Category: North Korean refugee

North Korea suffering worst downturn likely since 1990s Famine

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How much are sanctions hurting Kim Jong Un? North Korea’s economy hasn’t been in such bad shape since his father was battling floods, droughts and a famine that some estimates say killed as much as 10% of the population.

While North Korea’s isolation, secrecy and dearth of official statistics make estimates difficult, the economy probably contracted more than 5% last year, according to Kim Byung-yeon, an economics professor at Seoul National University. “As long as sanctions remain, time is on the U.S. side,” said Kim. “Sanctions are the most effective means to draw North Korea into negotiations, so they should not be lifted or eased without major progress on denuclearization.” Read more

A decline of 5% would mean that international curbs on North Korean trade — measures crucially backed by China — have put the country on its weakest economic footing since 1997. (Back then, the isolated nation was reeling from policy missteps under Kim Jong Il and a famine so bad some defectors reported rumors of cannibalism.)

The Bank of Korea estimated a 3.5% contraction in 2017, leaving North Korea an economy roughly the size of the U.S. state of Vermont. The South Korean central bank’s annual report on its northern neighbor — due for release later this month — will provide a fresh look at the impact of U.S. President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign just as the two sides prepare to restart talks.

One thing sanctions aren’t doing: stopping Kim from developing the nuclear arsenal that prompted his showdown with Trump. (The cost launching the more than 30 ballistic missiles Kim Jong Un has tested since taking power in 2011 comes in at about $100 million, according to estimates by South Korea’s defense ministry.) Nevertheless, Trump is counting on the economic pressure to compel Kim to compromise.

[Bloomberg]

North Korean defectors head back to school in the South to ‘re-educate’ themselves

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North Korea claims a 100 per cent literacy rate and boasts that its free compulsory education indicates the superiority of its socialist system. But those who escape from the impoverished country often struggle in the South from a lack of basic knowledge.

One of the first things North Korean defector Ri Kwang-myong, 31, did after reaching the South was to go back to school – 12 years after finishing his education.  Ri is among a handful of adult students at Wooridul School in Seoul, an educational haven for North Korean students too old, or lagging academically and so unable to go to appropriate state schools.

One of the most important subjects in the North Korean education curriculum is revolutionary studies, which focuses on the ruling Kim family. Lee Mi-yeon, a former kindergarten teacher in the North who fled in 2010, said: “The [Kim family] are taught as mythical, God-like figures who created the country and made grenades out of pine cones.”

And for many, education is also disrupted by grinding poverty or their long journey to freedom. Lee Song-hee, a 27-year-old student at Wooridul School, said that after only four months of junior school in the North she had to drop out to help her mother as they struggled to earn a living.

At the very least, once in South Korea re-education in culture, language, social studies and history is essential.

[South China Morning Post]

What really happened at the North Korean Embassy in Madrid?

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[According to the Free Joseon official website:] In early 2019, Christopher Ahn, Adrian Hong, and their colleagues – as part of The Provisional Government of Free Joseon (formerly called Cheollima Civil Defense) – traveled to Madrid, Spain, to rescue North Korean diplomats who had requested their help to defect.

According to Spanish media reports, Adrian Hong, Christopher Ahn and others were welcomed into the embassy in broad daylight by a defecting North Korean diplomat. More footage obtained by Fox News reportedly shows the men interviewing diplomats who wished to defect to freedom. At this time, Spanish court documents indicate that a North Korean woman, who presumably sought to prevent her colleagues from defecting, jumped from a window and alerted local Spanish police to what she fabricated as an ‘assault’ and ‘raid.’

The North Korean diplomats who originally intended to defect witnessed a heavily armed Spanish police force positioning outside the embassy, and understandably abandoned their plans to defect out of fear of being repatriated back to North Korea to face certain torture and execution.

According to Spanish court documents and media reports, Ahn, Hong and others engaged in nearly 5 hours of conversation and interviews with the North Korean diplomats who had wished to defect. Given the likelihood that they were to be arrested by Spanish police for this rescue attempt, media reports then described how the rescue team escaped the embassy and immediately returned to the United States.

Adrian Hong then reportedly arranged a meeting with the FBI in New York where he volunteered the intelligence, including what is likely an encryption cipher used by the current North Korean regime to plan assassinations and arms sales abroad that threaten the United States homeland. Rather than demonstrating gratitude, the involved United States Government officials, who as per media reports have become increasingly desperate to appease the current North Korean totalitarian regime, allegedly took the critical intelligence and then leaked information on the identities of Christopher Ahn, Adrian Hong, and their fellow rescuers.

Spanish court documents show that Madrid then issued extradition warrants based solely on the information provided by the United States and the false testimonies of North Korean diplomats.

Christopher Ahn, Adrian Hong, and the rest of the rescue team risked their lives to deliver North Korean defectors to safety, and are now high priority targets of a regime that has committed countless acts of brazen assassination.

[Source: Freedom for Free Joseon]

North Korean refugee: Why is the US, Spain punishing us?

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The following is authored by a North Korean defector, and a member of the Free Joseon, who was part of the group who entered the North Korean Embassy in Madrid on February 22, 2019:

I am a North Korean refugee. After being orphaned as a child, I faced hunger daily and fled alone as a young teenager to China before getting captured, repatriated and sentenced to forced labor and starvation in an internment camp. I witnessed public executions, suicides, and mass starvation, the everyday atrocities in an evil totalitarian regime.

I am grateful to have experienced freedom and a full stomach. My friends and family and millions of my countrymen have not experienced such luxuries. The world has forgotten them.

When I learned of the existence of the North Korean dissident group  Provisional Government of Free Joseon, I was overwhelmed with joy and relief. Finally, I had discovered a group of people who felt a personal responsibility to stop the crimes against humanity in my homeland. …I found my purpose and my destiny: to use the privileges I had been given as an adult to help save those left behind. Those who still live in the hell I was freed from.

Fast forward to February 2019. I was at the North Korean embassy in Spain to help a North Korean diplomat defect. Stepping inside the embassy was like being transported back to North Korea. The walls were lined with propaganda singing praises to North Korea’s leaders. Each room had portraits of the leaders – watching your every move and thought, peering into your soul. … They were the faces of the leaders who had driven their people into poverty, oppression and starvation. Men who turned us into animals while growing fat off luxury goods and threatening the world with nuclear weapons.

I stepped on a chair, raised the portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, turned and smashed them on the ground. I cannot explain how that felt. It was as though I was striking a blow on behalf of millions upon millions of my people, dead, alive or yet unborn, against this evil injustice. The sound of the shattering glass felt as though the chains in my heart also shattered.

These men [Adrian Hong and Chris Ahn] are heroes. They and their families deserve better. Somehow, the United States is now hunting us on behalf of Pyongyang, via Spain. …I cannot fathom why Spain would take North Korean testimony at face value and issue arrest warrants. If the intent was simply to harm or steal, why not leave in minutes? Would a group seeking to attack or raid use their own passports, enter via the front gate in the middle of broad daylight with neighbors walking around, and stay for five hours?

I ask the Spanish courts to drop the charges against these men. I ask the United States to deny extradition.

[Read full article at Fox News Opinion]

Ex-Marine accused by Spain of North Korean embassy break-in freed on bail

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A former U.S. Marine accused of breaking into North Korea’s embassy in Madrid and assaulting diplomatic personnel was freed on $1.3 million bond in Los Angeles on Tuesday. As a condition of his release, Christopher Ahn must confine himself to his home in the Los Angeles suburb of Chino Hills ahead of his possible extradition to Spain and must wear an ankle monitor. Ahn can only leave his home for medical appointments and church.

Spanish authorities have charged Ahn, 38, who spent six years in the Marines and served in Iraq, with breaking into the North Korean embassy with five others on February 22. They said the group beat some embassy staff and held them hostage for hours before fleeing. The charges include breaking and entering, robbery with violence and causing injuries, according to U.S. court documents.

Ahn is said to be a member of Free Joseon, or the Cheollima Civil Defense, an activist group which supports North Korean defectors and seeks to overthrown North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Two people allegedly involved in the embassy incident are still at large, including Adrian Hong, a Mexican national and longtime U.S. resident who is the purported leader of the group.

Attorneys for Free Joseon said the allegations of violence are lies from Kim’s diplomats, who they say made up the story to save their own skins. They claim the group members were invited inside and that there were no problems.

Video obtained by Fox News shows the activists walking into the embassy and chatting with a member of Kim’s diplomatic corps. One activist takes official photographs of Kim and his father Kim Jong II from a wall and smashes them on the floor.

Ahn was arrested by U.S. agents in April in Los Angeles. His actions have made him a target of the Kim regime, the magistrate said in an order conditionally granting him bail. “The F.B.I. has confirmed that the North Korean government has threatened his life,” the judge wrote. “He is apparently the target of a dictatorship’s efforts to murder him.”

[Fox News]

Son of prominent former South Korean Foreign Minister moves to North Korea

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The son of the highest-profile South Korean to defect to North Korea has arrived in the North to permanently resettle, North Korean state media said, an unusual case of a South Korean defecting to the impoverished, authoritarian North.

The state-run Uriminzokkiri website reported that Choe In-guk, about 72, arrived in Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, on Saturday to dedicate the rest of his life to Korean unification at the guidance of leader Kim Jong Un.

Choe said he decided to live in North Korea because it was his parents’ “dying wishes” for him to “follow” North Korea and work for its unification with South Korea, according to a written statement published on the website.

Some analysts say North Korea accepted Choe In-guk so it could use him as a propaganda tool to tell its citizens its system is superior to South Korea’s.

Choe is the son of former South Korean Foreign Minister Choe Dok-shin, who defected to North Korea with his wife in 1986, years after he was reportedly embroiled in a corruption scandal and political disputes with then-South Korean President Park Chung-hee. Before his 1986 defection to North Korea, the senior Choe had lived in the United States for about a decade and was a vocal critic of Park, who ruled South Korea with an iron fist from 1961 to 1979.

South Koreans have occasionally defected to North Korea in the past, but it has become a rarity in recent years, especially since the North suffered a crippling famine in the mid-1990s that is estimated to have killed hundreds of thousands of people.

[Associated Press]

Increased number of North Korean defectors to South Korea in 2019

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A total of 546 North Korean defectors arrived in South Korea in the first half of 2019, a 12 per cent rise from the figure recorded in the same months a year earlier, the South Korean government has announced.

The number of people fleeing the North reached an annual high of 2,914 in 2009, while the average number is between 1,000 and 1,500 since current North Korean leader Kim Jong-un came to power in late 2011.

More than 32,000 North Korean defectors currently live in South Korea and Seoul has announced plans to expand state subsidies to help refugees settle.

[AAP]

Human rights related to North Korean nuclear talks Part 1

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Young-jun Park recalls life in North Korea as defined by deprivation. Food shortages that wrought starvation. The lack of health care that brought more death. Park and his family eventually found their way to Seoul. In the ensuing years, he finished high school and graduated college, and he now works at a nonprofit funded by the South Korean government that assists North Korean refugees. “North Koreans are struggling so much,” Park says.

Reports from Human Rights Watch and the U.N. show that little progress on human rights has occurred in North Korea since Mr. Park fled in 2009, or in the five years since a U.N. investigation found that its government had committed “a wide array of crimes against humanity.”

The state-imposed violations include forced labor for adults and students, torture and execution of political prisoners, and pervasive abuse of women, children, and people with disabilities. Civil liberties enshrined in the country’s constitution – freedom of speech, religion, and the press – remain a mirage.

The funneling of state resources into weapons programs, coupled with a poor harvest season and the impact of international sanctions, has created a food crisis for some 10 million North Koreans, 40% of the population. Human rights advocates warn of a recurrence of the mid-1990s famine that killed as many as 3 million people if conditions fail to improve.

North Korea has enlisted China’s help to stop the flow of refugees – the Chinese government sends back defectors as a matter of policy – and those arrested face punishment ranging from indefinite prison terms to the death penalty. Even so, desperate to find freedom, thousands attempt to flee every year.

“They know there’s no future in North Korea,” says Gyoung-bin Ko, president of the Hana Foundation. “They want to give a better life to their children.” Read more

Two North Korean defectors arrive at South Korean port in fishing boat

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The South Korean Prime Minister apologized to North Korea late last week for a security lapse that allowed a North Korean fishing boat to spend two and a half days in its waters without being noticed.

A 33-foot wooden boat crossed the maritime border with South Korea last week with four North Korean men on board, and docked at Samcheok, a port 80 miles south of the border. One of the four North Koreans then came ashore, telling a South Korean villager that he came from the North and asking to borrow a cellphone so he could call an aunt who had earlier defected to the South.

During an initial interrogation by the South Korean authorities, two of the four North Koreans said they wanted to defect to the South. The other two were returned to the North on Tuesday over the land border.

The government’s apology came on the same day that President Xi Jinping of China arrived in North Korea for a state visit with Kim Jong-un.

South Koreans remain deeply worried about any breach of the border. Nearly two million troops on both sides of the border are on constant alert against possible intruders.

[New York Times]

No word on North Korean defectors apprehended in China

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Kim Jeong-cheol already lost a brother who tried to escape from North Korea, and now fears his sister will meet a similar fate after she was caught by Chinese authorities.

“My elder brother was caught in 2005, and he went to a political prison and was executed in North Korea,” Kim told Reuters. “That’s why my sister will surely die if she goes back there. What sin is it for a man to leave because he’s hungry and about to die?”

Reuters was unable to verify the fate of Kim’s brother or sister. Calls to the North Korean embassy in Beijing were not answered.

When another woman – who asked to be unnamed for her family’s safety – escaped from North Korea eight years ago, she promised her sister and mother she would work to bring them out later. Her 27-year-old sister was in a group of four defectors who made it all the way to Nanning, near the border with Vietnam, before being caught.

In January, their mother died of cancer. On her death bed, the mother wrote a message on her palm pleading for her remaining daughter to escape North Korea.

“It will haunt me for the rest of my life that I didn’t keep my promise,” said the woman, who now lives in South Korea.

Activist groups and lawyers seeking to help the families say there is no sign China has deported the recently arrested North Koreans yet, and their status is unknown.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry, which does not typically acknowledge arrests of individual North Korean escapees, said it had no information about the raids or status of detainees. “We do not know about the situation to which you are referring,” the ministry said in a statement when asked by Reuters. North Koreans who enter China illegally because of economic reasons are not refugees, it added.

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on North Korea human rights,  Tomas Ojea Quintana, said Monday he has discussed the issue of detained North Korean defectors in China with South Korean officials.

[Reuters]