Category: North Korean refugee

Was a South Korean missionary murdered by North Korean agents?

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Kim Ha-young believes her husband was murdered for helping North Koreans defect.

It’s almost two years since she found her husband, Kim Chang-hwan, foaming at the mouth in the Chinese city of Dandong on the North Korean border. The 46-year-old father of two had been working as a missionary, helping North Korean defectors escape across the border. Kim Ha-young was living in the border city as well, helping her husband.

She had just spoken to her husband 15 minutes earlier. “He told me he was meeting a North Korean defector and would then come home. A short time later I got a call from one of his colleagues who said (my husband) collapsed on the street and he told me to rush to the hospital,” she said. “When I got there he was dead.”

Hospital officials said Kim Chang-hwan had committed suicide by swallowing pesticides. His wife believes he was killed by a North Korean agent.

Refusing to accept the hospital’s explanation for her husband’s death, Kim Ha-young demanded the Chinese government conduct an autopsy. The autopsy report came back saying there was no poison in his system. Fearful of a cover-up, she went to the morgue before his body was cremated and collected samples of his blood on a glove and gave them to South Korean authorities on her return to Seoul.

The South Korean government report on that blood sample, reviewed by CNN, revealed levels of poison high enough to kill a person instantly.

“My husband was aware of the risk. People around us were telling us that it is a dangerous job because the North Korean government will severely deal with people who helped North Koreans defect,” she said. “We thought maybe the risk was prison or being expelled from the country by Chinese government. We never thought that it would cost his life.”

Fellow missionary Seok Sa-hyun said his friend had received threats in the past but nothing could stop him from helping defectors or providing food to North Korea’s malnourished children.

Traveling for a cause – Liberty in North Korea

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Millersville junior Sean Ferry has been involved in the organization Liberty in North Korea (LINK) for the past two years.

Founded in 2004, LINK is an organization that was created to protect and aid North Korean refugees and help spread awareness of the ongoing crisis. By joining this organization, Ferry became a “nomad,” which means that he would travel the United States as well as British Columbia, with three or four other people and share a documentary that tells the story of North Korean survivors that have journeyed across the border into China. With LINK, Ferry trekked to various high schools, colleges, churches, and even coffee shops to tell the story of the North Korean refugees.

Ultimately, joining this organization has opened his eyes to the world and helped Ferry feel as though he has a purpose in life. “I like that I am doing what I think is a good thing. I like knowing that I am helping to save lives, and am directly impacting the North Korean people. Seeing others inspiration, is what inspires me,” he said.

Now that Ferry has returned to school, he continues to try to support the organization he cares so much about. There are different things that everyone is able to do that can support LINK, he says. By donating on the organization’s website, libertyinnorthkorea.org, you can help continue the mission of providing aid to refugees. A way to get involved in the organization is through creating a rescue team with which you can host events to raise funds, or by interning as a nomad or working in the office.

Experience a defector escape from North Korea

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The Defector: Escape from North Korea provides a haunting first-person glimpse of what it’s like for someone trying to escape North Korea.

A site serves as a companion to a feature-length documentary film of the same name, directed by Ann Shin. The online component launched in advance of the documentary, which premiered at the International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam.

The stories on the site are based on true accounts of six North Korean defectors that bring viewers through prisons, jungles and crowded streets as they try to escape. As a voiceover explains what’s happening, viewers are given the option to watch additional videos and view photos about what it’s like to defect before continuing through seven chapters of content.

The site uses actual images and hidden camera videos from within North Korea, not to mention interviews from defectors, to illustrate the dangers they experienced at every moment.

“It was challenging to make something like this into a web project because of the scarcity of visuals and assets,” said Shin. “We had dozens and dozens of interviews with defectors and footage smuggled out of North Korea to work with.”

[Media Post] 

Keeping North Koreans in chains through military tension

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North Korean officials say they hope to conduct one or two more nuclear tests this year in an effort to force the United States into diplomatic talks.

But the North Korean regime of Kim Jong-un and his predecessors is notoriously unable to come to any negotiating table: North Korea is built on unblinking loyalty, even worship, of the ruling Kim family combined with the fervently held doctrine of juche, or self-reliance. Juche holds that man “is the master of everything and decides everything,” according to the government’s website. And it demands that any departure from official dictates be severely punished. That’s why North Korea has the fourth-largest army in the world—and why military prowess advances while ordinary citizens suffer.

Others agree that without the nuclear threat Pyongyang cannot get Washington’s attention. “A North Korea without nuclear weapons,” writes Sohn Gwang Joo, director of Daily NK, “is just a regime burdened by economic woes, inflicting human rights abuses on its people. … Only with nuclear weapons are they able to maintain their regime, hidden away from the world. This is how they keep their people in chains: through military tension.”

One week after the test, two survivors of North Korea’s state gulag testified before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. Shin Dong-hyuk and Kang Chol-hwan say the state’s political prison system is incarcerating 200,000 “criminals”—many of them Christians—in Holocaust-like camps: “Fundamentally, it is the same as Hitler’s Auschwitz,” testified Kang.

“People think the Holocaust is in the past, but it is still very much a reality. It is still going on in North Korea,” Shin told reporters on the sidelines of the human-rights summit. He is the only known surviving escapee from a “total control zone” camp—where three generations of his family had been held until he broke free seven years ago at age 23. When at 22 Shin met a new prisoner, he was unaware of any alternative reality existing outside the camps.

[World] 

North Korean nuclear test also meant for North Korean regime opponents

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Shin Dong-hyuk spent his first 23 years in North Korean prison camp 14, where he was tortured and subjected to forced labor. Another North Korean prison camp survivor, Chol-Hwan Kang, spent 10 years in Camp 15.

Kang suggests that Pyongyang’s recent nuclear test was meant not only as a message of strength to the outside world but also to potential opponents to the regime within the country. Both men say the international community must do more to help North Koreans, with Kang insisting the world should take advantage of growing feelings of opposition within the communist state.

Both Shin and Kang described life in their labor camps as defined by hunger and violence.
“Daily I saw torture, and every day in the camp I saw people dying of malnutrition and starvation. I saw lots of friends die and I almost died myself of malnutrition,” Kang recalled.

Shin still carries the scars of his experience on his body. Resting his right hand on the table in front of him, he revealed the missing tip of his middle finger, which was chopped off by a prison guard as punishment after he dropped a piece of machinery in a factory.

“I’m here outside the camp, but what I’m doing daily is talk about the situation in the camp,” Shin said. “I’m still in the camp in my head.”

After meeting Shin and hearing his harrowing account in December, UN right chief Navi Pillay called for an in-depth international inquiry into “one of the worst, but least understood and reported, human rights situations in the world.”

[News24]

North Korean labor camps compared to Nazi Holocaust

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North Korea’s prison camps are a closed-off world of death, torture and forced labor where babies are born slaves, according to two survivors who liken the horrors of the camps to a Holocaust in progress.

“People think the Holocaust is in the past, but it is still very much a reality. It is still going on in North Korea,” Shin Dong-hyuk told AFP through an interpreter on the sidelines of a human rights summit in Geneva.

Shin himself spent his first 23 years in a prison camp in the secretive country, where he says he was tortured and subjected to forced labor before making a spectacular escape seven years ago – and giving the outside world a rare first-hand account of life inside the camps.

The 30-year-old is the only person known to have been born in such a camp to flee and live to tell the tale, and was portrayed in a book by journalist Blaine Harden published last year called “Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey From North Korea to Freedom in the West.”

While Shin’s comparison with Nazi concentration camps – where the majority of the six million Jews who perished during the Holocaust were murdered – may seem extreme, another North Korean prison camp survivor, Chol-Hwan Kang, agreed with the analogy.

“Fundamentally, it is the same as Hitler’s Auschwitz,” Kang told AFP. With whole families in North Korea thrown into camps together and starving to death, he said the “methods may be different, but the effect is the same… It’s outrageous!”

Kang, now 43, was sent to Camp 15 with his whole family when he was nine years old to repent for the suspected disloyalties of his grandfather. He spent 10 years there before his family was released and later managed to flee to China and on to South Korea – the same route taken by Shin.

[News24]

Up to 1 million political prisoners have died in North Korean prisons

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A U.K.-based human rights organization has said that up to one million political prisoners may have died in North Korean detention camps. Christian Solidarity Worldwide made the assertion based on interviews with North Korean defectors and former political prisoners over the past seven years.

The report said that according to former prisoners and guards the mortality rate in the camps was about five to 10 percent annually. Based on those estimates, anywhere from 380,000 to one million people have died in the prisons.

CSW said North Korea is guilty of crimes against humanity, including murder, extermination, torture, persecution, kidnapping, and perhaps rape and sexual violence. The report also examines the possibility of genocide against Christians and other religious groups in the 1950s and 1960s.

“In light of the strong prima facie case that international crimes have been committed in North Korea, the United Nations, including the Security Council, should, in addition to taking other steps towards ending such violations, set up an international commission of inquiry,” the report said.

World reaction to North Korean nuclear test

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While North Korea marked the anniversary of its departed ‘Dear Leader’ Kim Jong-il’s birth on February 16th with a military parade, mass dances and televised sporting activities, this week’s nuclear test drew international condemnation, with President Obama pledging to “lead the world in taking firm action in response to these threats”.

The European Union will tighten sanctions on North Korea to curb trade in gold and diamonds and crack down on financial links in protest at Pyongyang’s recent rocket launch and nuclear bomb test, EU diplomats said on Friday.

In separate developments, North Korean officials have reportedly informed counterparts in China that further nuclear tests and rocket launches are planned for this year, with Pyongyang seeking to force the US into negotiations, a source told Reuters.

Commentators interpreted the North’s aggressive move as a statement by its new leader Kim Jong-un that he plans to follow his father’s “military first” strategy.

South Korean Defense Minister Kim Kwan-jin said tests to date indicate North Korea’s weapons had a range of about 6,200 miles, making the west coast of the United States a potential target.

Meanwhile, in the South Korean bordertown of Imjingak, defectors from the North released hundreds of thousands of helium balloons containing anti-regime leaflets and $1 currency notes, and bearing slogans declaring “Stop provocative acts with missiles and nuclear tests”, “North Koreans rise up” and “The Kim dynasty will soon collapse”.

Pyongyang has in the past threatened a “merciless military strike” in response to similar anti-North Korea propaganda leaflets, forcing the evacuation of South Korean residents.

Cannibalism in North Korea?

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In North Korea in the mid-1990s, as a great famine wiped out perhaps 10 percent of the population … it wasn’t unusual for people to disappear; they were dying by the thousands, maybe millions. But dark rumors were spreading, too horrifying to believe, too persistent to ignore.

“Don’t buy any meat if you don’t know where it comes from,” one Chongjin woman whispered to a friend, who later defected and recounted the conversation to reporter Barbara Demick.

Fear of cannibalism spread. People avoided the meat in street-side soup vendors and warned children not to be alone at night. At least one person in Chongjin was arrested and executed for eating human flesh.

The panic, Demick concludes, may have exceeded the actual threat. “It does not seem,” she writes, “that the practice was widespread.” But it does appear to have happened.

North Korea’s famine is over, but the stories of desperate men and women, driven so insane by starvation that they consume their own children, have resurfaced. Last week, Asia Press published a report alleging that thousands recently died of starvation in a North Korean province, a trend that is sometimes called a micro-famine. The story was sourced to Rimjingang, a collection of underground North Korean journalists whose work is generally considered reputable. According to Rimjingang’s sources, the famine, like others before it, had led to cannibalism. One man, they said, had been arrested and executed for killing and eating his children.

Is cannibalism still happening? The simple answer is that we don’t, and can’t, know for sure.

[Washington Post]

Information is shattering the myth of North Korea

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North Korea is built on a myth: that it is a great country to live in, that nothing is lacking, and that the outside world should be viewed with fear and distrust. When people discover that their homeland is built on lies, they lose faith in the regime.

The lies have been so pervasive that even the most apolitical information can corrode them. A North Korean watching a South Korean love story on a foreign Korean DVD would not fail to notice, for example, that the refrigerator in the background is full of food.

Barbara Demick tells a story about a North Korean she met sometime around 2004, who had worked for the country’s fisheries division. He had access to foreign radio via a Chinese fishing boat that was confiscated for entering North Korean waters. The boat had a radio, and so he was able to listen to a South Korean radio drama. One such drama featured two women living in an apartment complex who are fighting over a parking space. Initially, the North Korean thought it was a parody: How could South Korea possibly have so many cars that people fight for parking spaces? He soon figured out that it was not a joke. A year later, he defected.

If a few snippets of South Korean radio or television can shatter North Koreans’ vision of the world, just imagine if they had access to the World Wide Web. Of course, any such access would be surveilled and censored to unimaginable extremes. North Korea’s leaders are likely watching China, which has shown great skill in employing both technology and human censors to keep its Internet in check. Yet even with these controls the Internet has transformed countless Chinese lives by granting previously unimaginable access to information and (virtual) assembly.

In North Korea, where the regime is far more brittle and shrouded in myth, the effect would be even more dramatic. No, the Internet would not automatically trigger a North Korean spring. Revolutions are sparked by economic and political crises, or other events that brings public discontent to a boiling point. But when such events occur, a networked and informed society is far more likely to rise to the occasion.

 [Slate]