Category: North Korean refugee

Laos unexpectedly sends 9 North Korean refugees to China

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Laos sent back to China nine North Koreans who had fled their impoverished homeland.

The deportation raises fears the defectors may be repatriated by Beijing to North Korea, where they are likely to face harsh punishment. Reports of those who have been forcibly repatriated tell of beatings, torture, forced labor and sexual violence.

A South Korean source who works with defectors and who had been in contact with the nine North Koreans confirmed to VOA they were flown from the Laotian capital, Vientiane, to Kunming in southwest China on Monday.

South Korea’s Yonhap news agency earlier reported on the defectors, who it said were 15 to 23 years old. Quoting an anonymous South Korean foreign ministry official, the report said Laos “unexpectedly” rejected the South’s plea to send them to Seoul.

Laos, along with other Southeast Asian countries, is a common destination for North Korean defectors, most of whom eventually are resettled in South Korea.

Thousands of North Koreans have defected to the South since famine crippled agricultural production in their homeland in the past decade. Those reaching Chinese territory often do so with the help of activists, missionaries or smugglers.

VoA

Life for a North Korean orphan

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Hyuk Kim, who asked that his real name not be used for the safety of family members still in North Korea, lost his mother when he was 6, then his father when he was 11. After his father died, he lived in North Hamgyong province with a group of six other orphan boys.

“We started a fire together, but we still couldn’t sleep because it was so cold,” he said. “We just warmed ourselves with the fire at night and we mainly slept during the day when the sun was shining.

In the punishing winters, Hyuk and other orphans would break into sheds containing electric transformers near factories and markets to find a warm place to sleep. “Many children accidentally end up touching the transformers while sleeping and die,” said Hyuk. As he dozed off each night curled next to a transformer, he would try to stay as still as possible — willing himself not to move in his sleep.

“During the night, we needed to find food to eat. We sometimes stole food from others and gathered food from here and there.”

When something went missing in the neighborhood, the blame automatically fell on Hyuk and his friends, even when they had not been involved. The children would be taken to the police station and tied to chairs, he said. “The police would then automatically accuse us of stealing because they assume we would have stolen since we don’t have parents. They hit us, tie us up, and torture us. There was no one to defend us.”

Hyuk Kim fled North Korea in 2011, nearly a decade after becoming an orphan. Street children who flee to China become easy prey to traffickers, according to human rights activists. The girls are sold into the sex trade, or as wives for rural Chinese men.

China sends back those escapees they catch, so defectors live in hiding — fearing they’ll be imprisoned and tortured back home.

Now 21, Hyuk attends Hangyeore Middle-High School in South Korea, where he sleeps in a real bed inside a heated dormitory. The school serves three warm, buffet-style meals a day, and students can pile as much food as they’d like on their metal trays. The school, set up by the South Korean government, does not charge tuition.

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The abandoned children of North Korea

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Yoon Hee was born in a village near North Korea’s sacred Mount Baekdu. At 8 years of age, she was abandoned by her mother and did what many abandoned North Korean children do — live on the streets, nearly freezing to death in the winters, begging for mercy, plucking grass for food and crying so hard at night only the pain in her face could stifle her tears.

One day, alone and 10 years old, she lay in the snow as the icy winter descended in North Korea. Eventually, Yoon Hee caught what she suspects was typhoid, leaving her in a hell of fire and ice. Although she lay in the snow about two weeks, no one offered help or food.

She tried to muster her energy to sit and wiggle her fingers and toes, but her hands and feet barely budged — they were frozen in place. She could no longer move. Surely, this was it, Yoon Hee thought. She prepared herself. “I am going to die.”

Yoon Hee would become yet another corpse rotting in the street — she had seen the frozen corpses on the roadside because no one bothered to bury bodies of strangers. A voice interrupted her feverish daze. A villager thrust money into Yoon Hee’s hand. Her voice was firm: “You have to survive.”

For a decade, Yoon Hee roamed the streets, slept in crevices and picked rice off the ground that people had dropped. “I appreciated every single grain of rice,” she said.

Every night, she had the same concern: “Where am I going to sleep tonight? How can I survive?”

Yoon Hee learned survival skills fitting of “The Hunger Games” — where to scavenge for food, where to sleep, how to stay warm, how to keep safe. She curled into a fetal position in a nook under the windows of houses.

In North Korea, homeless children like Yoon Hee are called “kotjebes,” or flowering swallows. Like the bird, these children are free to roam, unconstrained by the country’s societal norms.

Yoon Hee attempted her first escape into China in the wintertime, the river at the border frozen, paving the way for a quick escape. In China, she was caught three times by local police and each time, she was sent back to a North Korean prison. She was pummeled with fists, sticks and kicked, Yoon Hee said. But each time, she was released.

In early 2010, she escaped North Korea for the fourth time and eventually met an underground network of Christian activists and missionaries.

The plight of orphans who’ve escaped North Korea caught the attention of U.S. humanitarian groups, who’ve lobbied for years to pave the way for their adoption by Americans and others. In January, President Obama signed the North Korean Child Welfare Act of 2012. The law is aimed primarily at those orphans hiding in China and other countries. Those who make it to South Korea are provided an education, a path to citizenship and even a chance at adoption.

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North Korea’s prison camps outlive Stalin’s

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North Korean prison camps have survived twice as long as Stalin’s Soviet gulags, and much longer than the Nazi concentration camps. Another important difference is that they are still in operation today.

Shin Dong-hyuk has brought new insights into the secretive camps.  Shin, 30, is the only man known to have been born and to escape from a North Korean prison known as Camp 14. He was born in a “total control zone” where prison authorities wield complete power, where guards beat children to death with no hesitation.

The unflinching account from a defector revealed how he picked corn kernels out of cow manure to eat as he competed with his family for food at one of North Korea’s notorious prison camp.

He was also forced to watch his mother’s hanging and his brother’s execution.

The concept of “reward marriages” was unknown until Shin told his story. These are rewards dispensed by prison guards, who allow a male and female prisoner to have sex. Shin was a product of a reward marriage in the prison camp.

The reward marriage works as an incentive for prisoners, Shin said.

Kenneth Bae humanitarian missionary to North Korea

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Kenneth Bae, a 44-year-old American citizen, was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in a North Korean gulag this week for “hostile acts” against the country and Kim Jong-Un’s regime. Considering the DPRK’s penchant for hyperbole and habit of punishing Americans, the truth about Bae’s situation remains murky. Here’s what we know so far:

1. Bae Dropped Out of the University of Oregon to Support His Family. 

2. Bae Owned a China-Based Tour Company That Specialized in North Korean Tours. His website read, in part: “We found ourselves falling in love with the friendly people…and fascinating culture… After realizing this love was something that needed to be shared with as many people possible, we developed Nation Tours so that others could fall in love with North Korea, too.”

One of the reasons Korean-Americans go to the country, despite warnings from the State Department, is to help missionary/humanitarian/relief operations.

3. Bae Might Have Been Helping North Korean Children.

According to friends interviewed in Tomlinson’s piece in The Oregonian, Bae was a “devout Christian.” Bae had a reputation for helping children. “What we know is that he [Bae] is a person who wants to help poor children, kotjebis (homeless children), and he took pictures of them to support them later.

4. But Bae Can’t Get Arrested for Taking Pictures of Starving Children, Can He? According to the South Korean Kookmin Ilbo newspaper (via The New York Times), and unidentified source said that Bae was arrested after North Korean officials found a hard disk belonging to Bae which contained sensitive information about the Country. “Mr. Do said that Mr. Bae might have taken pictures of North Korean orphans he wanted to help and that the authorities might have seen that as an act of propaganda against the North,” reported the New York Times’s Choe Sang-Hun in December.

Read full Atlantic Wire article

 

North Korean food prices triple over past year

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Beyond the capital of Pyongyang is the harsher reality of poverty, hunger and desperation, North Korean defectors say.

“My family had decided to commit suicide because for three days we didn’t have anything to eat,” said one North Korean female defector to ITN in Seoul. “We decided to starve to death. We said let’s die. But then I wanted to survive. I sold the house for 30 kilos of rice.”

She escaped North Korea shortly after leader Kim Jong Un came to power last year — her identity kept secret because she left family behind. “To survive, I had to eat grass. People pick grass and leaves and use them to make soup,” said the defector who now lives in South Korea.

Reports out of North Korea suggest food prices have tripled in the past year.

More than 25% of North Korean children under the age of five suffered from chronic malnutrition in 2012, according to the National Nutrition Survey of North Korea, a report backed by UNICEF, the World Food Program and the World Health Organization. The report also found nearly one in three women suffered from anemia.

As many as 3.5 million people are estimated to have died during North Korea’s severe famine of the 1990s,according to South Korean NGO Good Friends Center for Peace, Human Rights, and Refugees. Official North Korean numbers estimate 220,000 people died.

CNN

American citizen faces trial in North Korea

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CNN reports North Korea plans to begin a trial against a U.S. citizen detained there last year, state media said Saturday, complicating tense relations between the two nations.

Pae Jun Ho entered North Korea as a tourist on November 3, according to the Korean Central News Agency. After his detention, evidence revealed he had committed an unspecified crime against the country, the news agency said. The agency said he confessed to the alleged offense, but did not say what it was.

“He will soon be taken to the Supreme Court of the DPRK to face judgment,” the news agency said.

Last year, consular officials from the Swedish embassy in Pyongyang, which looks after U.S. interests in North Korea, visited Pae.

Who is Pae Jun Ho?

 

Why Hyeonseo Lee fled and then returned to North Korea – Part 1

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north Korean hyeonseo-leeHyeonseo Lee was born in North Korea and left for China in 1997, and now lives in South Korea where she is an activist for North Korea refugees. Read excerpts of her story:

When I was young, I thought my country was the best on the planet. I grew up singing a song called “Nothing to Envy.”

I thought my life in North Korea was normal, even though when I was 7 years old, I saw my first public execution.

My family was not poor, and I had never experienced hunger. But after my mother read me a letter from a coworker’s sister who said that her family was dying of hunger, I realized that something was very wrong in my country. A huge famine hit North Korea in the mid to late 1990s, and I began to see suffering, hunger and death around me.

As a young girl, I went alone to China to live with distant relatives. I thought I would be separated from my family for a short time. I could never have imagined that it would take 14 years for my family to live together again. Since North Korean refugees are considered illegal migrants in China, I lived in constant fear that my identity would be revealed and I would be repatriated to a horrible fate back in North Korea.

One day, my worst nightmare came true when I was caught by the Chinese police and brought to the police station for interrogation. Someone had accused me of being North Korean, so they tested my Chinese language abilities and asked me tons of questions. I thought my life was over, but I managed to control all the emotions inside of me and answered their questions. They let me go. It was a miracle!

After 10 years of hiding my identity and living in fear in China, I decided to risk going to South Korea. Just as I was starting to get used to my new life, I received a shocking phone call — the North Korean authorities intercepted some money that I sent my family through a broker, and as punishment, my family was going to be forcibly removed to a desolate location in the countryside. They had to get out of North Korea quickly. So I started planning how to help them escape.

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Why Hyeonseo Lee fled and then returned to North Korea – Part 2

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Continued story of Hyeonseo Lee, who was born in North Korea and now lives in South Korea where she is an activist for North Korea refugees. 

I took a flight to China and headed toward the North Korean border. Since my family couldn’t speak Chinese, I had to guide them through more than 2,000 miles in China and then into Southeast Asia. The journey by bus took one week, and we were almost caught several times.

One time, our bus was stopped and boarded by a Chinese police officer. He took everyone’s ID cards and started asking questions. Since my family couldn’t understand Chinese, I thought we were going to be arrested. As the police officer approached my family, I quickly stood up and told him that these were deaf and dumb people that I was chaperoning. He looked at me suspiciously, but luckily, he believed me.

We made it all the way to the border of Laos, but I had to spend almost all of my money to bribe the border guards. Even after we got past the border, my family was arrested and jailed for illegal border crossing.

After I paid the bribe and fine, my family was released after one month. Soon after, they were arrested and jailed again in the capital of Laos. This was one of the lowest points in my life — my mind and body felt completely drained, and I felt like a failure. I did everything to help my family get to freedom — and we came so close. And now my family was thrown in jail just a short distance from the South Korean embassy.

I went back and forth between the police station and immigration office, desperately trying to get my family out … but I didn’t have enough money to pay the bribes. I lost all hope.

At that moment, I heard a man’s voice asking me: “What’s wrong?” I was so surprised that a total stranger cared enough to ask. He would only give me his first name. With my broken English and a dictionary, I explained the situation, and without hesitating, the man went to the ATM and paid the rest of the money for my family and two other North Koreans to get out of jail.

I thanked him with all my heart, and then I asked him, “Why are you helping me?” … “I’m not helping you,” he said. “I’m helping the North Korean people.”

I realized that this was a symbolic moment in my life. The kind stranger symbolized new hope for me and other North Koreans when we needed it the most. He showed me that the kindness of strangers and the support of the international community are truly the rays of hope that the North Korean people need.

Eventually, after our long journey, my family and I were reunited in South Korea.

 

North Korean refugee speaks at TED

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North Korean refugee Hyeonseo LeeBorn in North Korea, in 1997 Hyeonseo Lee escaped to China as a 14-year-old refugee.

After more than 10 years in China, in 2008 Hyeonseo Lee arrived in Seoul, where she struggled to adjust to life in the bustling city. North Korean defectors often have a hard time in South Korea, she noted in the Wall Street Journal: “We defectors have to start from scratch. Prejudice against North Koreans and icy stares were other obstacles that were hard to cope with.”

Now a student at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, she has become an advocate for fellow refugees, even helping close relatives leave North Korea after they were targeted.

Her dream? As she told the Korea Times, she’d like to work at the UN or an NGO that advocates for the human rights of North Koreans, including their right to be treated as political refugees.

View her TED presentation.