Category: Humanitarian Aid and Relief

For North Korean refugees, Russia is the purgatory to North Korea’s hell

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In 2008, Ryu En Nam, a North Korean defector, was extradited from Russia and executed. He was tied to the train going back to North Korea.

“It was horrible. The train started moving and for as long as he could, Ryu En Nam ran with it,” human rights lawyer Lubov Tataretz said, a few years after she tried and failed to prevent Ryu En Nam’s extradition.

Under a recently-signed treaty, the few asylum seekers who manage to escape the hermit kingdom and make it to Russia will be forcibly repatriated, to a country where prison inmates have to burn bodies of those who starve to death and use the remains as fertilizer.

Many of the North Koreans who defect to Russia do so after being exported by their motherland to work as construction workers or lumberjacks in Russia’s far east.

Russia’s Federal Migration Service’s past treatment of North Korea refugees is not encouraging: Over the past decade, 200 North Koreans applied for Russian refugee status. Only two were successful.

[Gawker.com]

North Korean defector appeals to Russia for refugee status for 4th time

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Currently, Russia’s Federal Migration Service (or FMS) is reviewing a North Korean defector’s application for refugee status for the fourth and final time. The media calls him “Kim,” and he has lived in Russia since 2013.

Kim first crossed the river from North Korea to China when he was 17. It was 1997, there was a famine going on, and his boarding school had just closed down because it couldn’t feed its students. He lived illegally for eight years in China, until Chinese officials caught him trying to travel to Russia and quickly deported him back to North Korea. North Korean defectors don’t have a shot at asylum in China, where they are regarded as no more than economic migrants.

As punishment for crossing the border without authorization, Kim was sent to a prison camp “for re-education.” At these camps, fifty prisoners sleep in one room on a floor without bedding. Kim told Civic Assistance he worked 20 hours a day. (It could have been much worse at a camp for political prisoners.)

One day, when sent to work outside the camp, he and 30 others took a chance and ran away. Three men, Kim included, successfully hid in the home of an acquaintance. The rest were caught and shot. Again, Kim crossed over the river into China. Again, he lived day-to-day in hiding, this time only for five years. He managed to cross the frozen Amur River into the Russian border city of Blagoveshchensk. He ran into some Russian border guards and told them he wanted to request refugee status. They responded by arresting him.

[Gawker.com]

South Korea’s own sanctions against North Koreans

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South Korea said it will announce its own punitive steps against North Korea this week over its latest nuclear and missile tests, lending support to the latest United Nations Security Council (UNSC) sanctions.

The South Korean government is expected today to unveil a list of North Korean officials and institutions that will be barred from trading with South Korean companies and banks, sources say. South Korea will also freeze their assets here if there are any.

The North Korean figures and institutions subject to the South’s own sanctions are separate from the 16 individuals and 12 entities blacklisted by the U.N Security Council in the latest resolution.

South Korea will also ban the entry of ships from other nations if the vessels have visited North Korea, or if the vessels are suspected of originating from the repressive state but are flying other countries’ flags.

Meanwhile, speculation is growing that South Korea will scrap the so-called “Rajin-Hassan Project,” a logistics project involving North Korea and Russia. The project is aimed at importing Siberia-produced coal by transporting it by train between Russia’s border town of Rajin and North Korea’s port in Hassan and then loading the coal on to ships.

[The Korea Times]

Why do tourists continue to travel to North Korea?

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Otto Frederick Warmbier, a 21-year-old student from the University of Virginia, has been detained in North Korea for the past two months … for trying to steal a propaganda banner from a Pyongyang hotel. Since March 2009, 12 Americans have been detained in North Korea, accused of crimes ranging from illegally crossing Chinese borders to leaving a Bible in a bin at a health club. That raises the question: why do tourists continue to travel there?

I spent 10 days in North Korea, or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), last year. It was purely out of curiosity that I chose to visit. Our world is a small place. Every sea has been crossed, every mountain has been climbed and every jungle explored. Even the closed-off, secretive North Korea has been filmed, photographed and written about–but I don’t believe everything I watch, read or hear, and as a travel writer I couldn’t ignore this anomalous pocket in the heart of east Asia existing with such shocking defiance. I wanted to witness firsthand what North Korea was like.

Since the 1980s, North Korea has been admitting foreign tourists through organized, supervised tour groups. I booked myself on a chartered train tour along with 15 other tourists, including two Americans. We never felt unsafe. Not once. Not one of us ever questioned our security, largely because we abided by the rules which are few and simple: don’t deface photos of the Kims; don’t fold a magazine in half if Kim Jong-un’s face is on the front; include the whole body when photographing the Kims; wear a tie to the mausoleum; don’t take photos of the public without asking; and don’t leave Bibles behind in the country. This last rule exists as the regime believes that Kim Il-sung is still the supreme leader, and leaving behind a Bible is considered an attempt to influence the people’s beliefs.

[As for the North Koreans themselves:] After an initial blank stare, people smile and wave, whether it’s from fear, nervousness or simply a case of being unsure of tourists’ intentions. But it’s wrong to project a prescribed image on to an entire country.

Having traveled at the same time as the celebrations of the 70th anniversary of the Workers’ party, we were invited to join in dance rehearsals in the town square, holding hands and partnering with students who welcomed us without question. We shared earphones with our guides, showed photos of our families and had short, but sweet, exchanges with shop girls, museum guides and bellboys.

At the end of our trip one of the North Korean guides said quietly: “We are 20 million people. We are not to blame. We would like to be a member of world society. We are not perfect, but then no country is. Don’t make us suffer for what is not our fault.”

[The Guardian]

North Koreans have “nothing to envy”?!

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As a 17-year-old, Hyeonseo Lee’s childhood home in North Korea overlooked the border with China. Each night as North Korea plunged into darkness because of electricity shortages, she could see the twinkling lights across the border, a consistent puzzle without an answer.

“I think that because of the environment I grew up in … it raised a lot of questions, especially living on the border with China,” she told news.com.au. While Lee had been raised to believe that North Korea was the best country on the planet and even grew up singing the song Nothing to Envy, she gradually she started to think, “their life (in China) looks superior”.

“In the daytime I saw people die on the street, there were a lot of beggars on the street in my hometown,” she said. Lee saw her first execution at just seven years of age, and was shocked when she learned that people around her were dying of starvation.

Because her hometown was so close to the border, Lee’s home was able to receive Chinese television signals and this also raised questions. “It was illegal to watch … but I did my best to watch, it completely transformed my thought at the time.”

Lee decided to see for herself what life in China was like and made the dangerous journey across the frozen Yalu River, which separated the two countries. She also had the help of a border guard. At the time she innocently thought she would just make a quick visit and then return.

“But the moment I crossed the border, everything changed, after that moment, I couldn’t go back,” she said. Complications with the North Korean security police meant she was forced to live with relatives in China as an illegal immigrant.

She lived in fear that she would be discovered and sent back to North Korea, where torture for defectors was normal. At one point Lee was interrogated by police but they released her because her Chinese speaking skills convinced them that she was not North Korean.

[News.com.au]

Why Australia is special to this North Korean activist

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This weekend North Korean activist Hyeonseo Lee will speak at the Opera House in Sydney, Australia, two years after visiting the iconic venue as a tourist. “I never thought I would give a speech there,” she said.

She’s also keen to point out that Australia holds a particular place in her heart.

An Australian named Dick Stolp literally changed her family’s life when he withdrew US$981 from an ATM and paid for them to be released from a Laos jail, a short distance from the South Korean embassy. Lee had already spent everything she had to get her family across the border and had lost all hope of freeing them when Stolp spotted her and asked her what was wrong. He unhesitatingly paid the fines.

“His behavior changed me a lot. I didn’t believe angels existed in this world,” she said.

“Australia is a very special country, it’s the country where my hero is from. He paid all the penalties to get them out of jail, that’s why my family has freedom, I feel very happy to be here again.

Now 35 years old, Lee continues to be optimistic about her future and about the future of North Korea. “History proves that dictators can’t last forever,” she said.

[News.com.au]

UN Security Council approves new sanctions on North Korea

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The U.N. Security Council unanimously approved new sanctions on North Korea on Wednesday, in response to a recent nuclear test and rocket launch that violated U.N. resolutions on the country’s military activities. The new sanctions require, among other things, inspection of all cargo heading in and out of North Korea, a ban on the sale of valuable minerals by North Korea and a blockade on the sale or supply of jet fuel to the isolated nation.

The newly announced sanctions are tougher than previous resolutions targeting North Korea — part of a trend, NPR’s Elise Hu reports from Seoul, of incrementally tougher penalties placed on North Korea.

In an interview on All Things Considered last week, U.N. Ambassador Samantha Powers called the package of sanctions “nearly unprecedented in many respects” and “the toughest sanctions resolution that has been put forward in more than two decades.”

But as Elise told Morning Edition, the sanctions announced Wednesday aren’t expected to have a large impact on the lives of everyday North Koreans, thanks to the intervention of North Korea’s biggest ally. “China has been stern about saying that any new sanctions shouldn’t trigger a humanitarian disaster. So this set of sanctions is designed not to disrupt the general North Korean economy, which is based primarily on China and North Korea and their economic cooperation,” Elise says.

“The sanctions also don’t target one of North Korea’s big sources of hard currency, and that’s North Koreans who work overseas. So in general these are intended to weaken Pyongyang’s weapons systems and the elite members of the regime.”

China’s cooperation was pivotal to approving Wednesday’s new sanctions: disagreement between Beijing and Washington had prevented the Security Council from announcing new restrictions on North Korea back in January. Now, Elise says, “even China seems to be sort of running out of patience with North Korea and its young leader.”

[NPR]

North Korea’s recipe for bargaining: Detainee, script, TV cameras

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The Westerners who find themselves detained in North Korea–and there have been a fair few of them in recent years–invariably end up in front of television cameras making full-throated confessions, Otto Warmbier being the latest.

North Korea has a history of using American detainees as bargaining chips with the United States, its avowed enemy. These are some of the previous cases of strange confessions by detained Americans–which have been explained after their release.

“Put some emotion into it.” Jeffrey Fowle of Ohio spent almost six months in detention in North Korea in 2014 after leaving a Bible in a bathroom stall at a seaman’s club in Chongjin, a city on the northeast coast. Before his first appearance, in front of North Korean journalists from Associated Press Television News, Fowle’s minder told him to “put some emotion into it.” He suggested that it might be good if Fowle cried.

“The words were not mine.” Merrill Newman, an 85-year-old Californian man held in 2013 after mentioning to his tour guide that he fought in the Korean War. He later said, ‘Anyone who has read the text of it or who has seen the video of me reading it knows that the words were not mine and were not delivered voluntarily. “

“Long and grueling investigation.” John Short, an Australian, was arrested in North Korea in 2014 and held for almost a month after he left pamphlets about Christianity at a Buddhist temple. After his release, Short told the Australian Associated Press that he underwent a “long and grueling investigation.” “There were two-hour sessions each morning, which were repeated again in the afternoons,” he said.

“Regrettable.” Lim Hyeon-soo, a 60-year-old Korean-Canadian pastor who confessed last year to attempting to overthrow North Korea, was forced to make the claim, his friends say.

[Washington Post]

North Korean spy chief says Pyongyang unfazed by sanctions

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The head of North Korea’s General Bureau of Reconnaissance has said that the regime will survive regardless of international sanctions. Kim Yong-chol, who has headed the bureau since 2009, also serves as head of the United Front Department, which deals with South Korea.

Kim Yong-chol said North Korea “has not lived a single day without sanctions and will not die from them.”

Kim also insisted that the North’s latest nuclear test was only aimed at defending the isolated state against a U.S. threat, while North Korean leader Kim Jong-un intends to continue testing long-range rockets until the international community is convinced of their peaceful purpose.

[Chosun Ilbo]

American student held in North Korea “confesses”

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Otto Frederick Warmbier, a student at the University of Virginia who has been detained in North Korea for the past two months,  is accused of trying to steal a North Korean banner, containing a political slogan that was hanging from the walls of his Pyongyang hotel.

A North Korean official says the 21-year-old held a news conference “at his own request” Monday morning at the People’s Palace of Culture in Pyongyang. The event provided insight into the bizarre charges he is facing, including allegations that he was encouraged to commit the “hostile act” by a purported member of an Ohio church, a secretive university organization and even the CIA.

In a video supplied to CNN, North Korean guards escorted Warmbier into the room. He was not restrained and was wearing dark trousers, a light-colored blazer, shirt and tie. Appearing to read from a statement, Warmbier said: “I committed the crime of taking down a political slogan from the staff holding area of the Yanggakdo International Hotel.”

Warmbier is also seen in the video sobbing and pleading for forgiveness, and bowing deeply to apologize, and stating, “I never, never should have allowed myself to be lured by the United States administration to commit a crime in this country. I wish that the United States administration never manipulate people like myself in the future to commit crimes against foreign countries. I entirely beg you, the people and government of the DPRK, for your forgiveness. Please! I made the worst mistake of my life!”

Warmbier, a third-year business major at the University of Virginia, originally was detained on January 2 as he was about to board a plane and leave the country, according to Young Pioneer Tours, the China-based travel company that organized his trip.

[CNN]