Category: North Korean refugee

Horror of North Korea’s death camps – Part 1

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Kang Chol-hwan was just nine when he was sent to the Yodok concentration camp in North Korea with most of his family, including his father and grandmother. His grandad, who he would never see again, was accused of being a spy for the Japanese — and under North Korean rules, the whole family was guilty.

“At Yoduk, prisoners are executed in public to instill fear and obedience. Children, out of hunger and desperation, resort to scavenging for roots and rats. … There is one distinction that I would draw between the North Korean prison camps and Auschwitz,” Kang said. “While Auschwitz’s goal was rapid, industrial-style extermination, Yodok prolongs the suffering over three generations.

“The purpose of Yodok is to be but one facility that helps sustain the regime and cleanse the North Korean people of any freedom of thought.”

Kwon-Hyuk was once the commander of Haengyong Concentration Camp — the infamous Camp 22. Speaking about Haengyong to documentary filmmakers in 2004, he swore he had seen a family being gassed and said he had himself ordered the deaths of five families.

He recalled: “The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save their kids by doing mouth to mouth breathing.”

A study by the Database Centre for North Korean Human Rights claims no prisoner has left Haengyong alive, while reports indicate the camp closed in 2012.     

Horror of North Korea’s death camps – Part 2

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Some of the cruelest treatment is saved for pregnant women, who are made to have abortions without anesthesia, or witness their babies murdered at birth. One grandmother was tasked with looking after pregnant women at Sinŭiju camp and said newborns were left to die in a box which was simply buried when full.

In his memoir — The Aquariums of Pyongyang — Mr Kang recounts how a guard made a pregnant woman disrobe, exposing her belly, and then he beat her. Another defector illustrated how a pregnant woman had a board placed across her bump, which other prisoners were then forced to seesaw on.Those dreaming of escape face high-voltage electric fences, moats bristling with spikes, armed patrols, guard dogs and minefields, though security varies by camp. Anyone caught escaping is executed by either firing squad, hanging or stoning, typically in front of the other prisoners, and with rocks stuffed in their mouths to stop them screaming.
But the biggest killer in the camps is malnutrition, with no more food available than a handful of corn, grain and cabbage, plus whatever bugs, snakes, rats, grasses and barks can be found. Sketches drawn by gulag survivors detail how people, in their desperation, delay reporting each others’ deaths so that they kept getting their rations, and even steal dog food.
[Daily Star]

Is South Korea’s spying apparatus broken?

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When it comes to spying on North Korea, rival South Korea seems to be wrong almost as much as it’s right.

Seoul’s intelligence agents get battered in the press and by lawmakers for their gaffes, including one regarding Ri Yong Gil, the former head of North Korea’s military. Officials in Seoul’s National Intelligence Service (NIS), the country’s main spy agency, reportedly said Ri had been executed, but at this month’s ruling-party congress, he was seen not only alive but also in possession of several new titles.

While spying on perhaps the world’s most cloistered, suspicious, difficult-to-read country is no easy task, repeated blunders raise questions about whether South Korea’s multibillion-dollar spying apparatus is broken.

South Korean spies are thought to closely monitor Pyongyang’s media for details, to talk to defectors in Seoul, especially those who claim sources in North Korea, and to cultivate contacts in the North. The problem is that it’s unclear how reliable the sources are.

The NIS gives closed briefings to lawmakers, who then relay what they hear to South Korean press. Foreign media commonly cite those local reports, but by that point the information has passed through several hands. That makes it difficult to gauge the NIS’s level of certainty, understand how the information was obtained or determine how reliable its sources are.

When spies leak information directly to the local press, they usually demand that reporters refer to them only as “a source familiar with North Korea affairs.” This allows the NIS and other South Korean spy agencies to deny they were the source if the information is bad, which is what’s currently happening in the Ri case.

[AP]

A stark reality of life inside North Korea

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As North Korea embarks on its first party congress in 36 years, ‘supreme leader’ Kim Jong-Un is set to announce a number of economic reforms and tighten his iron-clad grip on power. It is likely to be accompanied by mass choreographed fist-pumping rallies and spectacles.

Jihyun Park has firsthand experience of the “hermit kingdom”. Born in North Korea, she lived through the famine of the late 1990s. “Three and a half million North Koreans died of famine in this period.” she tells The Independent. “I lived only worrying about what I would eat that day, and then the next day. My family died from starvation. My uncle lived alone in a rural area and because of food shortage and problems with food distribution he starved.”

Unable to afford a coffin, Ms Jihyun says her family wrapped his corpse with rice straws and carried him on an ox cart to be buried. According to Ms Jihyun, stories such as these are common in North Korea.

Education in the totalitarian state was wholeheartedly centred around and devoted towards the Kim dynasty . “The words of the Kims – both father and son – are on the walls of the classroom and we have to memorize them. Such mantras are repeated by every teacher, every hour,” she explains.

This indoctrination transcends the classroom. Jihyun says that in the 1990s, a poem written about former leader Kim Il Sung was ordered to be hung on the walls of every single home. “Everyone, man, woman and child, had to learn the poem by heart,” she recalls.

At the age of 30, Ms Jihyun and her brother escaped to China from her hometown Chongjin by the border to China. Although she had been promised a well-paid job once there, she was instead brought to a trafficking establishment. “Between 1998-2004, I spent six years in northeast China as a slave to a Chinese man. I gave birth to a son”.

But everything suddenly changed when she was arrested and repatriated back to North Korea and her son remained in China. There she spent a year in one of the country’s most harrowing detention camps. “Although I fled the North due to economic reasons, my crime was considered political betrayal,” she said. “I was imprisoned, tortured, and re-educated for six months, after which I could no longer work because of severe malnutrition, and an injury in my leg was so bad that I was released on sick bail to have it amputated.”

After a year she escaped yet again to China and there she took her son from the father’s family. She then traveled to Mongolia, and against all odds, arrived in Manchester England with her son in 2008. On the way she met her husband, a fellow North Korean defector, in China.

[The Independent]

Yearning for North Korea, the nation they fled

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For tens of thousands of North Koreans scattered across South Korea and living underground in China, North Korea is complicated, a memory they wrestle with. It’s home. It’s the place they left behind. And even if there is plenty they hate about it, there is also much that they miss, sometimes achingly.

They miss relatives and friends and the small-town neighborliness that can come, admittedly, in not having many recreation choices. They miss dancing to accordion music in public parks on their days off, and the greasy street food they’d yearn for when they were most hungry.

A convenience store manager in Seoul, whose muscular arms still betray his years as a miner, misses the siblings he left behind, and the nieces and nephews he may never meet. Relatives in South Korea paid smugglers to get his family out, he said, but his siblings wouldn’t go. “They were too afraid,” he said. “Now they regret it.”

Polls of North Korean refugees now in South Korea indicate many still have some fondness for the leaders in Pyongyang. “All three (of the Kim family dictators) really did think of the North Korean people,” said another exile, a former North Korean policeman who acknowledged that he is torn about his feelings.

North Korea, he noted, has spent billions of dollars on its military even as so many of its people have gone hungry. But, he added, his homeland is also a small, poor country that has successfully stood up to the world, surviving international isolation and years of economic sanctions. So when Pyongyang sets off a nuclear test or test-fires a missile, he sees a leader proving he cannot be bullied.

His sometimes-generous view of North Korea is mixed up with his difficulty adjusting to life in South, a common problem among the defectors who live in South Korea. He hasn’t been able to hold a job for more than few months, and constantly worries that he’s being discriminated against. He’s overwhelmed by the South, sometimes talks about wanting to return home. Lost amid Seoul’s dual whirlwinds of consumerism and competitiveness, he yearns for the days when things seemed simpler.

[AP] 

A complicated memory of life in North Korea

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In this file photo taken on Feb. 12, 2016 in Seoul, North Korean defectors wearing masks of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un attend a South Korean rally against North Korea’s rocket launch and nuclear test. For tens of thousands of defectors scattered across South Korea and living underground in China, it’s a complicated memory of their home they left behind.

Commentary on Chinese–North Korean relations

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The recent mass defection of 13 North Korean restaurant workers is a humiliating blow to the Pyongyang leadership. Especially because it was apparently allowed by China, North Korea’s most powerful ally and trading partner. In the past, China has sent defectors back to North Korea.

In an April 11 press conference, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Lu Kang made the unusual move of commenting publicly about the case. “After an investigation, 13 [North Korean] citizens were found exiting the Chinese border with valid passports on the early morning of April 6. It is worth noting that these people all had valid identity documents with them and exited the Chinese border in accordance with law,” he said.

Many analysts believe China’s actions could be a sign of increased tension between Pyongyang and Beijing. Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un’s government faces growing isolation and heightened sanctions over its nuclear and missile programs. Ongoing allegations of widespread human rights abuse made by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights continue to infuriate North Korean leadership.

Pyongyang has responded to mounting global pressure with a series of provocative shows of force. Observers believe Kim is trying to project strength, both domestically and internationally, ahead of the crucial Worker’s Party Congress next month, when the young leader is expected to consolidate his power. South Korean government intelligence indicates a fifth North Korean nuclear test could be in the works ahead of that major political gathering.

[CNN]

Pyongyang wants Seoul to return 12 ‘abducted’ defectors

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North Korea on Thursday issued two reports through its official media calling on South Korea to return a group of 13 defectors who fled from a North Korean restaurant in China earlier this month.

The Korean Central News Agency quoted an unnamed spokesman from North Korea’s Red Cross Society as saying the families of the 12 women from the group “are earnestly asking for direct contact with them as early as possible,” adding that “what we want is to let the daughters meet their parents and directly clarify their stand.”

The report from KCNA described the incident as “abduction,” and demanded an apology from South Korea. China confirmed that the group had left China legally and with valid passports.

A second report, issued by KCNA the same day, carried a statement from a spokesman, again unnamed, from the Central Committee of the Kim Il Sung Socialist Youth League, which claimed the case of the defectors was engineered for political purposes ahead of that country’s general election days later. (President Park Geun-hye’s Saenuri Party lost its majority in the April 13 poll.)

 [Kyodo]

LiNK and liberty for North Koreans

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Liberty in North Korea (LiNK) is a Los Angeles-based NGO that works with North Korean refugees. Since it was founded in 2004, LiNK has shepherded more than 400 North Koreans through China and Southeast Asia to South Korea and the United States, where defectors can claim political asylum.

Sokeel Park, LiNK‘s director of research and strategy, makes it clear that his organization does not do “extractions” — meaning they don’t arrange for people inside North Korea to make it out. Instead, LiNK works with refugees who have already fled, or gets “referrals” from defectors who have kept in contact with relatives via smuggled cellphones or other means and know an escape is coming.

With China and North Korea both seeking to arrest defectors — and potentially the people who aid in their escapes — Park says “operational security” is crucial, so the first step upon meeting refugees is vetting. After LiNK feels comfortable the defector is not an agent of the North Korean regime, the organization makes arrangements to smuggle the person from China’s northeastern frontier to a third country, typically in Southeast Asia.

In years past, defectors could simply enter a US embassy or consulate in China and be guaranteed protection. Getting out of the diplomatic outpost and moving on to the next destination required approval from the Chinese government, however, and Beijing began forcing refugees to wait months or years before allowing them to continue on their way. China also cracked down by beefing up security outside the compounds to make it more difficult to get inside.

LiNK has a history of success when it comes to helping defectors escape — Park says their success rate is over 95 percent — but there are no guarantees.

[Vice News]

Life for a free North Korean defector isn’t always what you expect

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Both the mother and brother of North Korean activist Hyeonseo Lee –who she helped to escape from the country in 2009– have had trouble adjusting to modern life in neighboring South Korea.

“It’s a completely different system in South Korea … [North Koreans] have never tasted freedom — and they can’t enjoy freedom. The system is not familiar so my mom prefers the ordinary life they used to have. When I see that, I understand her but sometimes I feel so sad.”

Lee’s mother still has seven brothers and sisters living in North Korea who she can’t see. Her only form of contact is through occasional phone calls made illegally using mobile phones that can connect to Chinese networks close to the border. Recently one of her mother’s brothers died and she was devastated she couldn’t be there.

“My mom was crying, she realized everyone will die like that. It’s hard to see unification (happening) in her lifetime. Family is the most important thing, you can’t buy that with money.”

Life in South Korea is also complicated by the fact that many view defectors as an economic burden, something that Lee hopes to change. ”We left everything behind and gave up everything, we risked our own lives … there’s a lot of prejudice … but we are showing that we can do very well,” she said.

Lee is one of those successful North Koreans, studying and working as an activist for others like her. Looking back at her experiences, she thinks they made her stronger. “At that moment I thought it was a tragedy, …but I look back now, I think it kind of helped me in my mentality (to have) that braveness … I became a strong woman.”

[News.com.au]