Category: Humanitarian Aid and Relief

UN discusses North Korea’s human rights abuses despite objections from China and Russia

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The U.N. Security Council on Friday met to discuss North Korea’s “appalling” human rights situation, overriding a bid by China, Russia and three other countries (Angola, Egypt and Venezuela) to block the meeting.

It was the third time Beijing has failed to stop the annual discussion at the Security Council since a U.N. commission of inquiry in 2014 accused Pyongyang of committing atrocities unparalleled in the modern world. Pyongyang’s sole ally and trade partner, China has long argued that international efforts should firmly focus on talks to denuclearize North Korea.

The U.N. commission of inquiry found compelling evidence of torture, execution and starvation in North Korea, where between 80,000 and 120,000 people are being held in prison camps.

“There has been no improvement in the truly appalling human rights violations in the country,” said U.N. rights official Andrew Gilmour.

South Korean Ambassador Cho Tae-yul told the council that North Korea had squandered $200 million on two nuclear tests and 24 missile launches — funds that Cho said should have been spent on easing the dire humanitarian situation.

[The Japan Times]

Ex-prisoners of North Korea speak out in Baltimore

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Former prisoners took part in a mock trial before judges, arranged by human rights groups to raise awareness of inhumane conditions in North Korea’s prisons. At the event, hosted by John Hopkins University in Baltimore, former prisoners described the human rights abuses they were forced to endure.

One of the speakers was Kang Chol-hwan, a defector who escaped from North Korea in 1992, after spending ten years in the Yodok concentration camp, where he was incarcerated as a child with his family. The ex-prisoner-turned-activist spoke out about the terrible conditions inside the camp, where it is believed thousands of people are still being kept captive and worked to death.

Chol-hwan described how he and his family were forced to survive on vermin and were made to carry out slave labor. Recalling his time in a North Korean camp, Chol-hwan said: “Daily life in the work camps is very mundane. We wake up at 5 am and are forced to work until sunset. We are given lessons on Kim il-sung and Juche. We are forced to watch public executions.

He added: “We are physically abused – hit and tortured. I think of it as another form of Auschwitz. These work camps are like products of Nazism, an abusive government needs elements such as Nazi concentration camps. They just have different ways of killing people.”

Chol-hwan said escapees of the camp usually got out with the help of the South Korean government or missionaries. He said: “Missionaries came and prayed for us. The heavens helped me and I was [eventually able to get from] from China to South Korea.”

[Daily Express]

Deserved praise for Kim Jong Un regime’s reconstruction efforts?

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Months after heavy flooding destroyed parts of North Korea’s northeastern region in late August and early September, Kim Jong Un’s regime has termed the disaster recovery after mass mobilization a “miraculous victory” for the East Asian country.

The heavy rains in North Korea’s northeastern region triggered by typhoon Lionrock in late August and early September reportedly destroyed over 11,600 buildings, almost 180 sections of roads and more than 60 bridges, leaving hundreds of people dead and tens of thousands others stranded.

A mass mobilization movement, referred to as the “200-day battle” has been credited for the “victory” on the “reconstruction front” in North Hamgyong Province, state-controlled news agency KCNA reported Wednesday.

KCNA reported that 11,900 new homes have been built for residents who lost their shelters because of the floods, in addition to over 100 facilities —from nurseries to medical clinics — having been built to assist those in need. Pyongyang also said another 15,000 homes have been repaired.

However, some people in the country are not as happy with the efforts as Pyongyang is attempting to show. A source in North Hamgyong Province told South Korean news service Daily NK that the newly-built homes are “being turned down by a lot of residents, and now it appears about 10 percent of the homes are vacant.”

The fast pace of redevelopment efforts — which could take up to take three years in a developing country according to a shelter adviser with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies — has raised questions over the sustainability of the construction quality.

[IBT Media]

MicroSD cards the key to smuggling info into North Korea

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Tiny memory cards and fluffy teddy bears are among the most popular items for North Koreans shopping in Dandong, China’s gateway city to its impoverished and isolated neighbor.

North Korean traders are the big buyers for the memory cards – and that could get them into trouble back home.

“We help them copy whatever they want onto microSD cards,” said Yao, who would only give his surname, in his tiny store primarily selling cameras. “They usually want South Korean TV dramas,” he said, sliding open a display cabinet to reveal a stack of the tiny memory cards, each the size of a fingernail, that slot directly into DVD players and computers.

The flow of information in and out of North Korea is tightly controlled by authorities. Most North Koreans cannot access the internet or foreign media and share content secretly on USB sticks. But tiny microSD cards are increasingly popular now because North Korea has been cracking down on USBs, Yao said. “It’s getting harder to bring USBs across the border, customs will check what’s on them. But microSD cards are smaller, easier to slip through,” he said.

Apart from their small size – the cards can be woven into clothes or hidden between the pages of a book – MicroSD cards can often be directly inserted into a “Notel“, a device popular in North Korea which can be powered by a car battery and plays DVDs and media from USB sticks and memory cards.

“MicroSD cards make it easier and safer for North Koreans to smuggle foreign digital media in from China,” said Sokeel Park of Liberty in North Korea (LiNK), an organization which works with defectors. “Once inside, it gets copied onto multiple USB sticks and memory cards, making it difficult for the authorities to effectively block out foreign information that undermines their propaganda and ideologies,” Park said.

[Reuters]

9 of 10 North Korea defectors say life worsened under Kim Jong Un

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Nearly 90 percent of North Korean defectors who participated in a recent South Korean survey said living conditions have deteriorated under Kim Jong Un.

The South Korea-based defector organization North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity presented its findings Monday. According to the survey, 89 percent of defectors said the situation “has not improved” under Kim, who fully assumed power in 2012.

Conversely, 11 percent said living standards have “improved” under Kim, while 2.8 percent of that group said the improvements were “significant.”

The defectors also confirmed an earlier study that showed the Kim regime is increasingly the target of common complaints in the country. According to the poll, 32 percent of defectors said they strongly agree that most ordinary North Koreans privately criticize Kim, while another 41 percent said they somewhat agree with the statement. Only 2.8 percent of those surveyed disagreed with the statement.

A previous study conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., found 35 of 36 North Koreans interviewed in the country complain or make jokes about the government in private although criticism of the state is a serious crime, punishable by imprisonment or even death in North Korea.

Nearly 80 percent of those surveyed said the defection of state officials could lead to collapse, and within that group 31 percent said the defection of senior people in government would have a “very large impact.”

[UPI]

UN renews effort to locate abductees in North Korea

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The United Nations has renewed pressure on North Korea to reveal details about hundreds of people abducted decades ago. Argentine lawyer Tomás Ojea Quintana, the special rapporteur on North Korea, made the comment in Tokyo Saturday, after completing a 10-day mission to South Korea and Japan. He also met with defectors and families of individuals abducted by North Korean agents. A final report is due to be released in March.

Ojea Quintana told lawmakers in Japan that he was committed to advancing the return of Japanese taken by North Korean agents in the 1970s and 1980s. Japan has officially listed 17 nationals as abductees, but it suspects Pyongyang’s involvement in many more.

The 2014 report issued by the U.N. Commission of Inquiry into the Human Rights of North Korea found that North Korea had “engaged in the systematic abduction, denial of repatriation, and subsequent enforced disappearance of persons from other countries.” While most abductees were taken from Japan and South Korea, others were taken from countries including Thailand, Romania, Lebanon, Malaysia, Singapore, France, Italy, the Netherlands and China.

Anocha Panjoy, a Thai woman, went missing in Macao in 1978 while working as a masseuse.

North Korean defector Kim Dong Nam said his son was abducted from China by North Korean agents almost a decade ago (2007). The boy had planned to travel to the United States, but agents learned of those plans through colleagues who’d been captured earlier. “They weren’t able to withstand the torture,” Kim said, noting the colleagues had been “sent back to North Korea and tortured and forced to work for hours – tremendous hours” in a camp.

[VoA]

North Korea continues to expand prison camps

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On Tuesday, Washington-based Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK) released images of Camp No. 25, a camp near Chongjin, on North Korea’s northeast coast. According to HRNK, the camp underwent an expansion before 2010, when it almost doubled in scale, and has continued to operate at its larger size.

“Our satellite imagery analysis of Camp No. 25 and other such unlawful detention facilities appears to confirm the sustained, if not increased importance of the use of forced labor under Kim Jong-un,” HRNK executive director Greg Scarlatoiu said in a statement.

HRNK‘s report comes after separate analysis by Amnesty International this month concluded that Pyongyang “is continuing to maintain, and even invest, in these repressive facilities. … These camps constitute the cornerstone of the country’s large infrastructure dedicated to political repression and social control that enables widespread and systematic human rights abuses.”

The UN’s 2014 report estimated that “hundreds of thousands of political prisoners” have died in the North Korean gulags over the past 50 years amid “unspeakable atrocities.”

[CNN]

South Korea to increase benefits for North Korean defectors

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The South Korean government will raise the subsidy given to North Korean defectors when they are first getting settled in the South. The Unification Ministry on Sunday said it will gradually raise both the resettlement payment and housing expenses for defectors, which currently is W7 million ($5947) and W13 million ($11,045) per person.

From 1998 and 2004, the government initially paid every defector W37 million ($31,435) towards getting settled, when the Roh Moo-hyun administration halved the subsidy.

Defector groups point out that it is difficult to settle in with the current payout given that they have often spent all their money on traffickers, plus incurred fines in third countries like Laos and Thailand.

The ministry also pledged to create public-sector jobs for defectors, to help them integrate, and encourage more private firms to hire them.

[Chosun Ilbo]

Refusing to stop criticizing Kim Jong-un

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Yeonmi Park is a young woman who fled North Korea through Mongolia. Border guards had surrounded her group of refugees as it meandered through the Gobi desert, and told them they would be immediately sent back to China.

Yeonmi and her mother begged for their lives. When that failed, they tried something altogether more radical. They grabbed the small knives they had brought and thrust them to their throats, threatening to commit suicide unless the guards let them stay in Mongolia. ‘I thought it was the end of my life. We were saying goodbye to one another,’ Yeonmi says.

Their actions, though, proved effective. Yeonmi and her mother were taken into custody and after 15 days were transferred to a detention center in Ulan Bator, the Mongolian capital. Several weeks later they were handed over to South Korean officials and one day Yeonmi stood at Ulan Bator’s Chinggis Khaan airport preparing to board a plane for Seoul. It was her first time flying and her new-found freedom had not yet sunk in. ‘Oh my God,’ she thought when Mongolian customs officials waved her through. ‘They didn’t stop me.’

A few hours later the plane touched down at Incheon airport in Seoul. Yeonmi stepped off the passenger jet wearing a shabby prison uniform. She remembers gasping at the sight of the moving walkways – a contraption unimaginable in her broken and impoverished homeland – and the immaculate lavatory facilities. ‘It was the first time I had seen a fancy rest room. I thought, “It’s so clean. Do I wash my hands in the [lavatory bowl]?’’ ’ she says. ‘Every­thing was shiny. I’d never seen anything like it.’

In April she was finally reunited with the sister she had long feared was dead; Eunmi, now 23, had reached South Korea via China and Thailand.

Still Yeonmi feels she has not entirely escaped the clutches of Kim Jong-un’s regime. South Korea allocates local detectives to keep an eye on all newly arrived defectors, and in May Yeonmi received a call from the official handling her case. He warned her that her name had been added to a ‘target list’ of outspoken defectors that the North Korean regime wanted to eliminate. The revelation made her more angry than scared.

The detective and Yeonmi’s mother urged her to stop criticizing Kim Jong-un. But she ignored them, convinced that she, as someone who had suffered the same fate, now had a moral obligation to draw attention to the thousands of women risking sexual violence and murder as they tried to escape North Korea.

[The Telegraph]

North Korea on Canadian and American detainees

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North Korea said on Friday that it had discussed the issue of American and Canadian detainees with the Swedish ambassador in the country. Neither the US or Canada have diplomatic offices in North Korea.

The North is holding at least two Americans and one Canadian for alleged espionage, subversion and other anti-state activities.

A North Korean Foreign Ministry official met with the Swedish ambassador on Thursday for talks on consular access for the Canadian detainee, Hyeon Soo Lim, a Christian pastor from Toronto sentenced last year to life in prison with hard labor, according to Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency.

The Swedish ambassador used the meeting as a chance to raise the issue of consular affairs for the American detainees. The Pyongyang official, identified as the director general of the ministry’s European Department 2, reiterated a position that the North will handle the issues of detained Americans line with a wartime law, according to the KCNA.

North Korea has not elaborated on what “wartime law” means, although it suggests North Korea could deal with US detainees in a harsher manner. No further details were given, including what the North Korean official said about Lim.

Korean-American Kim Tong Chol is serving a 10-year prison term with hard labor, while University of Virginia undergraduate Otto Warmbier received 15 years over alleged anti-state activities such as espionage and subversion.

Pyongyang’s Supreme Court found Lim guilty of crimes such as allegedly trying to use religion to destroy the North Korean system and helping US and South Korean authorities lure and abduct North Korean citizens, along with aiding their programs to assist defectors from the North.

Outside analysts say North Korea often uses foreign detainees as a way to win concessions from other countries.

[South China Morning Post]