Category: Humanitarian Aid and Relief

A nuclear deal could increase risk for North Korean defectors

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In recent years North Korea increased the number of guards and security measures at the border to prevent defections, that are viewed as a threat to the Kim government’s tight control over the population.

An estimated 100,000 undocumented North Koreans currently live in China, and many other defectors attempt dangerous journeys through China to reach a third country like Thailand or Mongolia, where they can request asylum in South Korea.

However human rights activists are concerned the progressive government of South Korean President Moon Jae-in is taking a passive approach to supporting defectors and confronting human rights violations on North Korea, in an effort to improve inter-Korean relations and facilitate a nuclear deal with the U.S.

U.S. President Donald Trump has been a more vocal critic of North Korean human rights violations, and some defectors expect he will confront Kim Jong Un on this issue when they meet for their summit, that is expected to take place in late May or early June.

However other advocates have voiced concern that Trump may be using human rights criticisms as a negotiating tacit to reach a better deal to end the North Korean nuclear threat.

[VoA]

Experiences of a 15-year-old defector in a North Korean labor camp

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Charles Ryu said he’s one of only 275 North Korean defectors living in the United States.

With an easy smile and calm voice … Ryu shares how he managed to escape not once, but twice from the most repressive regime in the world.

Ryu was born in 1994 to a Chinese father, who abandoned Ryu at age 5, and North Korean mother, who died of starvation when Ryu was 11.

When he was 14, Ryu and his stepbrother escaped North Korea. They bribed border guards, swam across a river and met Ryu’s father in a taxi in China.

But Ryu’s joy was temporary. He was captured by Chinese police and was kept in a Chinese jail for two weeks before being sent back to North Korea. Upon reentering his home country, Ryu was interrogated for months by the North Korean government.

Fifteen-year-old Ryu was then sent to a labor camp where he was given 150 kernels of rice to fuel 12 hours of work every day. One morning, Ryu was so overcome by starvation that he ate rice from dry vomit he found on a roadside.

After nine months, Ryu couldn’t stand or even lift an arm. While others have to work until they die, Ryu was released after nine months because of his young age, physical weakness and relatively insignificant crime of trying to unite with his father.  Continued

Ryu’s second and successful escape to China

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After his release from a North Korean labor camp for defecting, Ryu started working at a coal mine. He said his peers went crazy when he shared the freedoms he had experienced in China, like watching South Korean dramas and K Pop, and eating white rice, seafood and fruit.

“Every time I told these stories to my friends, it also reminded me, ‘What am I doing here,’ “Ryu said.  He concluded the risk of escaping for a second time, a crime punishable by death, outweighed working in a coal mine until he died or lost a limb.

So he stole five flashlights from the coal mine, sold them for food and waited three months for an opportunity to travel to the border.  When he spotted a train car bound for the North Korean border, Ryu seized his chance. He took advantage of his young age and small stature, telling the train guard his mom had already boarded the train with their tickets.

He spent the next two days hiding from the guards on the train. Ryu said the train had almost reached its destination when he was grabbed by his neck and told he would be handed over to the police at the next stop. Ryu jumped off the moving train, rolled into a ditch and sprinted into nearby woods.

He walked for hours and illegally boarded another train before finally making it to the border town.  He then swam through a river and walked for three days, without water or food, into China. Just when he had enough blisters he couldn’t continue, Ryu met a motorcyclist who helped him travel to his father.

With the help of an unknown travel broker, Ryu migrated to Southeast Asia and arranged for his passage to the U.S. Since arriving in America five years ago, Ryu has graduated high school and worked as a sushi chef, Uber and Lyft driver and driving instructor.

Despite the brainwashing, interrogation and labor he endured, Ryu said he does not resent North Korea. “It’s my hometown,” Ryu said. “It’s not the people I hate. It’s the government.”

[Indiana Daily Student]

Young North Korean defectors find new life in the South

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Five years ago, as young boys, they crossed a frozen river in the dark of winter. As they passed from North Korea into China, they didn’t yet understand that they were leaving their homes for good. More than 6,000 miles later, Park Kwon’s and Ju Cheol Kwang’s separate trek to freedom brought them to South Korea, where they met as roommates in a group home for other young North Korean defectors.

“It is more comfortable [in South Korea],” Cheol Kwang said through a translator, “but sometimes I think of my hometown. That can be difficult.” Their childhoods have been on their minds lately, with the announcement earlier this month of unprecedented summits between North and South Korean leaders, and President Donald Trump that could happen this spring. For the teenagers, the talks raise long-buried hopes of someday being reunited with their families.

The friends, now 16, have worked hard to adjust to their new lives in Seoul. Like other recent defectors, they face a more difficult reality than those who arrived to the South even one or two decades earlier. They must contend with rapidly evolving technology and a highly competitive labor market that requires them to match their peers in one of the most wired countries on the planet.

“South Korea is a completely different society,” said Ji Cheol-ho, a 32-year-old North Korean defector. If you don’t study, you won’t understand this society, and if you don’t understand South Korean society, you’ll never become part of it.”

Cheol Kwang and Kwon live with several other boys in the group home they share in suburban Seoul. Adapting to school has been difficult. “What a North Korean sixth-grader learned in math or languages is the equivalent for a South Korean fourth-grader”, says Kwon. “My teachers and tutors have been saying, ‘Now is the time you have to really start studying,'” he said.

Ki-won Chun, a pastor whose faith-based Durihana Mission has rescued more than 1,100 North Korean refugees from China since 1999, said “It can only be difficult for these children, because they were born into a completely different culture.”   Read more

Teen-age defectors adapt to life in Seoul

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What binds Park Kwon’s and Ju Cheol Kwang together are their stories. Cheol Kwang spent his childhood in North Korea laboring in the fields of Ryanggang Province to help support his family, so he didn’t go to school. His father died when he was 8. Four years later, in 2013, he and an older sister were told by their mother that they had to leave North Korea. He doesn’t remember much of the odyssey and is careful to protect the details of his family and escape, but he said he crossed into China on a frozen river. He stayed for about two weeks before being smuggled into Laos and was then granted safe passage into South Korea.

Kwon’s path to the South started from the mountainous mining region of North Hamgyong Province. In the winter of 2013, when he was 11, his family told him he would be going to his cousins’ home nearby. He saw his parents for what he didn’t know was the final time. With his older cousins, he snuck into China on the narrow Tumen River at night.  After a month in China, he was smuggled to Thailand, where police detained him. When they asked where he wanted to go, he gave only one answer: South Korea.

As required of all defectors, even children, the boys spent three months at a resettlement center outside of Seoul that teaches basics about South Korea and its history, as well as how to use its currency and transportation. The center also provides medical treatment and psychological counseling. They met at the group home in June 2014.

It felt like a dream. “The quality of food, clothing and shelter is so good. It’s the complete opposite of North Korea in that way, which was a pleasant surprise,” Cheol Kwang said. He was amazed to see most people in the South had cars, carried cellphones and lived in tall, modern buildings with electricity that didn’t flicker out in a storm. On television, the choice of channels was endless. In North Korea, there was only one — and it showed state propaganda.

[NBC News]

North Korea defector: I would never go back home

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24-year-old artist An Su-min, who fled North Korea as a teenager in 2011, starts off: “In North Korea, you don’t have any freedom of movement. There is almost no electricity. The culture is very restrictive. You have no freedom to wear what you want. It’s also a dictatorship, but I only learned about the concept of dictatorship after I came to South Korea.

“Coming to South Korea was the easy bit. Adjusting to life here wasn’t easy. …But now I’m used to it, the language, the culture and the level of stress. I reached puberty after coming to South Korea, so that added a lot of stress in my life.

“Right now, I’m studying at college. After I graduate, I’ll be in a position to do stuff that I want to do. …We really need a degree to do well in life. That’s why I’m focusing my efforts on my studies right now.

“Afterwards, given my skills as an artist, I could also teach North Korean refugees in Europe and help them out. That’s my plan.

“People outside North Korea have this fascination about life in my country. But if you’re living in the North, and you spend your entire life there, it’s just a way of life. You know of no other way. …You don’t think seriously about dictatorship. Even if you know what that is, you consider it a natural part of your life.

“Would I ever go back? … I’m stressed out here in South Korea but, no matter how much stress I’m under, I wouldn’t ever go back to North Korea.”

The last Americans in North Korea: Christian missionaries

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The work of humanitarian groups has resurrected tough questions about giving aid to despot nations, a debate centered on whether assistance to the needy frees up state resources for corrupt purposes. In North Korea, the question is whether the help allows the regime to spend more money on nuclear arms that threaten the U.S. and its allies.

U.N. aid to North Korea has shrunk to $39 million, around a tenth of its 2001 total. A handful of U.S. Christian groups provide roughly $10 million in aid a year, public documents show. The groups navigate international sanctions and a U.S. travel ban to serve as one of the last channels of help for North Korea’s many poor, particularly its children, elderly and sick.

When Chris Rice 57, a Christian aid worker from North Carolina, arrived in Pyongyang, he found some of his peers staying at the same hotel. One was Stephen Linton, 67 years old, from the Eugene Bell Foundation, named for his great grandfather, a Presbyterian who began Korean missionary work in 1895. Rice, 57, runs a South Korea-based humanitarian program for the Mennonite Central Committee.

These humanitarians, eligible for exemptions to the U.S. travel ban, are among the last Americans who engage in face-to-face work between people of the two nations, which over the past year have swung between brinkmanship and, of late, the possibility of talks between the country’s two leaders.

The U.S. travel ban allows humanitarian workers to apply for permission on a case-by-case basis. In practice, the sanctions have made aid work more difficult: Wary of running afoul of sanctions, transport companies are leery of taking goods to the North Korea border, and banks turn down requests to transfer money there, humanitarian workers said. Read more

What makes Christian aid workers tick?

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Christian aid workers say they are motivated by such biblical admonitions as “love your enemies.” Many say their work can foster peace through cooperation and trust-building. Groups hail from many denominations, including the Quaker-founded American Friends Service Committee, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mennonite Central Committee and the interdenominational World Vision.

Stephen Linton and Chris Rice, sons of missionaries in postwar South Korea, are  among those who believe that humanitarian aid, delivering food and medicine, builds goodwill.

Mr. Linton has traveled to North Korea more than 80 times since the 1970s. He runs a program to treat multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, a widespread problem. Late last year, North Korea asked him to double the scope of the program’s work in the country, he said.

Other Christian humanitarians have turned away from North Korea. “This money is all going straight into the pockets of the regime,” said Nancy Purcell, a Philadelphia-area native who first traveled to North Korea with a Christian nonprofit in 2000. She helped distribute food produced there until concluding in 2004 that the military siphoned off donations. Aid was “prolonging the regime,” said Ms. Purcell, 68.

Tim Peters, of Michigan, said he first traveled to North Korea to deliver food during the 1990s famine, inspired by a verse in the Book of Romans: “If your enemy hungers, feed him.” Today, Mr. Peters, 67, runs a Christian group, Helping Hands Korea, that assists North Korean defectors.

North Korea badly needs food and medicine, experts said. At least 40% of North Korea’s population is undernourished, and such diseases as tuberculosis and hepatitis are rampant, according to U.N. reports. In January, UNICEF said a slowdown in aid could lead to starvation for some 60,000 children. Read more

Billy Graham’s first visit to North Korea in 1992

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Christian work in North Korea began around the time of two trips to Pyongyang in the early 1990s by the late evangelical leader Billy Graham. He said he was received with a bear hug from Kim Il Sung, the now-deceased founder of North Korea’s dynastic state and grandfather of Kim Jong Un.

The regime gave its own spin. In 2016, state media reported Mr. Graham had affirmed Kim Il Sung was akin to God, “so perfect in his ideas that North Korea didn’t need the Bible,” which the Graham organization denied was said. (Note that regime founder Kim Il Sung grew up in a Presbyterian home and learned to play the church organ, historians said. He built three showcase churches in Pyongyang.)

In 1995, North Korea made an international call for help to combat famine and became one of world’s biggest recipients of food aid, about a million tons a year. The U.S. gave $1.3 billion in food and energy from 1995 to 2008. Researchers now suspect that North Korea diverted much of its famine-era aid to elites and its military.

Christian aid workers say they are confident their donations reach intended recipients. To deliver the food and medicine, North Korean authorities allow the workers to travel to regions otherwise off limits to foreign visitors.

While North Korea accepts Christian aid, it is no friend of Christianity. The regime sees religion as a threat and has imprisoned Christians for praying and owning a Bible. Preaching is forbidden, yet some aid workers say they talk about their beliefs in private with individuals who ask, despite the risk.

[The Wall Street Journal]

What brokers do to help North Koreans defect

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Around 31,000 North Koreans have defected into the South since the end of the Korean War in 1953. Most of the North Koreans who defect do so via the long and expensive journey that takes them into China after crossing the Yalu River.

Um Yae-run, a 41-year-old defector who now works in Seoul at a marriage bureau and also as a broker, explains, “A lot of people who come to South Korea become brokers. They work with brokers in China who work with brokers in North Korea.

“If someone in the South wants to bring a family member over, they will give the address of the person in North Korea to the South Korean broker who will pass it on. In North Korea, you can’t trust anyone. So we give the brokers personal information, like a code word, so the person knows who sent the broker.

“The person will then work with the brokers to get you to the border. In North Korea, if you have money, you can do anything. If you don’t live near the border you need to take a train for which you will need a license. The brokers will pay to get you on the train and bribe the railway officials.

“Once at the border, the broker will arrange a time for crossing the river. In the summer, you might swim with a black rubber boat or the boat might have a string attached to the Chinese side that the brokers there will pull. The brokers might also bribe the border patrol to tell them their shifts so they can cross over then. If they can strike a deal, it becomes easy.

“When I crossed the border, it cost me around 3m Korean won ($2,800). When my daughter came, I paid 6.5m ($6,000). Now, it costs almost 10m won ($9,300). Coming to South Korea will cost you around 15m won ($14,000). Crossing the border is the most expensive part.

“After arriving in South Korea, I …worked as a broker because for every person you help, you made around two to four million Korean won ($1,800 to $3,700).”