Category: North Korean refugee

Who is Kenneth Bae and why is he being held by North Korea?

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Kenneth Bae, a Korean-American tour operator, was arrested by security authorities in North Korea in early November. A US official told CNN that Kenneth Bae, whose Korean name is Pae Jun Ho, is affiliated with a Protestant religious group.

Bae, 44, entered the northeastern port city of Rajin on November 3 along with five other tourists for a five-day trip. Rajin is a special economic zone across the border from the Chinese city of Yanji, where many Christian groups shelter North Korean refugees — something which angers the North Korean state considerably.

Bae was detained by North Korean authorities and questioned after a computer hard disk was found among the group of tourists, an unidentified source has said. The source added that the hard disk might have contained sensitive information about North Korea.

After his detention, Bae was transferred to Pyongyang for further investigation.

Last year, Eddie Yong Su Jun, a Korean-American missionary, was arrested and then released after facing indictment on charges of committing an unspecified crime against the regime.

In 2010, North Korea set free Robert Park, a Korean-American Christian activist who crossed into the country on Christmas Day 2009 to draw international attention to the North’s poor human rights record.

Also in 2010, former President Jimmy Carter helped secure the release of Aijalon Mahli Gomes, another U.S. citizen and Christian activist, who had been fined roughly $600,000 and sentenced to eight years of hard labor for crossing over the Chinese border into North Korea.

In 2009, former U.S. President Bill Clinton flew to Pyongyang to win the release of two American journalists caught during a reporting tour covering North Korean defectors.

Bae’s detention comes amid tensions over Pyongyang’s planned long-range rocket launch. Concerns have been raised that Pyongyang may try to use the case as a “bargaining chip” or a trump card in forcing the US into post-launch talks.

 

North Korea trip by Richardson and Schmidt set for next week

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Former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt will lead a private humanitarian mission to North Korea next week, Richardson’s office confirmed in a statement Saturday.

The trip comes despite public criticism from the U.S. State Department, which has said the visit was ill-timed in light of tensions stemming from North Korea’s recent rocket launch.

The delegation will also include Jared Cohen, the director of a Google initiative known as Google Ideas and Schmidt’s co-author on an upcoming book about how the Internet is changing the world.

Last July, Cohen organized a conference outside Los Angeles that featured nearly a dozen North Korean defectors, who gave harrowing accounts of privation and coerced criminal activity including drug sales.

Schmidt spoke at the conference and met with the group, according to panel moderator and North Korea expert Sheena Chestnut Greitens, now a graduate student at Harvard University.

Richardson, a former ambassador to the United Nations, has made numerous trips to North Korea. Many observers expect Richardson to seek the release of Kenneth Bae, a Korean-American tour guide who was detained last year.

Bill approved making it possible for Americans to adopt North Korean children

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The US Congress has approved a bill which aims to make it possible for Americans to adopt orphaned North Korean children. The measure was passed by the House in September and by the Senate last week.

The North Korea Refugee Adoption Act instructs the US State Department to devise a comprehensive strategy to facilitate the adoption of North Korean children by US citizens.

US Republican lawmaker Ileana Ros Lehtinen, a key backer of the bill, said late last year that the legislation aims to “provide loving families for some of the world’s most endangered children.”

Supporters of the measure said many North Korean children become orphaned or stateless when their families flee with them to China or other neighboring nations, and that the youngsters often are left without the proper care. But many children who remain in North Korea fare no better, Ros Lehtinen said.

“We are all too keenly all aware of the extreme repression, malnutrition, and poverty suffered by so many inside North Korea today. Those threats often take the greatest toll on children,” the Republican lawmaker said.

Any efforts to facilitate adoptions, Ros Lehtinen said, would ensure that the North Korean adoptees are genuine orphans, and not victims of child trafficking.

The United States is home to the largest ethnic Korean population outside of Northeast Asia, with nearly two million Americans of Korean descent.

Kim Jong Un facing an authoritarian contradiction

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It’s a dilemma for Kim Jong Un who needs to find a way to modernize North Korea and its economy while holding onto absolute power.

In a clear sign of the North Korea’s border crackdowns, the number of North Korean refugees reaching South Korea in 2012 has dropped by almost half, to about 1,400, compared to last year.

Meanwhile, changing technologies, ambitious smugglers and well-funded critics of Pyongyang mean that everything from DVD melodramas to illegal Chinese cellphones to Korean-language radio news broadcasts funded by the U.S. government make their way into North Korea. And their presence exposes an ever-growing number of North Koreans to the outside world, which threatens the underpinnings of the Kim regime.

The hunger for the larger world resembles, in many ways, the appetites in China in the years after Mao Zedong’s 1976 death, when Beijing began opening the door for the world’s mass media.

“I felt sad about the state of my country when I watched the DVDs,” said a North Korean defector who now lives in Seoul and spoke on condition he not be named, fearing retribution against family still living in North Korea. “I could see Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, the United States … these other places were so much better off.”

“There has definitely been a push to roll back the tide of the flow of information,” said Nat Kretchun, associate director of an international consulting group InterMedia, which released a report earlier this year about information flow into North Korea, based on surveys of hundreds of recent North Korean defectors.

North Korea attempts to keep out ideological and cultural infiltration

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The warning came from Kim Jong Un, the North Korean ruler who sees his isolated nation, just across the border from this busy Chinese trading town, as under siege. The attack, he said, must be stopped.

“We must extend the fight against the enemy’s ideological and cultural infiltration,” Kim said in an October speech, as he called upon his vast security network to “ruthlessly crush those hostile elements.”

Over the past year, Kim has intensified a border crackdown that has attempted to seal the once-porous 1,420-kilometer (880-mile) frontier with China, smugglers and analysts say. Special security units have been formed to seek out any contraband information or technology that Pyongyang sees as a threat.

The assault that Kim Jong Un fears? It’s being waged with cheap televisions rigged to receive foreign broadcasts, and with smuggled mobile phones that – if you can get a Chinese signal along the border – can call the outside world. Very often, it arrives in the form of wildly popular South Korean soap operas smuggled in on DVDs or computer thumb drives.

Their presence exposes an ever-growing number of North Koreans to the outside world and threatens the underpinnings of the Kim regime. Kim’s crackdown has been largely aimed at the border with China, long the route for much of the outside information making its way into North Korea, as well as for refugees trying to get out.

In a country where one family has held absolute control for more than 60 years, a communist enclave that survived the downfall of the Soviet Union and a devastating 1990s famine, the notion of allowing knowledge of the larger world is deeply feared.

North Korea songbun background

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A caste system called songbun, effectively translating as “background“, has shadowed the life of every North Korean.

Bob Collins, who wove together smuggled documents, interviews with former North Korean security officials and discussions with an array of ordinary North Koreans,wrote an exhaustive songbun study released this year by the Washington-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. While the songbun system theoretically allows for movement within the hierarchy, Collins said most families’ standing today remains a reflection of their ancestors’ position in the 1950s and ’60s.

Despite its power, songbun is an almost-silent presence. Few people ever see their own songbun paperwork. Few “low-caste” families speak of it at all, exiles say, left mute by incomprehension and fear. It’s only when young people stumble into glass ceilings, normally when applying to universities or for jobs, that they begin to understand the years of slights.

Eventually, most grow to understand and accept its power, but they rarely have more than a general idea of where they fit into the pecking order, experts said. In a country where secrecy is reflexive, the state simply denies it exists.

To be caught at the bottom, defectors say, is to be lost in a nightmare of bloodline and bureaucracy. “My family was in the lowest of the lowest level,” said a former North Korean coal miner who fled to South Korea in 2006, hoping to give his young sons opportunities outside the mines. “Someone from the state was always watching what we were saying, watching what we were doing … The state treated us as if they were doing us a favor simply by allowing us to live.”

The man, like other North Korean refugees interviewed for this story, spoke on condition he not be named, fearing that relatives still in the North would be punished.

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BBC World Service to broadcast into North Korea?

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The Independent reports that the BBC World Service could for the first time begin broadcasting programs aimed at residents of North Korea.

Barack Obama’s administration is encouraging the British Foreign Office to back plans to establish a BBC Korean service to help open up the most secret country on earth.  They believe the BBC’s reputation for impartiality could help build up trust with communist state’s 24 million population.

Peter Horrocks, the head of the BBC World Service, will discuss the matter in Westminster with MPs from the All Party Group on North Korea early in the new year. Lord Alton, who leads the group, which has also met with the Foreign Office minister Hugo Swire, said Washington-based officials had recently been in London to support the idea of a BBC service. The talks come amid signs that North Korean citizens are increasingly ignoring a ban that forbids them from accessing foreign media.

The US government-run networks Voice of America and Radio Free Asia already broadcast into North Korea. Based on interviews with some of the 25,000 North Korean defectors suggests that 14 per cent had listened to Radio Free Asia, 11.6 per cent to Voice of America and six per cent to South Korean radio.

Although the World Service transmits to 188 million in 27 countries it has never broadcast a Korean service. This is partly because North Korea arrests citizens discovered listening to foreign media and sends them to camps where more than 150,000 political prisoners are believed to be held.

North Koreans ready for liberalization and change?

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The North Korean people appear ready for change.  Certainly ever fewer believe DPRK mythology that they live in a world of plenty compared to an impoverished South Korea.

Refugees who have experienced life in China and regime elites spread information about the outside world.  DVDs of Chinese and South Korean television programs circulate; some observers describe a “mania” for South Korean culture.  A million North Koreans own cell phones.  Famine forced many people into the black market to survive.

The regime is aware of the risks of liberalization and has embarked upon what author Scott Thomas Bruce called “the ‘mosquito net’ strategy, meaning that Pyongyang will allow foreign investment … while blocking potentially harmful news and culture from the outside world.”  This strategy is risky, since the multi-headed genie cannot easily be put back into the bottle.

Indeed, the regime has tightened border enforcement along the Yalu and enhanced punishment of would-be refugees, targeting their families as well.

Nevertheless, Kim Jong Un’s rhetoric may raise expectations without yielding results, setting the stage for further unrest.

Forbes

 

Born and raised in a North Korean prison camp

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A brutal North Korean prison camp was all that Shin Dong-hyuk knew for the first 23 years of his life. CNN journalist Anderson Cooper, after interviewing him, said, “Shin Dong-hyuk isn’t just somebody who was sent to a concentration camp. This is somebody who was born into a concentration camp. And for the majority of his life up until he was probably 22 or 23, had no idea that there was another kind of way to exist.”

Anderson Cooper: Growing up, did you ever think about escaping?

Shin Dong-hyuk: That never crossed my mind.

Anderson Cooper: It never crossed your mind?

Shin Dong-hyuk: No. Never. What I thought was that the society outside the camp would be similar to that inside the camp.

Anderson Cooper: You thought everybody lived in a prison camp like this?

Shin Dong-hyuk: Yes.

Anderson Cooper: Did anybody ever explain to you why you were in a camp?

Shin Dong-hyuk: No. Never. Because I was born there I just thought that those people who carry guns were born to carry guns. And prisoners like me were born as prisoners.

Anderson Cooper: Did you know America existed?

Shin Dong-hyuk: Not at all.

Anderson Cooper: Did you know that the world was round?

Shin Dong-hyuk: I had no idea if it was round or square.

Read transcript of full interview with Shin Dong-hyuk

 

The continued desperation of North Korean refugees

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It’s rare for North Korean defectors to set sail for Japan, but last September, a group of nine North Koreans, who have since resettled in South Korea, was discovered drifting about 15 miles off the coast of Noto peninsula.

In 2006, four other North Koreans also successfully floated to northern Japan. And previously, in 1987, a family of 11 drifted from North Korea to west Japan.

This group was not so fortunate. A small wooden boat was discovered early morning Wednesday off the western island of Sado in Japan contained decomposing bodies, according to local police. The boat was badly damaged and contained faint markings on the side that appeared to be Korean characters.

Police would not say exactly how many bodies were found on the boat, but said that some bodies had decomposed to the point where only skeletons remained. Local Japanese media reported five bodies were found.

CNN NewSource