Kim Jong Un, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported, citing an unidentified government source. It said the man, aged around 29, is a computer repairman from Texas who came to South Korea 10 days ago.

Americans are occasionally arrested after entering North Korea illegally from China, but a U.S. citizen trying to get in from South Korea is unusual.

In 1996, American Evan C. Hunziker entered North Korea by swimming across the Yalu River that marks the Chinese border. Hunziker, 26, who apparently made the swim on a drunken dare, was accused of spying and detained for three months.

Some Americans recently detained in North Korea include missionaries aiming to spread the gospel or draw attention to human rights abuses. On Christmas Day in 2009, Korean-American missionary Robert Park defiantly walked into North Korea from China calling for the dismantling of the North’s prison camps.

[AP]

Canadian government stands up for its citizens

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The Canadian government has threatened to have its prime minister back out of a high-profile meeting with Chinese leadership if Beijing does not release a Canadian couple, Kevin and Julia Garratt, seized by Chinese authorities near the border of China and North Korea in August.

This is despite the fact that applying heavy pressure on China is raising warnings that Canada could pay an economic price for angering a country that does not look kindly on foreign interference in its affairs. The stakes are “huge” if Canada picks a fight with China, said Victor Gao, a director at the China National Association of International Studies.

The Garratts are Christian evangelicals from British Columbia who ran a coffee shop in the Chinese city of Dandong on the North Korean border. The couple, who first came to China 30 years ago, were taken away Aug. 4 by agents of China’s Ministry of State Security. They have not been formally charged or arrested.

Ottawa has made clear that if the couple is not released, it will decline an invitation to a meeting between Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Chinese leadership in Beijing around the time of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference in early November.

Canadian government officials have let it be known they see the couple’s detention as a kind of reprisal for the arrest of Su Bin, a Chinese immigrant to Canada accused of masterminding efforts to steal U.S. military secrets.

[The Globe and Mail]

Stop funding food aid to North Korea?

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Excerpts of Guardian opinion by Jang Jin-sung, once one of Kim Jong-il’s favorite state poets until he defected in 2004:

North Korean exiles will tell you that the international community must stop funding food aid. We say this for pragmatic and humanitarian reasons.

Today, the fatal threat for the regime lies not in the outside world, but within the country itself. More specifically, this is the jangmadang – an underground economy arisen from the ashes of economic collapse in the 1990s, and which consist of market activities taking place beyond the remit of the regime’s control mechanisms.

This fundamental transformation from below, the notion that lives may be lived outside the domain of loyalty to the system, is the greatest imminent threat to the regime’s power – which is held in place by inculcating the cult of the Kim dynasty, surveillance controls and the coercive mobilization of its subjects.

In today’s North Korea there are two rival forces in battle: the forces of the regime and the forces of the market. The former’s interests are better served by the maintenance of existing party, military and surveillance mechanisms of control. The latter are equivalent to North Korea’s progressives, who believe in a future that is possible beyond the absolute, stifling and structurally inhumane confines of the regime.

An international community wishing to assist the North Korean people should recognize that funding food aid is a channel of limited efficiency. The majority of North Koreans depend not on the regime’s munificence but on market forces – they have already found this a more successful alternative, despite a disproportionate lack of international support or awareness. Even at times when the regime is calling for food aid, it does not mean that the jangmadang will not have food on offer, whether stolen from state cooperatives or smuggled in from China.

[The Guardian]