Category: Humanitarian Aid and Relief

A so-called normal childhood in North Korea

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If such a thing as a normal childhood can be had in North Korea, Joseph Kim had it. He lived with his father, mother and older sister in Hoeryong. At the end of each day, the neighborhood children would gather around the television and gorge themselves on popcorn and candy.

When Kim was nearly 4-years-old, his father, a respected member of the Workers’ Party of Korea, was so successful that he was able to build a house for his young family. It was 1994.

As he writes in his new memoir, Under the Same Sky: From Starvation in North Korea to Salvation in America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Kim and his family believed that they wanted for nothing.

What Kim’s family did not know was that Hoeryong was, and remains, home to a maximum-security concentration camp, one of six the country is known to run.

Every North Korean was to have a framed picture of Kim Il-sung and his wife in their homes. “You could be sent to a prison camp for allowing dirt to gather on Kim Il-sung’s portrait, or for putting it behind cracked glass,” Kim writes.

The children learned about America, mainly through illustrations. Teachers showed their students drawings of American soldiers spearing pregnant North Korean women with bayonets and marching them into gas chambers.

“I held my breath,” Kim writes, “as the teachers explained that Americans had come to our country to massacre Koreans for no other reason than they liked to … the only people who stopped the Americans from coming to my country, our teachers said, were Kim Il-sung and the soldiers of North Korea.”

[News.com/au]

North Korean defector opens about being gay

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When North Korean defector Jang Yeong-jin arrived in South Korea in 1997, officials debriefed him for five months but still hesitated to release him. They had one crucial question unanswered: Why did Mr. Jang decide to risk crossing the heavily armed border between the two Koreas?

“I was too embarrassed to confess that I came here because I felt no sexual attraction to my wife,” Mr. Jang said. “I couldn’t explain what it was that bothered me so much, made my life so miserable in North Korea, because I didn’t know until after I arrived here that I was a gay, or even what homosexuality was.”

Mr. Jang, 55, is the only known openly gay defector from North Korea living in the South. In late April, Mr. Jang published an autobiographical novel, “A Mark of Red Honor.” In the book and during a recent interview, he described his experiences as a gay man growing up in the totalitarian North, where the government maintains that homosexuality does not exist because people there live with a “sound mentality and good morals.” His struggle continued even in the capitalist South, where he said he felt like a “double alien”: a North Korean refugee who was also gay.

“In North Korea, no ordinary people conceptually understand what homosexuality is,” said Joo Sung-ha, who attended the elite Kim Il-sung University in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, in the 1990s and now works as a reporter for the mass-circulation South Korean daily Dong-A Ilbo. “In my university, only half the students may have heard of the word. Even then, it was always treated as some strange, vague mental illness afflicting subhumans, only found in the depraved West.”

While North Korea has no laws explicitly prohibiting same-sex relationships, it is not shy about expressing its homophobia. Last year, for example, it said that Michael D. Kirby, a former Australian judge who led a United Nations investigation of human rights abuses in the country, was “a disgusting old lecher with a 40-odd-year-long career of homosexuality.”

Mr. Jang said he never heard of homosexuality while growing up in Chongjin on the eastern coast of North Korea. “Most gay men in the North end up marrying whether they like it or not, because that’s the only way they know,” Mr. Jang said. “On the first night of my marriage, I thought of Seon-cheol and could not lay a finger on my wife.”

In the winter of 1996, he swam across an icy river into China. After looking in vain for 13 months for a passage to South Korea, he slipped back into the North and crawled cross the border into the South in 1997. He was one of only a handful of defectors to make it across the mine-strewn frontier. His defection made headlines.

[The New York Times]

UN warns of drought and coming hunger in North Korea

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A drought in North Korea could lead to huge food shortages this year, the top U.N. official in the country told Reuters in an interview.

Rainfall in 2014, the lowest in records going back 30 years, was 40-60 percent below 2013 levels, and reservoirs are very low, said Ghulam Isaczai, the U.N. resident coordinator. “We’re extremely concerned with the impact of drought which will affect the crop this year severely. And we might be faced with another major incident of food availability or even hunger,” said Isaczai. “It is going to create a huge deficit between the needs and what is available.”

“This is currently the rice-planting season. Normally they submerge the land almost a week or two in advance. But this year, I’ve seen it myself – they’re doing it in the dry, actually planting rice. So what we’re hearing right now is that they’re switching to maize and corn because that requires less water.”

Some farmers, already struggling with a shortage of fuel and equipment, have resorted to using buckets to water seedlings, he said. “What the government confirmed to me is that they’re operating at 50 percent of capacity in terms of power generation. A lot of it is now related to water,” the U.N. official added.

Blackouts in Pyongyang last anything from 8-9 hours to a whole 24 hours and many hospitals are unable to operate.

A famine in the 1990s killed as many as 1 million North Koreans but recently many international donors have been reluctant to help because of Pyongyang’s restrictions on humanitarian workers and international concerns over its nuclear ambitions.

[Reuters]

The plight of North Korean women

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jihyun-park-north korea defectorThe following is written by Jihyun Park (pictured at left),  a North Korean defector who escaped from North Korea twice and spent time imprisoned in a North Korean gulag. 

In North Korea, women have no rights. There is no right to freedom, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. Because of state-induced starvation and poverty, families have been ripped apart and relationships between mothers and children have been severed. A pervasive patriarchal culture governs North Korean society. Women not only fear abuse from the state, they fear abuse from patriarchal impunity.

Any discussions, however infrequent, on human rights inside North Korea are made for and by men. This situation is made worse because many women are ignorant of their universal human rights and cannot imagine recourse to justice or equality. For example, if a North Korean woman sought to escape North Korea, her only path is through the world of human trafficking and sexual exploitation in China. For many of us, human rights violations became a fact of day-to-day life.

My own experience of being trafficked from North Korea into China, being sold into marriage with a Chinese man for 5,000 yuan (approx. US $800), and being subjected to constant domestic servitude is something that will haunt me for the rest of my life. I gave birth to a son in China, but soon after I was repatriated to North Korea and my son was left in China. If my son had been born in North Korea to a Chinese father, he would have been killed for his mother’s betrayal of her Fatherland.

Pregnant women in North Korea prison camps work extremely hard until the death of their unborn children through miscarriage, or if she carries it to term, the newly born child is killed in front of mother. They cannot even cry out loud in front of the death of their un-born children — that would be a further act of treason — all they can do is quietly wipe away their tears with their sleeves.

Continued   

Defector says DMZ activists don’t understand plight of women in North Korea

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I do not know Christine Ahn, the woman who organized the “peace march” across the DMZ or her fellow travelers. Nor do I know much about Ahn’s activities, if she claims to be a true feminist, or how much she knows about the situation of women in North Korea.

But speaking as a North Korean woman myself, I do not see how Ahn’s crossing of the DMZ will improve the lives of the women of North Korea or bring peace to a country that is governed by a leadership who despise women.

Along with 200 of my former countrymen and countrywomen, I spoke as a witness to the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in North Korea. Ahn would do well to read my testimony and those of the women whom she claims to be helping. In our testimonies, we spoke of unspeakable sexual violence, forced abortions and endemic rape. These facts about North Korea ― for that is what they are ― are available for the world to read. I truly hope that Ahn listens to the words of North Korean women before she enters our homeland.

I do not know Christine Ahn. They all tell us that they are feminists and seek peace on the Korean peninsula. Yet not one of these women, who have told us that they are good-intentioned, has any understanding of the plight of women in North Korea.

They say they are doing this for peace and that they will not be used. As they cross the DMZ into a propaganda festival for the North Korean government, I hope that my words cross their minds. I and many North Korean women campaign every single day for the rights of North Korean women ― and we do so without Ahn’s fanfare.

It is us, the North Korean women, who have suffered and we urge the world to listen to our voices.

[CNN Opinion by Jihyun Park, North Korean defector] 

Activists’ walk across Koreas’ DMZ becomes bus ride

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Female activists including Gloria Steinem and two Nobel Peace laureates were denied an attempt to walk across the Demilitarized Zone dividing North and South Korea on Sunday, but were allowed to cross by bus and complete what one of them called a landmark event.

The group of 30 women from 15 countries made a final appeal to authorities on both sides to allow them to walk across the demarcation line, but were turned down. The North allowed a South Korean bus to cross the demarcation line to pick them up on the North side of the DMZ and transport them over the border to South Korea.

United Nations Command officials met the group inside the DMZ after they crossed the demarcation line, and allowed them to march again after the final checkpoint on the southern side.

Organizer Christine Ahn, a Korean-American peace activist, said the group initially wanted to walk through the symbolic truce village of Panmunjom, where the armistice was signed. Still, she said the crossing itself was a success and a “historic event” despite “governments setting boundaries.”

[Associated Press]

International female peace activists to walk DMZ

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A group of female activists, including Gloria Steinem and two Nobel Peace Prize laureates, said they will walk across the Demilitarized Zone separating the two Koreas this Sunday, despite criticism they are being used as propaganda tools by North Korea’s government.

The group of 30 women from 15 countries will not go through the symbolic truce village of Panmunjom, where the Korean War armistice was signed in 1953, because officials in South Korea and the United Nations Command responsible for security in the area said they could not guarantee the group’s safety. Instead, the women will take a route that links the two Koreas to the Kaesong industrial complex, a joint North-South business venture near the border.

The plan to walk across the DMZ, which organizers say is intended to start a dialogue and bring international attention to the need for a formal end to the Korean War and the peninsula’s division, has been controversial. The DMZ is one of the most heavily fortified in the world. There is little direct contact between the two Koreas and, with few exceptions, it is considered a crime for citizens of either country to cross the DMZ.

Organizer Christine Ahn, a Korean-American peace activist, said in Pyongyang, “We spoke about the impact of militarism around the world, including in Liberia, Colombia, Japan, northern Ireland as well as the United States.”

Members of the group said they feel the crossing in itself is a breakthrough. Leymah Gbowee, a Nobel laureate from Liberia, said, “Not only have we received the blessing for our historic crossing, we’ve gotten both Korean governments to communicate. That is a success.”

“We have accomplished what we set out to do — to walk across the DMZ on behalf of both North and South Korean women. They cannot walk, so we must,” said Steinem, 81, an iconic figure in the United States for her role in the women’s rights movement. “Over 60 years of silence has not worked. Why not try human contact?”

[AP]

More on Human Rights conditions of North Korean overseas laborers

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The Database Center for North Korean Human Rights (NKDB) has released a new report entitled Human Rights and North Korea’s Overseas Laborers: Dilemmas and Policy Challenges, by Yoon Yeosang and Lee Seung-ju This report provides the most comprehensive picture to date on the scope and conditions under which North Koreans are contracted for overseas labor assignments.

NKDB estimates that the DPRK has sent about 50-60,000 laborers overseas to 40 countries to earn an estimated $1.2-2.3 billion on behalf of the state, although Marcus Noland of the Peterson Institute for International Economics suggested that this estimate foreign exchange earnings may be too high. Most North Koreans are employed in the mining, logging, and construction sectors, and candidates are selected through a state-administered process.

The Kaesong Industrial Complex, which marries South Korean investment and infrastructure with North Korean provision of labor primarily for processing-on-commission work, involves transfer of worker’s wages to the DPRK rather than to individual accounts. Thus, it is not surprising that North Korea might be tempted use the same model to contract workers overseas. Perhaps more surprising is that North Koreans naively compete to be selected for these overseas jobs, presumably because they anticipate an improvement of conditions for labor that exist inside North Korea.

The most disturbing elements of the report involve descriptions of substandard living conditions for North Korean laborers in almost complete isolation from the local populations, virtual slave-labor conditions at the workplace, absence of safety standards or injury treatment or compensation, forced contributions from labor salaries for their own upkeep, and virtually no holidays or time to rest.

[From CFR blog] 

North Korea gains foreign currency through human trafficking

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Scott Snyder, senior fellow for Korea studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said increased trafficking of its citizens is one of North Korea’s ways of earning foreign exchange.

North Korea, frequently ranked as the world’s worst human rights abuser, has lured between 50,000 and 60,000 of its citizens to work in industries around the globe with the promise they would keep their wages, according to a paper from the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights presented on Tuesday. Instead, the wages are sent to the North Korean government, generating as much as $2.3 billion per year.

Industries employing the laborers range from logging and mining to restaurants, and workers who complain or escape risk reprisal against themselves and their families who remain in North Korea, said Robert King, special envoy for North Korea Human Rights Issues at the State Department, at the House hearing.

Workers have been sent through bilateral contracts to around 40 countries, primarily Russia, China, Mongolia and nations in Africa, central Europe and the Middle East, according to a State Department Trafficking in Persons Report from March.

One defector, Lim Il, told the Lantos commission that he had been a state employee in North Korea but went to Kuwait to work at a construction company, where he was required to put in 14-hour days under strict surveillance, with two days off per month. “I think we were slave laborers,” Il said.

After escaping to the South Korean embassy, he learned that his salary had all gone to the Office of the Worker’s Party that manages foreign currency. “The money obtained through the export of laborers overseas [is] used as a personal fund for Kim Jong-un,” the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights paper said.

[MarketWatch]