Category: North Korean refugee

A North Korean defector paid smugglers to get her family out. China sent them back.

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Heo Yeong-hui, who fled North Korea in 2014, paid smugglers to try to bring her husband and son through China to reunite in South Korea.

Her husband was a trombone player in North Korea who liked to whistle the Irish ballad “Danny Boy” as a private serenade for his wife. His son gained a medical degree in Pyongyang and wanted to become a professor.

Sometime late last year, the two men disappeared into the North Korean gulags that hold a special place of punishment for defectors caught by Chinese authorities and who are then sent back over the border.

Now Heo has agreed to tell her story to The Washington Post, abandoning the normal cloak of anonymity used by defectors worried that speaking openly could endanger relatives back home. She is taking a chance. Her voice and others like hers, she believes, are needed to shape the debate over North Korea’s future and efforts to hold the regime accountable.

It’s impossible to put a precise number on North Korean defectors sent back by China. Most groups, including the Database Center, say it could be in the hundreds of thousands since the 1990s. China has resisted international calls to end the repatriations despite international pressure.

A 2014 U.N. report said those returned could face being “forcibly ‘disappeared’ into political prison camps, imprisoned in ordinary prisons or even summarily executed.”

[Washington Post]

North Korea systematically tortures North Koreans sent back by China

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Even as diplomacy moves at a dizzying pace with North Korea, many human rights activists and others take issue with what’s missing. So far, the talks have cautiously avoided a direct spotlight on the North’s staggering record of abuses and political repression in apparent attempts to keep the outreach with Kim Jong Un from unraveling.

Also little discussed in the high-level dialogue is Beijing’s role in shipping back defectors snared by Chinese security forces.

Any comprehensive peace deal with Kim must deeply involve China, the political and economic big brother of the North. But a full reckoning on rights abuses will also touch on China’s practice of declaring the defectors to be economic migrants rather than people fleeing oppression — and deporting them.

“Sadly, through thick and thin in the bilateral relationship, one of the things Pyongyang and Beijing continually agree on is they don’t want North Koreans seeking freedom by fleeing across China,” said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch. “There is no sugarcoating the fact North Korea systematically tortures every North Korean sent back by China.”

[Washington Post]

Some North Korean defectors hopeful after Trump-Kim Jong Un summit

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Two prominent North Korean defectors told CBS News they were “disappointed” by President Trump’s summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in Singapore, but expressed hope in the American president’s efforts to usher in peace on the Korean Peninsula. With pageantry surrounding the historic meeting but scant mention of the regime’s brutal human rights record, activist Park Sang-hak wondered what had changed.

“Maybe he was thinking about America’s national interests first, or forgot the contents of his address before the National Assembly in Seoul last year. I was very sad,” said Park, founder of Fighters for a Free North Korea. The son of a former North Korean spy who defected with his family to the South in 2000, Park is known for his work launching balloons with USB drives, transistor radios and pro-democracy literature into North Korea. He has been the target of two foiled assassination attempts by North Korean spies.

Lee Ae-ran, founder of the Center for Liberty and Unification and the first defector to run for the South Korean National Assembly, wondered if Mr. Trump had been “fooled again like previous presidents.” But upon digesting Mr. Trump’s press conference post-summit, where he told reporters he had “discussed” the human rights abuses of the dynastic Kim regime “strongly” but “relatively briefly compared to denuclearization,” Lee said she became more understanding of the circumstances.

Mr. Trump drew criticism when he continued his praise for Kim. “He’s a funny guy, he’s very smart, he’s a great negotiator. He loves his people, not that I’m surprised by that, but he loves his people,” he told Voice of America. Lee said she was “dumbfounded” by the statement, but took it as diplomatic rhetoric. “I felt like [President Trump] was pacifying a child. Could President Trump actually think Kim Jong Un ‘loves’ the North Korean people? If he loved them, that child would never act the way he does.

Park said he hopes Mr. Trump will stand on the side of tens of millions of North Koreans who are “victims,” rather than with Kim Jong Un. Only if Kim dismantles his country’s notorious political prison camps will Park believe he can be trusted on promises to work toward the U.S. goal of complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization.

[CBS News]

North Korean defectors vow to fight on against Kim Jong-un government

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Some North Korean defectors who have made new lives in the South vow they will never stop fighting for the removal of the government in Pyongyang even if  Kim Jong Un agrees to give up his nuclear weapons.

Choi Jung-hoon, a former North Korean army officer, who defected to the South in 2006 and who survived a North-driven assassination attempt in 2013, insists the Moon-Kim meeting will to do little to change his mind about the country he fled.

“No matter the outcome of these summits, our goal will still ultimately be regime change,” Mr. Choi said in an interview recently.

He spoke inside a discreet office in the South Korean capital, where he and handful of other defectors run Free North Korea Radio, a nonprofit that has piped subversive shortwave news broadcasts into the North since 2006.

Mr. Choi told The Washington Times the harrowing story of his own escape from North Korea, where he grew up never thinking of himself as an opponent of the regime. His views changed in 2006 after unintentionally running afoul of the government when he sought money in exchange for helping a South Korean family locate a kidnapped relative in the North.

[Washington Times]

The Father of Defectors

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Kim Yong-hwa, 64, fled North Korea in 1988, and later formed the North Korean Refugees Human Rights Association of Korea in Seoul to look after those who continue to arrive and face difficulties settling in.

He begins: “I joined the Korean People’s Army in 1970 but left to work on a railroad safety project a decade later. In 1988, there was an accident and I was [accused] of not being loyal to the state. If I had stayed, I would’ve been shot in public just like the four others who were also blamed for the accident.

“So I fled to China and then Vietnam, Laos, and finally South Korea, spending months and  months in detention along my journey.

“I don’t know where my family is. I heard through others that they were killed after I fled. I was not able to speak to them after I fled North Korea.

“[Once settled in South Korea] in 2005, I founded the North Korean Refugees Human Rights Association of Korea. Our group sends money, clothes and medicine to defectors who are having a difficult time. There are a lot of young women in China who are sold in the sex industry or as wives. Men are also treated as slaves and they’ll be forced to work on farms but won’t be given any money.

“I’ve help save almost 6,000 defectors so far and the media calls me the ‘Father of Defectors’. But the job isn’t done yet.

[Al Jazeera]

North Korean defectors ‘treated like animals’

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Scott Kim first escaped North Korea at the age of 17 in 2001. At the time, he and his mother only wanted to get across the border to China so they could eat hot meals. Growing up during North Korea’s deadly famine in the late ’90s, Kim had spent much of his childhood starving.

Today, Kim lives in South Korea and owns a business trading automobile and railway parts. He is currently working on an English-language memoir about his experiences with the help of Teach North Korean Refugees (TNKR), a volunteer-run organization in Seoul helping defectors develop English skills.

But it was a long and dangerous six years in and out of China before he got to Seoul.

“At the detention center in North Korea where i was held, we lost all our rights as human beings,” Kim told Business Insider. “We were treated like animals, literally. We had to crawl on the floor to move from place to place.”

Kim was put in a cell with 20 other defectors. There was one toilet in the corner and no space to lie down. Day and night, the defectors sat on the ground.

When he or other defectors were told to down the corridor to the warden’s office, they were made to crawl on their hands and feet. Officers beat them with gloves and sticks as they went.

An estimated 100,000 North Koreans or more currently live in detention centers, political prisons, or labor camps where they endure hard labor, torture, and starvation. Kim’s description of his experience comes amid President Donald Trump’s summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who has been accused of killing his own people. But when asked about the North Korean dictator’s human rights violations, Trump appeared to be an apologist for the dictator’s actions.

[Business Insider]

Video of a tearful Kim Jong Un gets the experts guessing

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Video footage of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un venting tears of frustration over the slow pace of economic reform in his backward country is making the rounds of the corridors of power in Pyongyang. According to a defector to South Korea who once served North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party of Korea, this different and rarely seen side of Kim Jong Un featured in a documentary to educate party officials who lead the lowest rungs of the leadership apparatus or state-run enterprises.

The video shows Kim Jong Un standing on an unspecified stretch of coastline gazing toward the horizon as tears trickle down his cheek. A narrator explains that the North Korean leader is distraught over his inability to radically overhaul the economy to make the reclusive country a vibrant power.

According to the defector, the video surfaced from around April and was shown to those in high-ranking positions at local branches of the Workers’ Party or state-run companies. Portraying the North Korean leader in a moment of weakness may well have been a sly propaganda ploy to convince subordinates to work much harder so as not to reduce him to tears.

The defector speculated the video was also intended to convince the rank and file to accept the anticipated fruits of on-off summit talks tentatively set for June 12 between Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump in Singapore. With preliminary negotiations between North Korea and the United States focusing on Pyongyang renouncing its nuclear program, any announcement of such an agreement with Washington would represent a fundamental turnaround in North Korea’s foreign policy.

Seen in this light, the video may be an attempt to downplay any sense of alarm triggered by a sudden shift in policy. As that position has not yet filtered down to the masses, who clearly embrace the notion of an all-powerful North Korea in the face of evil adversary the United States, the video may be intended to prepare the nation for the day that will mark a sea change in the country’s fundamental outlook and way of dealing with the rest of the world.

[Asahi Shimbun]

Two North Koreans defecting latest upset for diplomatic thaw on Korean peninsula

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Last Saturday morning, two North Koreans, including a military officer, defected to the South. The officer and a civilian defected by boat and were picked up by the South Korean military in the Yellow Sea, near the inter-Korean sea border, after expressing willingness to defect, reported the South’s newswire, Yonhap.

The defection, the first of a North Korean military officer since 2008, is awkward timing for Seoul, which has a longstanding policy of accepting any North Korean defectors who want to live in the South.

Moon Jae-in, South Korea’s president, has been at pains to keep this year’s diplomatic détente between North and South on track. But despite a friendly first meeting between Kim Jong-Un and Mr Moon at the end of April, during which they held hands as they crossed their shared border, the diplomatic thaw that began in January, the latest defections could raise tensions further.

[The Telegraph]

On North Korean defectors’ concerns about being returned to the North

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North Korean defectors now living in South Korea Seoul are concerned that Pyongyang could demand that defectors be forcibly returned to their homeland as a condition for the resumption of talks with Seoul, and thus that their lives might be at risk.

James Brown, an associate professor at Tokyo’s Temple University, agrees that the aggressive demands that North Korea is making of the South will inevitably be of serious concern to the defector community.

“Moon is under great pressure and clearly wants the talks with the North to resume and succeed, but he built his reputation on being a lawyer for human rights so I doubt he will actually order the repatriation of any defectors,” he said. “I imagine that Pyongyang has reached a similar conclusion, so they will soon ask for something else instead,” he suggested.

And because that request will be more palatable than sending defectors back to a deeply uncertain future, the South may give in to that request. And then, Brown expects, they will make another demand to test Seoul’s resolve.

[Deutsche Welle]

North Korea demanding the return of restaurant worker defectors

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North Korea is demanding the return of 13 defectors as a condition for the resumption of talks with Seoul, with support groups for thousands who have fled the repressive regime in the North saying there is genuine fear that Seoul might give in to Pyongyang’s demands and that their lives might be at risk.

Pyongyang is demanding that 12 women who had worked at a North Korean restaurant in China and their manager be returned to the North after it was claimed on a television program that the women had not been told they were being taken to South Korea in 2016 and that they have been tricked into going by the South Korean intelligence services.

The demands coincide with Pyongyang cancelling a high-level meeting scheduled for last week that was designed to build on the agreements reached when South Korean President Moon Jae-in met with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, at the border village of Panmunjom late last month.

[Deutsche Welle]