Category: Humanitarian Aid and Relief

North Korean floods a serious challenge for Kim Jong Un

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Battling to rebuild homes damaged by the flooding, North Korean work gangs are filling sacks with rocks — 20 bags every hour, from dawn to dusk. It’s back-breaking labor.

It is a mark of how serious this disaster is that Kim Jong Un has appealed to the world for help and for money to rebuild. South Korea has already refused. North Korea isn’t asking everyone. “I’m not going to reach out my hand to the United States,” said one official, Ri Song Chol. “Not after 70 years of their aggression.”

Many people are putting their trust in their all-powerful commander-in-chief.

“Our Dear Leader Kim Jong Un promised us he would provide new house for us before winter,” said homeless mother Taw Kyung Wha. “So we believe him.”

For Kim, who rules some of the poorest people on earth, it is risky.

He can’t afford to lose popular support as his father did in the early 1990s when a flood was followed by a terrible famine that left hundreds of thousands dead.

[NBC]

North Korean floods: Homeless survivors as winter approaches

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One month after devastating floods ravaged North Korea’s northeast, aid agencies have warned that many survivors are homeless and at risk of disease as winter looms.

“In two to three weeks it will be a different story,” Patrick Elliott, a delegate with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), said in a statement warning that incoming snowfall in October could be disastrous for unprepared flood survivors. “People have lost their coal supplies and are burning bits of wood in makeshift stoves to keep warm. They need proper roofs over their heads, fuel and warm clothes. The risk of a secondary disaster is very real.”

Elliott said that increasing numbers of old people and young people had been diagnosed with respiratory infections and diarrhea.

The floods, considered the worst in decades, killed hundreds, left 70,000 people homeless, and a total of 140,000 people in desperate need of assistance in the north of Hamgyong province.

Flood survivors are currently staying in public buildings and with host families. While the IFRC is purchasing thousands of roofing sheets for permanent homes, the North Korean government has started to reconstruct permanent homes.

[CNN]

North Korea devastation in flood-hit area

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One month after devastating floods caused by a typhoon hit a remote area of North Korea, Red Cross officials said Sunday that more help is needed for thousands of displaced people before harsh winter conditions set in.

In a video provided by The Red Cross, people of North Hamgyong are seen living in temporary shelters amid rubble and mud-caked areas of destruction left in the wake of the flooding. North Korean authorities have launched a major reconstruction effort, but have asked international humanitarian organizations for help.

The Red Cross has sent supplies to construct temporary shelters and provide daily necessities for people who lost everything in the flooding.

Winter is coming soon, meaning snow and plummeting temperatures will make life more difficult for thousands of displaced people still living in very basic conditions. Red Cross official, Chris Staines, who was among the first international humanitarian workers to reach the area in early September, said in this part of the country, the peak of winter can see temperatures reach as low as -30 degrees Celsius.

[AP]

South’s Park Geun-hye directly appeals to North Koreans to defect

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South Korean President Park Geun-hye has called on North Koreans to abandon their country and defect, just a day after a soldier walked across the heavily fortified border into the South.

In a rare message directly addressed to rank-and-file troops and North Korean citizens, during a speech marking the country’s Armed Forces Day, the president on Saturday invited North Koreans to relocate to the “bosom of freedom” in the South.

“The universal values of freedom, democracy, human rights and welfare are the precious rights you should also enjoy. We will keep the road open for you to find hope and live a new life. Please come to the bosom of freedom in the South whenever you want.”

Park said defections by North Koreas fleeing hunger and oppression were increasing “drastically”. “There have been persistent defections, even by North Korean elites who have been supporting the regime”, she said.

The call comes a month after North Korea’s deputy ambassador to Britain defected to South Korea, handing the country a major propaganda coup at a time of rising tension on the divided Korean peninsula.

Ties between the two Koreas are at the lowest ebb since the height of Cold War in the 1970s, with Pyongyang test-firing more than 20 missiles and carrying out two nuclear tests this year alone.

[Al Jazeera]

No indicators of North Korea releasing two American hostages

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North Korea is holding two U.S. citizens as “prisoners of war,” regime officials have told Americans lobbying for their release, as the months drag on with no word about the pair.

During this period of Kim Jong Un’s military launching a stream of increasingly longer-range and more reliable missiles and conducted its fifth nuclear test, there has been no word on Otto Warmbier, a business student at the University of Virginia, and Kim Dong-chul, a South Korean-born naturalized American citizen, since they were separately sentenced to years of hard labor in North Korean prisons in March and April respectively.

“I am certain that North Koreans will keep Otto Warmbier and Kim Dong-chul until after the U.S. election,” said Sue Mi Terry, a former North Korea analyst for the CIA who is now at Bower Group Asia, a consultancy.

“American prisoners are one of the few bargaining chips North Koreans has,” she said, and there is “zero incentive” for the North Koreans to release these Americans at this point. “Why waste it now with the Obama administration when there appears to be little progress that can be made in terms of either returning to talks or easing of the sanctions in place?”

In recent years, the regime has made a habit of detaining U.S. citizens and using them as bargaining chips. This has followed a familiar pattern: arrest and harsh sentence, then release after a high-profile American flies to Pyongyang to get them out.

These visits are portrayed in North Korea’s media as signs of the isolated state’s strength–a weak Washington coming begging to Pyongyang.

Because the United States does not have diplomatic relations with North Korea, the Swedish embassy in Pyongyang represents American interests there. Swedish diplomats have not been granted access to Warmbier since March 2, John Kirby, spokesman for the State Department, said.  Kirby declined to comment on whether the Swedish diplomats had seen Kim Dong-chul since his arrest and conviction.

[Washington Post]

The generation of semi-legal North Korean jangmadang markets

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As the United States and other nations grasp for new ways to sanction Pyongyang in response to its latest nuclear test, some North Korean defectors see investment in its rudimentary market economy as a way to foment gradual change from within.

South Korea forbids its citizens from trading with anyone in North Korea but turns a blind eye to remittances estimated at $10 million a year sent to relatives by many of the nearly 30,000 defectors in the South.

Surveys of defectors by Seoul National University found that the biggest challenge for North Koreans doing business was funding, followed by bribes paid to authorities and occasional crackdowns on market activity.

One young defector, Seoul-based activist Ji Seong-ho, has been sending funds of $300 to $500 at a time for North Koreans to open food stalls and crop-lending businesses in rural areas.

“The bigger markets grow, the weaker the regime gets, so we need to support North Korean entrepreneurs,” said Ji, 34, who heads Now, Action and Unity for Human Rights (NAUH), which tries to help North Korean refugees in China to defect.  Read more

[Reuters]

Shaping North Korea’s new capitalists

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One defector living in South Korea, who escaped through China in the early 2000s, uses a clandestine funding channel to send hundreds of thousands of dollars to help dozens of North Koreans open small businesses, such as noodle shops and grocery stores.

Under Kim Jong Un, North Korea has allowed a growing number of semi-legal markets known as jangmadang, where individuals and wholesalers buy and sell goods they have produced themselves or imported from China. The markets have improved the quality of life for many but also makes them less reliant on the Soviet-style planned economy, undermining the power of the state.

“The North Korean business owners I am helping can be an alternative group to build sound capitalism,” said the defector, who is in his 40s and declined to be named fearing for his safety and that of his partners in the North.

He uses a clandestine money channel typically works with middlemen who wire money to banks in China, where it is collected by agents and carried across the border. He vets prospects through his relatives and acquaintances.His brokers on the ground send photographs to him of businesses the defector has funded, using cellphones connected to China’s mobile network.

The defector, who does not seek a profit, tells the North Koreans he helps “not to be greedy, help other poor North Koreans and gain respect,” he said. “This is [effective] because it directly supports livelihoods.”

[Reuters]

New report on treatment of Christians in North Korea

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Christian Solidarity Worldwide has issued a harrowing report of religious persecution inside North Korea, including allegations that authorities there ran over confessing Christians with a steamroller.

The report, Total Denial: Violations of Freedom of Religion or Belief in North Korea, was issued September 23, “Save North Koreans Day”,  and claims liberty with respect to religion – or any belief contrary to the state’s communist ideology – is “largely non-existent.”

“Documented incidents include Christians being hung on a cross over a fire, crushed under a steamroller, herded off bridges and trampled under-foot,” the report claims.

Christians, who are forced to practice their faith in secret, are often the targets of persecution. Those discovered are sent to concentration camps where they take part in forced labor. They are also subjected to sexual violence, torture and “extra-judicial” killings.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom also said in its report that Christians considered to have participated in acts of worship, of having studied the Bible or having possessed a church hymnal “are typically jailed, or worse.”

“In prison, Christians reportedly endure harsher treatment than other prisoners. It is estimated that tens of thousands of Christians in North Korea are currently in prison camps facing hard labor or execution,” the USCIRF report said.

The CSW report also documents China’s deportation of North Korean refugees who are able to escape the country. The country immediately returns the refuges in violation of its obligations under the United Nations Convention on Refugees Treaty of 1951.

[Christian Examiner]

24 Chinese Embassies face protests for repatriating North Korean defectors

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Human rights activists in 24 cities around the world protested outside Chinese embassies on Friday and delivered petitions calling on the Chinese government to stop killing North Korean defectors by repatriating them back to their home country.

It is an offense punishable by death or imprisonment for North Korean citizens to defect from the country and the oppressive Kim regime, and the Chinese government helps facilitate North Korea’s crimes against humanity by refusing to grant North Korean defectors refugee status. By sending thousands of them back to North Korea, China knows full well that they will be tortured, forced to do hard labor and even killed in political prison camps.

In 2014, a 400-page United Nations report extensively detailed the widespread torture and abuse that North Korea is responsible for and found that China is violating its responsibility under international human rights and refugee laws.

Organized by the North Korea Freedom Coalition, demonstrations and candlelight vigils to honor those defectors who have been killed or imprisoned were held outside Chinese embassies in two dozen cities around the world including Washington, D.C., Chicago, San Francisco, Toronto, Berlin, Paris, Seoul, London, Helsinki and others as a part of the annual Save North Koreans Day.

Activists urged China to “stop killing North Koreans, and accused China’s president, Xi Jinping, of standing “side by side” with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un in “genocide.” Along with the demonstrations, activists delivered petitions calling on the Chinese government to stand with the persecuted North Korean families.

“It is not becoming of a big country that China claims itself to be,” Jai Poong Ryu, a professor at Loyola University of Maryland and CEO of One Korea Foundation, said. “It’s odd that China is going against the United Nations resolution that it led others to sign. It’s violating its own principles instead,” Ryu added.

[Read full Christian Post article]

Treatment of North Korean women in Chinese detention center

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North Korean defector Jo Jin Hye, who was granted political asylum in the United States in 2008, looks back on the dark days of her incarceration in a detention center in the Chinese border city of Tumen:

A Chinese prison guard came in and said there was an inspection. He was a man in his 30s, and he had been sent to do body searches of women.

In the detention center, the staff refused to give us sanitary products, so we had nothing to use when our menstruation came around. We would use whatever we had to hand; bits of blanket, ripped off. Then, if they discovered it, they would force us to eat it. If we didn’t, they would hit us really hard, until our faces swelled up and we were spitting blood, and couldn’t walk.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

There was a woman who was five months’ pregnant, and she was sitting down, leaning against a wall. A prison guard came in and started beating us all with a baton. He beat an old lady nearly half to death, and the pregnant woman as well. The pregnant woman bled for several days after that.

I was afraid she would lose the child, because she had been trying for a child for three years. I knew that child was very important to her. So I ran over there and grabbed the guard’s leg, saying “Don’t beat her. She’s five months pregnant and not in good health, and she bleeds all the time. If you carry on, she’ll lose the baby.”

He replied: “Who cares? It’s not mine, anyway.” That’s what he said.

[Radio Free Asia]