Category: Humanitarian Aid and Relief

Drones gaining ground as choice delivery system into North Korea

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For decades, efforts to bring outside information or entertainment into North Korea have been decidedly low tech.

Radio programs made for North Koreans can get their frequencies jammed. Balloons carrying pamphlets, SD cards and USB flash drives have been released in hopes that the wind would carry them over into North Korea. Sometimes, the balloons drift off course into the sea or back into South Korea. Traders and activists have hired smugglers to carry goods such as Chinese cell phones, media and other goods over the North Korean border. But relying on a network of people in the secretive state is risky and dangerous to the individuals involved.

However, drones can follow a specified route and drop off their payloads in a specific area. Human Rights Foundation President Thor Halvorssen said his organization is able to load several pounds of SD cards and flash drives on one drone.

After months of testing in secrecy, Jung Gwang-il, founder of the group No Chain, and Halvorssen decided to make their activities public in order to “encourage other civil society organizations to take advantage of new technologies. … With more and more other actors, it could have a big impact in increasing quantity of info getting in,” Halvorssen said.

[CNN]

North Korean slave laborers in the heart of the European Union

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North Korean forced laborers, in the heart of the European Union? It sounds impossible to believe.

But a VICE investigation has found extensive evidence of North Koreans working in conditions of forced labor in Poland, with their wages funding the DPRK regime. VICE gained access to confidential documents such as service contracts, payment records, registers of persons, passport copies, and excerpts from a population register smuggled out of North Korea, the latter indicating a Polish company may be being run by a high-ranking member of the North Korean military.

The investigation was sparked by the death of a North Korean working as a welder at a major shipyard in the Gdansk region. He suffered 95 percent burns in an accident that was only possible because of inadequate working equipment and unsafe practices, the yard’s responsible work inspector Tomasz Rutkowski told us.

A document seen by VICE revealed that Polish National Labor Inspectorate (PIP) found 14 different Polish companies using North Korean workers between 2010 and 2016. The investigation focused on Rungrado and three Polish companies, two of which we discovered supply North Korean workers to two major shipyards which build and repair ships for clients across the European Union (EU).

PIP’s documents show that North Koreans were also found working in industries such as surface construction, furniture production, agriculture, metalworking, medicine, and finance.

A company known as the Korea Rungrado General Trading Corporation, which is directly owned by Kim’s Workers’ Party and has been implicated in the illicit shipment of Scud missile parts to Egypt, was also named in the document.

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Firsthand account of working conditions of North Koreans in Poland

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Conversations [that VICE investigators] managed to have with North Korean shipyard workers in Poland revealed they frequently work 11 to 12 hours a day, five days a week, with shorter seven hour shifts on Saturdays. [They] also observed workers being brought to a construction site in Warsaw on a bus at 5.52am and picked up after 7pm, then taken to living quarters inside a heavily guarded compound in an isolated rural area.

“We don’t receive the money personally in our hands,” said one. He was unable to tell us how much he earned per hour or per month. “We let the company look after it. When I return to [North] Korea I’ll get the money. If we carried cash, there’s a chance that we could lose it. Anyway we don’t need any money on the way to and from work. We leave it to the company, that’s safest.”

At their living quarters, four to five workers share a room with one bed each, another North Korean told us. As they are also required to work night shifts, there are usually two to three persons sleeping in the room at any time, he said.

We asked another if he was able to talk to Polish co-workers. “We simply don’t have time. We go to work and then we go back home. That’s all we do,” he said.

When asked if it was true that workers were not allowed to keep wages, and their employer kept a large proportion, he said: “Unfortunately I cannot answer that question.”

According to the European Alliance for Human Rights in North Korea, workers abroad are deprived of the majority of their wages, which are paid in foreign currency direct to the DPRK, serving as a method of bypassing UN sanctions. “Laborers are rarely allowed to leave work sites or to come into contact with locals throughout their periods of forced labor.

Access to media is denied, communication with family members in North Korea is limited, and ideological indoctrination lessons are more pervasive than those conducted in the DPRK,” it said in a report published last September which was based on interviews with defectors.              Read more

50 thousand North Koreans work abroad earning foreign currency for Kim regime

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The UN estimated in a report last year there are about 50,000 North Koreans abroad, earning the Kim regime $1.2billion to $2.3bn per year. The workers are paid very little, with their employers paying “significantly higher amounts” directly to the North Korean government, said special UN rapporteur Marzuki Darusman.

Remco Breuker, a professor of Korean Studies at Holland’s Leiden University who chairs a working group of experts to research North Korean forced laborers in the EU, puts the situation bluntly: “In my view, North Korea is the world’s largest illegal job agency. They send people where they’re needed to whoever wants to pay.”

Breuker is clear the North Koreans are working under duress. “It’s definitely forced labor as far as I can tell. Whether these people can be considered slaves, that’s a difficult question to answer — I would probably say they come very close to being slaves,” he said. “You can’t really speak of voluntary labor.”

Research indicates workers are mostly from Pyongyang, and must be loyal to the regime, and married — allowing the threat of consequences for family members to act as leverage to ensure good behavior. They are allowed a 40-day vacation back home after two years work, after which they work abroad for another three years. One worker VICE spoke to said he had been in Poland for five years.

A spokesperson from Poland’s immigration authority told VICE that asylum was granted to a North Korean who fled while working in Poland in 2015, but provided no further details.

Kim Seung-cheol escaped during a work assignment in Russia in 1999, though sources who spoke to VICE upon condition of anonymity claimed no more than 50 out of every 50,000 North Koreans who work abroad successfully flee. According to Kim, the secret police visit the families of disobedient workers and he told VICE that his son and mother were deported and then died shortly after he fled his employment. “My whole family was destroyed,” he said.

[Read full VICE News article] 

Young North Korean Defector remembers chasing after flyer balloons

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Kim Kyoung-ok still remembers chasing after the flyer balloons, alien care packages raining from the sky, filled with Korean noodles and letters from children like her. She did not know yet that there could be a better life than the one she was born to in North Korea.

But as the years passed, her mother, Kim Tae-hee, had experienced a comparatively better quality of life in China where she was one of the approximately 50,000-60,000 North Koreans permitted to work abroad—an opportunity granted to citizens considered loyal to the regime.

Kyoung-ok was only 12 when her mother decided to make a dream of a better life a reality, fleeing with her youngest daughter to China. Now 21, Kyoung-ok detailed the treacherous journey of defecting from North Korea.

It was 2007 and Beijing was preparing for the 2008 Olympic Games. Kyoung-ok explained that the crackdown on North Korean defectors had intensified ahead of the games, with China repatriating those suspected of attempting an escape to South Korea. She and her mother were forced into hiding, living in Chinese caves before traveling through Vietnam and Cambodia with the assistance of a paid broker. The pair sought asylum at a Cambodian Christian church before arriving in South Korea in 2008.

Kyoung-ok has adjusted well to her life in the South, and has developed a close friendship with a fellow refugee she met at resettlement camp and who asked not to share her last name. The relationships built in her new home have proven vital to Kyoung-ok, who has lived on her own in Seoul to attend school since age 13, while her mother, a music teacher, worked in the southern part of the country.

[Excerpted from TIME]

Second group of North Korean defectors expected in Seoul shortly

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A second group, as yet an unspecified number, of North Koreans working at a restaurant outside North Korea have escaped their workplace and will come to South Korea, South Korean officials said Tuesday.

The announcement follows earlier South Korean media reports that two or three female employees at a North Korean-run restaurant in China fled and went to an unidentified Southeast Asian country.

It’s the second known group escape by North Korean restaurant workers dispatched abroad in recent weeks. In April, a group of 13 North Koreans who had worked at a North Korean-run restaurant in the eastern Chinese city of Ningbo defected to South Korea. After the 13 workers – a male manager and 12 waitresses – arrived in Seoul in April, Pyongyang claimed they were kidnapped by South Korean spies and repeatedly demanded their return. South Korea said the workers chose to resettle in the South on their own.

New Focus, a Seoul-based online news outlet run by a North Korean defector, was among the first to break the news Monday. It said the group comprised three women in their 20s who had worked at a North Korean-run restaurant near Shanghai.

[Associated Press]

13 North Korean defectors healthy and want “to be forgotten”

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An attorney at the South Korean intelligence office said all of the North Koreans who defected after working at a restaurant in China are all healthy, dismissing North Korean government’s argument that they were abducted and protesting with hunger strikes.

Park Young-sik, who serves at the North Korean refugees protection center under the National Intelligence Service (NIS) as a human rights defender, discussed the individual interviews she carried out with the 12 female defectors over the weekend.

“I can say clearly that all of the 13 defectors are all healthy, don’t have any problem,” said Park. Park emphasized that the defectors hope “to be forgotten” by the public.

“What’s going to happen for a defector’s family if the defector’s motivation and process of defection is revealed?” Park told the Chosun Ilbo on the same day.

[NK News]

And what of Canadian pastor Hyeon Soo Lim still in North Korean prison?

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Canadian citizen Hyeon Soo Lim was convicted in December of plotting to overthrow the North Korean government, and since then has languished in a hard labor camp. The 62-year-old senior pastor of the Toronto-area Light Korean Presbyterian Church has lost weight and is slower in his responses.

Ottawa says it is doing everything in its power to get Lim out of prison and in the interest of his case, it won’t divulge many details on its exact efforts to make that happen. Canadian consular officials have visited him twice in Pyongyang where he is serving a life sentence.

But frustration is growing among Canadians tracking the case who say Ottawa is “too silent,” and should take the initiative and engage and pressure North Korea more directly on setting Lim free. What’s necessary, said several people contacted by CBC News, is a well-tested U.S.-style intervention that combines contact and pressure.

“It’s clear as day what needs to be done,” said the Canadian source. “The prime minister has to write a letter to the chairman [North Korean leader Kim Jong-un] requesting release or pardon.” A higher-level emissary could also travel to Pyongyang to negotiate with the leadership there, said the source.

American missionary Kenneth Bae, who was convicted of subversion in North Korea, is also advising that Ottawa do more. He is in Toronto this week to raise the profile of Lim’s case. “[The North Koreans] want some sort of gesture from the Canadian government to save their face. They need an excuse to let him go.”

Lim appeared in an interview with CNN earlier this year. Bae says allowing the interview was a clear signal to Ottawa that they were willing to negotiate.

[CBC]

Kenneth Bae former prisoner in North Korea explains his “crime”

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Kenneth Bae, a Korean-American missionary imprisoned in North Korea, recounted last Wednesday how he had engaged in a kind of spiritual tourism to a little-known city in the northwestern corner of the country. Between 2011 and 2012, Bae brought more than 300 people on tours to North Korea [as part of his vision to evangelize North Koreans].

But on his 18th trip, he said, he made what he called a “very crucial mistake” — inadvertently bringing a computer hard drive along in a briefcase he meant to leave behind in China. The hard drive had files about his missionary work. It also contained a video of emaciated North Korean children scrounging in the dirt for food — footage Mr. Bae said a friend had sent him years earlier and that he not ever fully watched.

After the banned material was discovered, he was held in seclusion in a hotel in northeastern North Korea for a month while officials grilled him. He was given little to eat, generally a few bites of rice and some wilted vegetables, and was forced to watch government propaganda every evening. But he was not beaten or overtly physically abused by authorities.

He eventually confessed that one of the documents on his hard drive was a plan for what he described as “Operation Jericho” — an effort to bring tourists into North Korea to pray and spread the love of God. They would not have openly evangelized, but he had hoped that the “walls” isolating North Koreans from the rest of the world would come crumbling down, just as the walls of Jericho fell in the Bible story.

The book outlines how North Korean officials did not understand the plan’s metaphorical nature, and how Mr. Bae struggled to explain that he wasn’t trying to actually overthrow the government. The government sentenced him to 15 years in prison.

“I had to make a choice,” he said, adding that he began praying deeply as he pondered whether to fight his incarceration or somehow embrace it. He finally determined that it was “God’s will” that had put him there. “After that moment,” he said, “my perspective of life in prison changed because I was no longer there as a prisoner, but I was there as God’s ambassador — somebody who was sent from God to do God’s work.”

It was that belief that ultimately brought him through the ordeal, Mr. Bae said, adding that it has since made him realize that he had a new mission: to remind the world not to forget the ordinary people who are suffering in North Korea.

“We need to differentiate between the government and the people. The people are suffering without knowing what is coming next for them,” Mr. Bae said. “We as people outside need to continue to stand up for them and reach out to them and remember them through prayer support and any other blessing we can give.”

[Washington Times]

Horror of North Korea’s death camps – Part 1

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Kang Chol-hwan was just nine when he was sent to the Yodok concentration camp in North Korea with most of his family, including his father and grandmother. His grandad, who he would never see again, was accused of being a spy for the Japanese — and under North Korean rules, the whole family was guilty.

“At Yoduk, prisoners are executed in public to instill fear and obedience. Children, out of hunger and desperation, resort to scavenging for roots and rats. … There is one distinction that I would draw between the North Korean prison camps and Auschwitz,” Kang said. “While Auschwitz’s goal was rapid, industrial-style extermination, Yodok prolongs the suffering over three generations.

“The purpose of Yodok is to be but one facility that helps sustain the regime and cleanse the North Korean people of any freedom of thought.”

Kwon-Hyuk was once the commander of Haengyong Concentration Camp — the infamous Camp 22. Speaking about Haengyong to documentary filmmakers in 2004, he swore he had seen a family being gassed and said he had himself ordered the deaths of five families.

He recalled: “The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save their kids by doing mouth to mouth breathing.”

A study by the Database Centre for North Korean Human Rights claims no prisoner has left Haengyong alive, while reports indicate the camp closed in 2012.