Category: Humanitarian Aid and Relief

Red Cross on North Korean flood relief: “Put politics aside and recognize this is a humanitarian tragedy”

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The Red Cross is struggling to raise needed funds to aid flood-affected regions of North Korea after a disappointing response from the international community to its emergency appeal, a spokesman said on Saturday.

Red Cross has only raised 25 percent of the $15.38 million it sought in an emergency appeal aimed at helping more than 330,000 people needing humanitarian assistance over the next 12 months, and with winter fast approaching.

Donors’ political concerns about the North Korean government have hampered efforts to raise funds, Patrick Fuller, communications manager for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), said, even though the money donated to the Red Cross is spent by the organization, without passing through the government. International donors need to “put politics aside and recognize this is a humanitarian tragedy for thousands of people,” said Fuller.

North Korean government-led reconstruction efforts have moved at an incredibly fast pace, the IFRC said, with cement factories working overtime and a constant stream of building materials reaching the affected areas by train and ship.

“Credit has to go to the government for what they’ve achieved,” Fuller said. “They will have achieved in three months probably what most other countries achieve in three years after a major disaster.”

[Reuters]

North Korean women and the decision to leave their Chinese babies behind

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Together with two women from a village in northeastern China, North Korean defector Suh determined to make it to South Korea. In doing so, she made the heart-wrenching decision to leave her 5-year-old daughter with her Chinese husband.

The women traveled by bus and car down through China to the border with Laos, which they crossed illegally in the black of night, Suh carrying her 18-month-old daughter, Ji-yeon, on her back.

While waiting to cross the Mekong River, the women talked about the difficult decisions they had had to make. Suh’s 5-year-old is listed on her Chinese father’s family register, which gives her legal status in China and enables her to go to school. But by the time Ji-yeon was born, the back channel for registration — involving bribes to willing officials — had closed. The baby doesn’t legally exist.

So when Suh decided to flee and realized she could only manage to take one child with her, she knew it had to be Ji-yeon.

“[My 5-year-old] thinks I’ve abandoned her,” Suh said, breaking down into another torrent of tears as she recalled telling her older daughter she would be back soon.

The women made it to Vientiane, the Laotian capital, where a Washington Post reporter spent two days with them as they paused on their journey to what they hoped would be a better life. The women talked for hours about their lives in North Korea and in China but, unlike some defectors who exaggerate their stories to make them more sensational, they appeared to play down their experiences, apparently out of shame.

The relief of being out of China had washed over the women, and the challenges ahead loomed. The women had begun to dwell on the handicaps that North Koreans face. “I have no passport, no papers, nothing,” Suh said. “Why are our lives so different, just because of where we are born?”

[The Washington Post]

North Korean refugee women speak out about leaving children behind in China

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Tongil Mom, a group comprised of North Korean refugee women working to be reunited with their children, spoke at the University in Charlottesville VA as coordinated by the human rights advocacy group Liberty in North Korea.

With the help of a North Korean translator, the women of Tongil Mom shared personal testimonies of how they defected from North Korea, their time in China as forced brides and how they eventually resettled in South Korea. Many North Korean women leave their country due to intense struggle and relocate to China, where they are often sold and forced to be brides for Chinese men. While these North Korean refugee women have children with these men, many are still forced by the Chinese government to go back to South Korea. This forced repatriation causes many women to never see their children again. Each woman who spoke at the event currently has a child in China from whom they are separated.

“I think that sometimes it’s easy to forget when all we see in American media is North Korean news about nuclear weapons and political issues. But the fact of the matter is that there are 24 million civilians that live in that country and they’re dealing with a lot of humanitarian issues so we should remember them and strive to support them,” Cameron Hicks, fourth-year College student and executive board member of Liberty in North Korea, said.

Tongil Mom has three main parts in its petition, which is directed to the governments of the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of Korea. These include calling for proper identification papers for children born to North Korean refugees in China, humanitarian measures for mothers who defected from North Korea to be able to exercise rights as birth mothers to their children and giving these children the right to choose with which parent they live.

“Obviously, the Chinese government is not going to stop its policy of repatriation overnight, but I believe if we approach the people in China, the people with a [conscience], the people who believe in human rights in China and if we approach this using social media then we can definitely try to make a change regarding the situation,” Tongil Mom Executive Director Kim Jeong Ah said.

“We want to set up a website for children in China to look up the whereabouts of their mothers,” Ah said. “We have all of these ideas to reunite a lot of mothers so they can hug their children again, but we need all the help we can get.”

[The Cavalier Daily]

Every Falling Star

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“My father left to find food, said he was going to China, and he hasn’t come back yet. … My mother went to Aunt’s house to get food, too. She told me she would be gone a week and to eat salt and drink water until she got back. That was, I think, about ten days ago.”

[My fellow street urchin] Young-bum responded, “… I believed you were just acting dumb when we told you about things going on in Joseon. But really… you don’t know! …Your family was kicked out of Pyongyang, fancy-pants, because Pyongyang people don’t come here to live unless the government has told them to get out. And when Pyongyang fancy-pants people are asked to leave, they’re stripped of everything.

“Everyone knew about your family the moment you arrived in that train station, all polished like those shiny metal escalators in the metro in the capital. Everyone talked behind your father’s back about how a great star of the regime must have done something really bad to have fallen into a garbage heap like this.”

I felt the knot in my throat grow tight. My father hadn’t wanted me to know these things.

“You can’t go back to Pyongyang,” Young-bum continued, his voice light and soft as if he genuinely wanted to comfort me. “And even if you found a way, your grandfather isn’t there anymore. When someone does something against the government, the entire family is usually penalized. Your doctor grandfather has been kicked out, too. Or if he hasn’t been kicked out, he’s been stripped of all his things and likely left on his own to survive.

I lowered my head, feeling all hope drain, like on a hot steamy day being given a glass of water with holes in it. I swallowed hard so as not to cry.   Read more

9.27 Shangmoo

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“You’ve never heard of the 9.27 Shangmoo?” he asked, staring at me wide-eyed. “On September 27, the government formed the Shangmoo, a band of police to collect people who are not at home or at school and take them to shelters. Every city has a force of these 9.27 Shangmoo, except maybe Pyongyang, because [it’s] like the golden perfect city in the sky, with golden perfect people who all have homes and who never do anything wrong.

“But everywhere else, there are so many kids not at school, adults hunting for food… the Shangmoo’s job is to clean the streets of these people. The Shangmoo send the people they find to so-called shelters—the adults to one place, the kids to another. But these are not nice places. They’re guhoso, jails.”

“Where are you taking me?” I demanded, afraid he was taking me to the prison. … “Here,” he said, stopping. We were standing at the edge of the market.

“I can’t look after you. This is your kitchen now,” Young-bum said, waving an arm around the market.

I followed his hand and looked into the tired eyes of the vendors, eyes that no longer reflected light. The men were wrinkled, sunken, and walking around on bowlegs; the children had runny noses, swollen stomachs, and open sores; the women, who like my own eomeoni, I could tell from their fine features and graceful movements, had been beautiful once like swans, until their skin became first pallid from malnutrition and then blue from dirt and their hair began to fall out.

“At least you’re alive,” Young-bum whispered.

“Am I?” I grunted. “Maybe I died a long time ago, and this is just my nightmare.”

[Extract from “Every Falling Star: The True Story of How I Survived and Escaped North Korea” by Sungju Lee & Susan McClelland]

North Korean defector explores integration

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Audrey Park, a master’s student studying political science in Seoul, is working for Conservative Sen. Yonah Martin, the first Canadian of Korean descent to serve in the Senate. Through her six-month internship split between Toronto and Ottawa, Park will explore the similarities and differences of integration policies between Canada and South Korea.

During a widespread famine in the 1990s when Park was seven, her family in North Korea lived off of one meal a day. Park also remembers it was not unusual to see people passed out or dead in the streets due to starvation.

In December 1998, when Park was 10, her mother felt she had no choice but to leave their home in Hamgyong to flee to China. They embarked on a terrifying 12-hour walk to the Chinese border, dodging car headlights at night and walking through forests during the day. Her mother bribed a soldier to cross the border, which was not uncommon.

The pair lived in China for seven years. They were deported three times to North Korea, each time again fleeing the Hermit Kingdom. In 2006, they escaped for the third and final time during the winter, eventually ending up in South Korea.

When asked how she survived her ordeals, the stoic young woman said the need to survive trumped fear.

[Ottawa Citizen]

Defectors adjusting to life beyond North Korea

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For most people, adapting to life in a foreign country is a challenge. For North Korean defectors, such challenges are much more imposing.

Take those who defect to South Korea, for example. “For them, it’s kind of like waking up from a time machine and finding yourself in the future,” Sokeel Park, director of Research and Strategy for Liberty in North Korea, an international non-governmental organization that works with North Korean defectors.

North Korea and South Korea started off on similar footing. Unlike North Korea, the South embraced globalization, democratization, and massive economic development. Where South Korea is one of the most wired countries in the world today, most North Koreans have never used a computer.

North Korean defectors sometimes struggle with poverty, language barriers, social anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression and suicidal thoughts, criminality, drug abuse, a lack of education and employable skills, and discrimination, Park explained.

North Koreans living in South Korea are reportedly three to four times more likely to end up prison than their local counterparts. “Under the burden of livelihood difficulties and homesickness, more defectors tend to get involved in crimes with the number of defector prisoners on the rise,” South Korean Rep. Kang Chang-il reported in late September.

Drug abuse is a noteworthy problem. Park noted that some North Korean defectors abuse drugs because that cultural norm exists in North Korea. Others use narcotics as a response to trauma, and for some other defectors, drug abuse is a type of self-medication.

For many North Koreans, freedom, while cherished, is sometimes bitter-sweet. The transition from a broken kingdom to the modern world is often overwhelming.

Most North Korean defectors despise the Kim regime for the tragedies inflicted upon them and their families, and pray for change in their former homeland.
[Daily Caller]

The plight of North Korean women who defect to China

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A steady stream of North Korean defectors make their way down through China, across to Laos, then into Thailand and eventually to South Korea. Most are women from the northern provinces, considered down-and-out even by North Korean standards, and face an extremely precarious life in northeastern China.

Many had been sold — some knowingly, thinking life couldn’t get any worse. But other women had been tricked into thinking they were heading to jobs in China, only to find that the man who offered to help them escape, paying bribes to border soldiers and arranging passage, turned out to be a trafficker, selling the women and pocketing the profits.

The buyers are men in the countryside who are too poor or unappealing to get a wife any other way, and the women are stuck in remote villages where they cannot communicate with the locals — if they are permitted to leave the house, that is.

Women ages 15 to 25 are the most prized, fetching between $10,000 and $12,000, brokers and humanitarian workers say, while women in their 30s can be acquired for half that. These increased prices mean that some Chinese families are spending their entire life savings to buy a North Korean woman, and as a result the women are sometimes shackled inside the house.

But even if the women are allowed out and even after they learn some Chinese, venturing into the open is a risky business. If they’re caught by the Chinese police, they face repatriation to North Korea and, at a minimum, time in a labor camp. Read more

North Korean defectors turn to online sex work

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Although some North Korean women who have defected and marry rural Chinese men take the risk of working outside the home, shuttling between cleaning and babysitting jobs or working behind the scenes in restaurants, an increasing number feel they have no choice but to try to make money behind closed doors.

That is where video chatting comes in. About one-fifth of the North Korean women living in hiding in China are involved in this kind of online sex work.

“If you’re working in a restaurant or outside, you run the risk of being asked for your papers by the police. So doing this work is safer and the money is better,” said Park a broker who works to get women out. “In the village where they lived, every North Korean woman does this. It’s so normal to be doing this.”

“These North Korean women in China faced a dire dilemma, either having to remain hidden and submit to this kind of sexual exploitation, or risk working outside of their residence with the very real possibility that Chinese authorities could arrest them at any time and force them back to North Korea,” said Phil Robertson of Human Rights Watch.

Suh was sold eight years ago to a man in northern China who, she said, treated her well — he beat her “only a few times.” But the arrival of their second child made a tough financial situation untenable. She heard about video chatting through a friend of a friend and began chatting with South Korean men at night when everyone in her house was asleep.

On her first day she earned $3. In her best week, she netted $120. A few months ago, Suh decided she couldn’t take it. “I wondered why I had to do this. I’m a human being, the same as everyone else,” Suh said, breaking down into heaving sobs. “I wanted to be a good mother, a strong mother for my daughters.”   Read more

Escaping the ‘cruel, sad, and dark’ world of North Korea

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Grace Jo, a North Korean defector who now lives in Washington, D.C., shares her story:

“North Korea is very cruel, very sad, and very dark,” Grace said, recalling her days there. “It is a world completely without hope.”

Born in 1991 in Hamgyeong Province, Grace lived in the mountains with her mother, father, two older sisters, younger brother and grandmother. She lost more than half of her family before she left North Korea for good.

Her childhood was defined by a famine which killed hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, between 1994 and 1998. “We were always hungry and cold,” Grace explained, “My mother, father, and siblings were always out searching for food. … I went 10 days without any food. We could only drink cold water from the river,” she said. Had it not been for the generosity of a neighbor, Grace would not have survived.

To fight off starvation, Grace’s mother and father made several food runs to China. The first two times were successful, but everything went wrong during a third trip, when they were caught by border police. Her mother, who was pregnant at the time, was tortured in prison, an experience that crippled her permanently. Grace’s father died during his incarceration.

To care for the family, Grace’s oldest sister traveled to China to find food, but she disappeared. After recovering, Grace’s mother left Grace, her older sister Jinhye Jo, her younger brother and her new baby brother in the care of their grandmother and set out to look for her daughter in China.

“We did our best to take care of our new baby brother while our mother was gone, but we were unable to save him. He died after only two months,” Grace explained. Read more